“I don’t want to say we’re clueless, but we are,” according to an operations officer quoted in the report. “We’re no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment.””Our senior leaders, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the president of the United States — are not getting the right information to make decisions with. We must get this right. The media is driving the issues.”
Someone sent me an article with these quotes in an article below on some of the struggles the military effort in Afghanistan is facing. I’m not totally up to speed on what’s going there, but the issues involved are common to many leadership contexts, especially organizations with multiple tiers of leadership authority.
Effectively the question is how do the key decision makers get the right information to make wise decisions? The article reveals that there is a sense in some circles that leadership decisions are being made based on guesswork and media reports. That would be troubling to me if I was trying to lead big but only had small information.
Things are changing when it comes to getting the right information. In the past, perhaps somebody could work their way through the hierarchy to collect information, but now that is a slow and tedious approach that typically just reinforces a power-preserving type of culture. Important insight and information is available in all sorts of places, but we often have to retrain ourselves on how to identify where reliable sources are and where to gather them.
One of my monster pet peeves in leadership is when there are significant decisions by leaders in the hierarchy and it’s clear that there was information that could have assisted the process, but it wasn’t tapped. I find it fairly easy to fall in line if someone else makes a leadership decision that I don’t agree with if it’s clear that they’ve done due diligence to consider the available insight and information that could lead to wisdom. It’s a little harder when ignorance is at work. It’s even harder when the ignorance comes from stubbornness and refusal to change rather than just limited awareness.
If you’re leading, maybe this example is a good reminder to think about who are the people or other “sources” that can give you the information or “intel” you need to make the decisions you have been put in a position to make.
Consider the Afghanistan situation – are you getting real-time “intel” from the field? Who are the people that can give you the right insight and information to expedite wisdom? What are the methods that can facilitate that?
Are you relying on slow and unreliable sources of knowledge and input? Some surveys are outdated by the time they are even analyzed. Some people, depending on where they are at in the hierarchy and their own commitment to getting reliable information are often not current either. There’s a lot to consider when it comes to getting the right information to be able to make wise decisions consistently.
Article Link:http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/05/nato-official-intelligence-work-falling-short-afghanistan/
