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Commando Development

Thoughts on using technology to build a competitive advantage

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### Organisations that win are those that build better systems.

Increasingly in today's world that mean leveraging technology.

Writing

There are inflection points in the growth of teams and organisations where behaviour changes very quickly. Interestingly these transition points happen around military sub-unit sizes, and the military is a good place to looks for clues on how to navigate these phase transitions.

# Organisational size phase transition points

![group-sizes.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/cdodev/image/upload/v1648988224/group_sizes_401a7feedb.png)

## Section
In the Royal Marines the section is the basic unit. It’s made up of a commander and 2nd in command and 6 other men with various specialisations. 8 men in total who operate as a singe cohesive unit (but can also split down into two fire teams.

## Troop (platoon in the army)
The next unit size is the troop. It’s made up of 3 sections, troop commander and sergeant, signaller and any attached units. The troop deploys its sections to complete missions. This is the first time we start to see the need for coordinating the efforts of smaller sub-units to achieve larger and more complex objectives.

## Company
A company is pretty much where you have a self sustainable unit. It’s roughly 3 troops plus larger HQ element and attached capabilities dependent on mission. Company missions can be larger and more sustained, as well as being more complex.

A commando unit is made up of 3 fighting companies, plus supporting specialisations of signals, motor transport, heavy weapons etc etc.

Now what’s really interesting about this is that these structures are fractal. What’s even more interesting is that the process of coordinating across these different unit sizes shares the same structure. The orders and planning process for a mission that a section would take on is exactly the same in structure as a company operation. The company operation is divided up and the same process is then used at troop and section level to build a complete picture of WHAT everyone needs to do and more importantly WHY.

Now let’s compare these to a growing tech company.

You start with your founding team. You’re optimising for speed of learning and experimentation. You get things done as fast as possible, having (and needing) very little structure. You’re a section.

Fast forward past product market fit. You know what you’re building now (hopefully). Your sections are now your cross functional teams. You’re taking on longer running, more strategic pieces of work and coordinating multiple streams of work and competing priorities.

This is your first inflection point. This is where you start needing structure and consistency, but not at the expense of being able to get things done and ship. This is also where the seeds of success or dysfunction for scaling up start to be sown.

The next inflection point is when you’re trying to get to company size. You need a correspondingly larger leadership and HQ element. This is also the point where communications needs to be a lot more disciplined and structured.

# Scaling badly

Trying to scale an organisation without having done the work of establishing structure and communications practices is painful. The default seems to be that this is left too late and companies attempt to bolt it on when things start to become uncomfortable. They might do this by hiring someone with experience, but it’s always tricky trying to retrofit culture that worked elsewhere.

What tends to happen is that practices and systems evolve haphazardly and are not given the attention required to change and adapt as the company grows. This tends to hit just when you want to accelerate and scale. Signs of this are:

- Unclear mission or priorities
- Delivery slowing down and a feeling of friction
- Siloing of teams and information

A great example of this is the spotify model. It’s a description of a set of practices that evolved in a particular context. There are certainly some useful fundamental principles that underpin it and it will work well with adaptation in many places.

# Scaling well

Culture is an emergent property of the constraints applied to a group of people 1. It evolves with the organisation, and one of the most important jobs of a leader is to ensure that this process is nurtured and guided. The only way to do that is to create space around the work for reflection and improvement. To build Situational Awareness.

> Lead like a gardener
> A gardener creates an environment that encourages growth. An environment full of light and nourishment. An environment with sufficient space for stretching and expanding.
> Leadership – and gardening – are all about creating positive change.
> 
> Gen. Stan McChrystal 

The military has evolved a communications structure that balances operations with improvement really well. It’s the order and debrief process where operations are planned and learned from. I’ve adapted these processes for tech companies to help them navigate social inflection points as they scale.

Further reading
- https://norrisnode.com/3-inflection-points/
- http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the%5Fdunbar%5Fnumb.html

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Social Inflection Points

Why is it so hard to do innovation in a big organisation? What can we do to
ensure that small organisations are able to keep innovating as they grow? We can
learn a lot from the historical interaction between hierarchies and networks.

## Table of Contents

## Intro

Throughout history there's been a continuous interaction between established,
stable structure and small, faster moving, destabilising innovation. This happens at
every timescale from the slow march of evolution over millennia, to the exponential pace of
our current economic changes.

<div class="quotation">
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent
that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
</div>


This quote is often mis-attributed to Darwin, but it actually came from a
marketing professor in the 1960's. Leon C. Megginson actually
[said](https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-things-darwin-never-said/evolution-misquotation) that "those who survive are the ones who most **accurately perceive their
environment and successfully adapt to it**."

**Hmmm. Sounds like someone else I know of...**

<div class="quotation">
To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or
concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy
and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing
environment.
</div>

More on this later!


## Commandos - insurgents since WWII

One example of small, agile groups being deployed to disrupt larger structure is
the formation of the Commandos, SOE and other special operations units in the
Second World War. This is a text book case of an innovative insurgency on three
levels:

<div class="list">
- The resistance of the establishment it grew within.
- Its use in asymmetrical attacks against the weak points of a much larger foe.
- The reliance on small, highly trained, SEPARATE teams of people
</div>

![legacy.jpg](https://res.cloudinary.com/cdodev/image/upload/v1649074009/legacy_e7b76b723f.jpg)

### The SOE - Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Conduct

![guerrilla-OODA.jpg](https://res.cloudinary.com/cdodev/image/upload/v1649073967/guerrilla_OODA_8406def316.jpg)

The story of the rise of unconventional warfare despite massive resistance from
the War Office is told in the fantastic book [Churchill's Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Conduct](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B0151PQ6QU&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref%5F=cm%5Fsw%5Fr%5Fkb%5Fdp%5FrwrrEb46DPR8V). It's extremely well written and entertaining, but the
main takeaways for me were:

<div class="list check-square" >
- The need to build SOE outside of the slow moving hierarchy of the War Office
- R&D without a specific goal (at least initially).
- Deployment of capabilities against the weak points of the enemy network.
- Team built from diverse backgrounds. e.g. Chief engineer was a caravan builder.
</div>

### Commandos, Infantry and Police

Robert X. Cringely noticed a pattern in the evolution of tech start up in his
1996 book [Accidental Empires](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27652.Accidental%5FEmpires). He identifies 3 phases of development **Commandos**,
**Infantry** and **Police**.

**COMMANDOS** take the beach. They figure out how to smash the status quo and find
opportunities to exploit. They have and need very little structure, iterate
quickly and make things happen.

**INFANTRY** are the second wave. After the commandos have gained a beachhead it's
down to the infantry to build upon what they've eked out. The commandos will
likely leave a big mess which will need to be sorted out and systematised. So
there are more infantry and they need correspondingly more structure and
process.

**POLICE** Come in when there's a need for even more stability and regularity.

Simon Wardley built on this analogy when we came up with 3 different types of
team within a business and placed them on top of his axis of evolutionary
development. He observes that as products, services and components move from
genesis to commodity the types of teams you need and the way you work changes.

![pst.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/cdodev/image/upload/v1649074076/pst_069fc35006.png)



## Social Inflection points

In my last article about [Social Inflection Points](../social-inflection-points) I had a table of group sizes.
I want to recreate this here and add Commandos Infantry and Police to the mix
as a new column (CIP).

The CIP column is the size of organisation where these stages of team evolution
will start to appear. So below a tech company below ~30 people is made up mostly
of commandos or poineers. Infantry or settlers start to be added in the journey
to 100 or so. Police or town planners come into play anywhere from 100+.

<div class="ox-hugo-table d-flex justify-content-center text-center g-py-20">

| people  | military name | anthropological equivalent | CIP            |
|---------|---------------|----------------------------|----------------|
| 8       | section       | hunting party              | Commandos      |
| 30-50   | troop         | tribe                      | Infantry       |
| 100-150 | company       | village                    | Police (maybe) |

</div>


## Hierarchies vs Networks
What we're also likely to see as an organisation moves along the continuum from
early stage commando unit to established company is the formation of a
hierarchy. Even in "leaderless" structures like holacracy, there's still a
formal structure that emerges. This has to happen in one form or another because
as a group grows past 15 or so people it becomes untenable to scale the 1-1
communication between members.

Why?


### Metcalfe's Law
The of number of connections in a network is proportional to the square of the
number of nodes.

![metcalf.jpg](https://res.cloudinary.com/cdodev/image/upload/v1649074125/metcalf_6989bf9831.jpg)


So as networks expand spontaneous order starts to emerge.

What's unfortunate for growing tech companies, is that his need to create
structure and order starts to emerge just when they want to really start to
scale. So what can companies do about this?

**How can we achieve economy of scale, while still achieving agility?**

Organisations in today's world are subject to increasingly _punctuated
equilibrium_. It's simply a fact of life.

<div class="note">
[Punctuated Equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated%5Fequilibrium) posits that most social systems exist in an extended period of stasis, which may be punctuated by sudden shifts leading to radical changes. In our VUCA world these shift come more often and are of greater magnitude.
</div>

The best companies in the world either consciously or unconsciously recognise
this and position themselves in such a way that they become anti-fragile to
dislocations.

They do this by constantly, often uncomfortably, innovating. Disrupting
themselves so that an external disruption is part of everyday life. A bit like
the netflix chaos monkey, but for everything!


## Further reading

There have been a wealth of books that have dug into these phenomena. Way too
many to provide a full treatment of here. I'll include a list of some favourites
at the end but, want to say a paragraph or two on three books in particular. The
Commando Development "must read list" if you will :-)


### [Team of Teams](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529127-team-of-teams) - Gen. Stan McChrystal

Team of Teams is the story of the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. This was
really the first time that we saw a loosely organised, ideologically aligned,
highly networked modern insurgency.

The book (and its follow up One Mission) contains a fascinating insight into the
changes a fairly rigid, hierarchical organisation had to make in order to be
able to counter an enemy that was innovating daily.

![team-of-teams.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/cdodev/image/upload/v1649074159/team_of_teams_b8a1bf2e68.png)


Main takeaways:

<div class="list check-square">
The use of cross functional teams to keep the size of sub networks to a minimum.
Shared consciousness to keep everyone aligned.
Empowered execution to ensure decisions are made by those "in the fight".
The need to be able to change at least as fast as the environment you operate in.
The value of hierarchy for economies of scale. e.g. payroll and admin.
</div>

### [Loonshots](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863447-loonshots) - Safi Bachal

Just like how changing the temperature of a fridge by one degree can change
water from a solid to a liquid, “Loonshots” explains how making small shifts in
company structure can lead to dramatic outcomes that can alter company’s future.
The book distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and
visionaries everywhere.

Main takeaways:

<div class="list check-square">
Separate the Commandos and the rest (artists and soldiers in the book).
Create dynamic equilibrium - love them equally.
Tailor the tools to the phase.
Appoint, and train, project champions to bridge the divide (boundary spanners).
</div>


### [The Square and the Tower](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35629744-the-square-and-the-tower) - Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson take a look at the last 500 or so years of history as a battle
between networks and hierarchies. The square (market squares, town squares)
represent the messy, organic networks humans form. The tower represents
hierarchies that rise and fall as they exert control and get over thrown. This
rise and fall is precisely what I mean when I say innovation and insurgency:

<div class="list check-square">
An innovation develops allowing development of hierarchy.
The hierarchy exerts control, driving the system toward regularity.
Insurgents push the boundaries of control innovating their own advantages.
And so it goes.
</div>

Some of my favourite excerpts:

> Networks are not static, but dynamic. Whether they are random or scale-free,
> they are prone to phase transitions. They can evolve into complex adaptive
> systems with emergent properties. Very small changes -the addition of just a few
> edges -- can radically alter the network's behaviour.
>
> By the same token, the seemingly rigid structures of a hierarchical order can
> disintegrate with astounding rapidity.


> The problem is that networks are not easily directed 'towards a common objective
> ... that requires concentration of resources in space and time within large
> organizations, like armies, bureaucracies, large factories, vertically organized
> corporations'. Networks may be spontaneously creative but they are not
> strategic.


> It distinguishes the long epochs in which hierarchical structures dominated
> human life from the rarer but more dynamic eras when networks had the advantage,
> thanks in part to changes in technology. To put it simply: when hierarchy is the
> order of the day, you are only as powerful as your rung on the organizational
> ladder of a state, corporation or similar vertically ordered institution. When
> networks gain an advantage, you can be as powerful as your position in one or
> more horizontally structured social groups. As we shall see, this dichotomy
> between hierarchy and network is an over-simplification." Is it better today to
> be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you
> power?

> The crucial incentive that favoured hierarchical order was that it made the
> exercise of power more efficient: centralized control in the hands of the 'big
> man' eliminated or at least reduced time-consuming arguments about what to do,
> which might at any time escalate into internecine conflict."


### Other books and resources

There are a million more books and other resources I'd like to dig into, but
these will have to wait for another time. A by no means exhaustive list:

[One Tribe at a Time](https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/one-tribe-at-a-time-4-the-full-document-at-last/) - Maj. Jim Gant on US Special Forces' experience in Afghanistan

[Network Science](http://barabasi.com/book/network-science) - Albert-László Barabási

[Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Conduct](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29635592-churchill-s-ministry-of-ungentlemanly-warfare) (mentioned earlier)

[Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the
Next Stage of Human Consciousness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20787425-reinventing-organizations) - Frederic Laloux,  Ken Wilber

[Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23526564-holacracy) - Brian J.
Robertson

[Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101438.Skunk%5FWorks) - Ben R. Rich


## Conclusions

We exist in a complex web of organically structured organisations, ecosystems
and the links between them.

The connectivity boost ushered in by the rise of the internet, and in particular
social networks has made it more important than ever to understand how these
systems function, interact and break.

We can look at insurgencies as a proxy for innovation in organisations that have
become overly linear and structured.

If your organisation has become ossified and can no longer react to the
disruptions and dislocation of the market, changing that had better be in your
top 5 priorities.

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Innovation and Insurgency

# What can fast moving digital product companies learn from the Royal Marines?

Quite a lot as it happens.

In this conversation [Paul Lacey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-lacey-rift/) and Ben dig deep into the similarities between doctrine that the military has evolved to mitigate chaos and modern product management principles.

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Commando Product Management

How to apply to the military concept of Mission Command, or _the doctrine of empowerment_ to building better tech businesses.

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Mission Command

In 2021 Ben was invited to give a talk about applying OODA and situational awareness to building better Command and Control (*C2*) systems.

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The Paradox of Control

Ben's guest appearance on the OODA cast with Bob Gourley.

Some things we touched on:

- How can Winston Churchill's decisions regarding Commando Unit reporting structure inform your decision on how your enterprise AI initiatives or cybersecurity actions are organized and led?
- How can the metrics of legendary Commando (and trainer of OSS) William Fairbairn inform the metrics of enterprise cybersecurity?
- How can you apply the ideas of John Boyd to building better businesses?

Checkout  [the original episode here](https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2021/05/07/oodacast-ben-ford-founder-of-commando-development-on-the-ooda-loop-and-tech-leadership/) for transcript, shownotes and other episodes.

Writing

Organisations that win are those that build better systems.

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