Milestone Group Quarterly: January 2007
Articles
By Invitation:
Chip Heath, Stanford Graduate School of Business and Author of Made to Stick
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, considers six principles shared by all sticky ideas—ideas that people understand, remember, and that change the way people think or act. In this excerpt they discuss the principle of simplicity, a key challenge for entrepreneurial organizations.
Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced back to an original order from the President of the United States. Then orders and plans cascade downward—from the President to generals to colonels to captains.
The plans are thorough, specifying the “scheme of maneuver” and the “concept of fires”— what each unit will do, which equipment it will use and how it will replace munitions. The orders gain enough specificity to guide the actions of individual foot soldiers at particular moments in time.
The Army invests enormous energy in planning, and its processes have been refined over many years. The system is a marvel. There’s only one shortcoming: the plans often turn out to be useless. They just don’t stick.
“The trite expression we always use is, No plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Colonel Tom Kolditz, head of behavioral sciences at West Point, in an interview appearing in our book Made to Stick. “The enemy gets a vote. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless 10 minutes into the battle.”
Colonel Kolditz said, “Over time we’ve come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations.” Plans are useful—in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, “They just don’t work on the battlefield.” So, in the 1980s, the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI), which illustrates the value of expressing ideas in a way that they are made to stick.
CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plans’ goal, the desired end-state, e.g., “My intent is to have Third Battalion on Hill 4305, to have the hill cleared of enemy, so we can protect the flank of Third Brigade as they pass through the lines.”
The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. “You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent,” says Kolditz. In other words, if there’s one soldier left in the Third Battalion on Hill 4305, he’d better be doing something to protect the flank of the Third Brigade.
Commander’s Intent aligns the behavior of soldiers at all levels without play-by-play instructions from the leaders. When people know the desired destination, they can improvise in arriving there. Col. Kolditz gives an example: “Suppose I’m commanding an artillery battalion and I say, ‘We’re going to pass this infantry unit through our lines forward.’ The mechanics know that they will need lots of repair support along the roads because if a tank breaks down on a bridge, the whole operation will come to a screeching halt. The artillery knows they will need to fire smoke in the breech area where the infantry unit moves forward, so it won’t get shot up as it passes through. As a commander, I could spend a lot of time enumerating every specific task, but as soon as people know what the intent is, they begin generating their own solutions.”
The Combat Maneuver Training Center recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions:
If we do nothing else during tomorrow's mission, we must _________________.
The single, most-important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________.
No plan survives contact with the enemy. No doubt this idea resonates with people with no military experience whatsoever. No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers. No sales plan survives contact with the customer.
It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. For us to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” What we mean by simple is finding the core of the idea.
To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out the superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s easy. The hard part is weeding out the really important ideas that just aren’t the most important. Commander’s Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. You can’t have five North Stars, you can’t have five “most important goals,” and you can’t have five Commander’s Intents.
Research in psychology and economics shows that when people are given a good choice they take it. When they are given two good choices they… delay, hoping to find a good way of deciding between them. Entrepreneurial start-ups are filled with choices to make. Without a Commander’s Intent, dozens of critical choices may go unmade, waiting for the right choice to become clear.
The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal—knowing how much can be taken out of an idea to highlight its essence. Simple, core ideas are more likely to stick. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die has just been published by Random House.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die has just been published by Random House.
Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. |
