Process and organisational development - taking organisational development to a new level

Military organisations have certain characteristics that distinguish them from commercial enterprises, but the acronym VUCA (Volatility' Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), coined at the United States Army War College (USAWC) in the 1990s, is now the basis of the demand for agility.

For the armed forces themselves, quick decisions based on incomplete information have always been necessary. In this context, the proposals of the Prussian army reformers were correspondingly influential, anticipating numerous elements of agile action, which in turn continue to exist today in the Bundeswehr's concept of "mission tactics". In this respect, a central aspect of organisational development should be to adapt the proven principles of leadership and communication to the rapid development of technology, in particular information technology, so that previous principles can continue to provide promising leadership in the future.

Military organisations include not only combat units, but also administrative units such as the civilian military administration. A conscious decision was made to apply different maxims for action in this sphere. The desire for more entrepreneurship in these authorities leads to a misunderstanding of the military administration's very own tasks: organisational development should focus on simplifying and, if necessary, streamlining established structures and processes in order to make administrative tasks quick and transparent. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that the military administration, as part of the overall organisation, should not carry out administrative tasks for its own purpose, but for the purpose of supporting the existing tasks of the Bundeswehr: The goal comes before the process.

An administration developed in this way can then make a better contribution to ensuring that the military structures and commercial enterprises can provide the necessary agility for their contributions to the rapid and adapted fulfilment of tasks.

The military command and control process includes numerous tasks, the core of which is the processing of large amounts of information. It is particularly important to recognise patterns and bring often contradictory information into a meaningful context and possibly also to question the reliability of incorrectly or incompletely transmitted information when assessing the situation and later monitoring success.

Military leaders also carry out numerous tasks of a repetitive nature when evaluating the orders issued by higher-level command and when issuing their own orders. Machines are already clearly superior in all of these tasks. In the future, they will further extend their performance advantage, especially in terms of speed.

Future battle management systems (BMS) will relieve military leaders of as many routine tasks as possible. They will continuously and independently update situation pictures and recognise even unreliable information as such by means of highly developed pattern recognition - not without error, but at least at the level of an officer (who can make human errors). Within certain limits, they will also be able to make generic suggestions on possible courses of action and save the human decision-maker a considerable amount of time.

Depending on the degree of automation, there will then be a greater shift from humans as decision-makers "on the loop" to humans as command-givers "before the loop".

The element of mission tactics has always proved its worth in the confusing and often unpredictable progress of military battles. The observable acceleration of combat operations in particular confirms that mission tactics are an indispensable instrument. However, due to the large amount of information available, micromanagement is becoming more attractive at higher levels of command. This could be observed, for example, in the deployment of special forces in Afghanistan. The concept of mission tactics may therefore need to be defended even more actively than before.

Each command level is characterised by a certain command span and information processing capacity. How will the performance of a division commander or his divisional command post, for example, change in the future? What contribution do the subordinate brigade commanders and their respective brigade command posts make to decision-making on the basis of his orders? How quickly can battalions and companies react to changes in the situation in the familiar leadership cascade?

Defence administration often faces challenges that are caused by embedded structures and procedures. Although these provide individual security, they can also significantly slow down processes.

Examples of this include safeguarding measures such as co-checks and co-signatures that are implemented even though the facts or decision would be covered by the individual decision-making framework. Instead of speed and goal-orientation, the focus is often on legal certainty. This means that the means is the central element and not the end.

This is where our support comes in: Administrative staff must be empowered to make independent decisions in their area of responsibility. This requires a cultural change, which we support as part of a change management process. More constructive feedback, suitable incentives and appropriate management training should help to place the solution at the centre instead of the purely procedural process.

The Bundeswehr already has an instrument in the form of mission tactics that characterises precisely this culture of personal responsibility and empowerment. The task now is to establish this approach in the administration both mentally and culturally.