Later this year, I’ll be sharing the stage at SDI Miami with Stephen Bungay, whose book, “The Art of Action,” has been influential in the Agile community. He’ll be continuing to expand on his thesis—that the Prussian General Staff identified an effective approach to organizing for collective action in the face of uncertainty—and presenting on “Blitzkrieg: Lessons in Organizational Agility & Strategy.” I’m looking forward to seeing how he relates the success of the German Army in the early years of World War II to the management challenges of today.

I plan to do something similar, but with a less familiar example. I’ll be highlighting the importance of rapid organizational learning by discussing the Allied offensive at Guadalcanal in late 1942. The series of naval battles triggered by that offensive led to revisions in the U.S. Navy’s doctrine—its approach to combat. Whereas Bungay will discuss the merits of the German Army’s doctrine, I’ll be presenting the importance of developing doctrinal agility: the ability to rapidly refine, adapt, and evolve doctrine.

So what is Doctrine?

In my forthcoming book on organizational learning in the U.S. Navy, I define doctrine this way:

Doctrine is the set of implicit and explicit assumptions that govern the behavior of a military force. It is what officers and sailors fall back on to guide their decisions when precise instructions are not available. It has a parallel to “culture” or “ethos” but greater specificity than either one.

Bungay (and many others) contend that the German Army’s doctrine was particularly effective because it created a common sense of what to do and how to do it, allowing large collections of individual soldiers to act in concert with minimal need for explicit instructions. I contend that the U.S. Navy’s doctrine was effective because it retained the ability to evolve and change in the face of new information. These are related concepts, but the difference is important.

Why Should I Care about Doctrine?

Whether we are aware of the process or not, doctrine influences how we make decisions. We’ve all experienced the influence of doctrine in our work. Some organizations tend to centralize decisions, perhaps in the hands of a senior engineer or manager. Those who fail to defer to them are stigmatized or punished, quickly creating a doctrine of centralized decision-making. Other organizations attempt to empower teams with the ability to collaboratively make decisions. When leaders—managers, senior engineers, scrum masters, etc.—reinforce this concept, the doctrine of empowered teams spreads. Many more examples exist. In most cases, organizational doctrines are implicit, but they exert a powerful influence.

Military forces explicitly create a doctrine based on their preferred approach. Drill, exercise, and repetition creates patterns—what Daniel Kahneman calls “heuristics”—that become the preferred approach to solving specific problems. There are two challenges in this. First, the heuristics must align with the organization’s goals and objectives. Second, the heuristics must not be so deeply embedded that they cannot change. The U.S. Navy was particularly adept at both seventy-five years ago.

Come to SDI Miami and I’ll explain why this was so, and what the implications are for modern organizations.