Fog of Business

I want to talk about what’s known as the fog of war. The fog of war is basically the uncertainty that soldiers face in combat. So you might go on a mission as a soldier and you might know what the plan was and have some guidance on how to achieve the goals of whatever the mission was but then something inevitably unexpected happens. If the guidance that we receive was too rigid like you must go this way, you must do this, you must do that, we wouldn’t be able to adapt to those unforeseen circumstances to be able to react to those changes in our mission and ultimately be able to achieve our goals. To kind of remedy this, our leadership would make sure that everyone involved knew what the mission’s objectives were. Our job then would be to achieve the mission’s objectives, not follow some predetermined set of actions like robots, right? So we weren’t just stuck to a certain particular path. We weren’t stuck to doing things a certain particular way. We had that flexibility built in to our mission to be able to achieve our objectives when those unforeseen circumstances came up and this was, the flexibility was given down to the lowest levels. As long as we were keeping in line with the mission’s objectives, we were able to make changes on the fly to kind of achieve those objectives. That eliminated some of that uncertainty that comes with the fog of war. In business, we face similar uncertainties all the time and some people have even referred to this as the “fog of business” where there’s unforeseen circumstances that come up and sometimes people just don’t know how to deal with them or what to do. A lot of times we’ll come up with a strategy and a plan but when it’s time to execute these plans, we hit these unforeseen circumstances and to get around this and not get stuck with what I’ve referred to before as “analysis paralysis”, we should provide our company, our employees with a framework of rules that can guide the employees’ actions. So we can go down the same path and make similar decisions. They may not be identical decisions along the way but we empower our employees to be able to make these decisions so that way they’re not stuck there not knowing what to do. For example, think about when you’re driving, right? There’s lines painted on the road for a reason, right, so that we all stay in our lanes but then you may be driving along and then all of a sudden there’s debris in the road, maybe a tree branch or a tire or something, broken glass, something like that that you come across. When you come across this, do you just stop? I mean, the rules say you’re supposed to stay in between the lines on the road and you’re supposed to drive in that prescribed location but you don’t just stop, do you? You kind of swerve around it. If you stopped, you can cause a traffic accident with all the cars that are driving behind you not realizing what it is that you’re stopping for and by swerving around whatever that obstacle is, you’re able to continue on your mission of getting from point A to point B and continue on and achieve your objectives. So the lines on the road are there to keep you on track but occasionally you kind of have to ignore those lines. The fog of business, the fog of war, whatever you want to call it, kind of has a similar mindset where you’re not going to follow and stay in those exact same lines every single time everywhere you go regardless of where you’re coming from or going to. There’s flexibility built in and everybody should know that you have that flexibility. The driving rules, there’s no laws on the books or rules of the road that say you can’t go around debris that’s in the road. As a matter of fact, it would be kind of a wise decision to go around that debris so you’re not damaging your car by driving over it or causing an accident by stopping quickly when something comes up in the middle of the road. So there’s no rules against doing that and that’s for a reason. There’s flexibility built in to driving just the way there should be flexibility built in to business decision making and even military operations. That’s kind of the idea. Hopefully you can take that into your business when you have employees or other people who are maybe working with you, contractors or whatever that may feel like they’re stuck and they don’t know how to proceed with whatever the mission is that they’re working on.