Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

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Thought of the Week

“Do you have the courage to prepare carefully for the future?

Or do you just repeat what you saw work in the past?”

TL; DR

• The FT reports many drones sent to Ukraine are obsolete on arrival and stripped for parts.

•  In fast-moving environments, repeating yesterday remains our mental bias and emotional preference – but is quite useless.

• We must design for speed, for human agility: learning and adapting faster than the opposition.

• What does it mean for you? Are you taking bold Decisions and Actions based on a clear future Result? Or Deciding from habits formed and grooved a decade ago?

Preparing for the Past…

Legend has it that Canadian Spitfire ace George Beurling used to sit under shady trees between sorties pointing at birds flying in the sky whilst others drank tea.

He was rehearsing velocity prediction. His finger was, in fact, just ahead of the bird. He was firing an imaginary round to meet the bird a second later, obsessively refining his accuracy in combat.

One of the greatest aerial marksmen in history, Buerling knew well that aiming at a fast-moving target meant the bullet would pass behind it.

When mobilizing an organisation, or a national defence, this approach demands a deal of courage.

A recurring theme in Prof. Sir Lawrence Freedman’s book ‘Strategy: A History’ is that we prepare to fight the previous war again – not to fight the coming war. In other words, even our Generals suffer from continuation bias. The assumption that it will all go on as it did.

… Or Building for the Future?

What is the future target that you must consciously build your organisation to accurately hit? And how?

This question, which has underpinned my professional life for two decades, was given even greater poignancy for me this week when I read the following in the FT, released online on 26 February:

 “Many drones given to Kyiv’s forces by its western allies are obsolete by the time they arrive. Ukrainian drone unit commanders and engineers told the FT that most western drones needed to be reconfigured before use and that many end up being cannibalised and scrapped for parts.”

Software, radio control frequencies and autonomous navigation advances render them useless in days and weeks, not months and years, the article goes on.

(To delve further into how ill-prepared NATO is to fight a future, rather than historic, war see how 10 Ukrainian drone operators direct from the front line inflicted enormous mock ‘damage’ on NATO troops during a training exercise).

How Radically Different Must Decisions and Actions be?

Remember our DARE Loop:  Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate: then Loop around again.

If the Result is defined as:

“The future of warfare is drones, therefore, as we did in the past with artillery shells, we must stockpile drones” then: ‘Build warehouses full of drones” is the rational Decision we should Act upon.

But if the Result is defined as:

“The ability to hit our targets whilst hacking and out-innovating the enemy’s electronic warfare and targeting systems week after week, across different terrain and seasons for four or more years” then the Decisions and Actions look entirely different.

Now we must build capability, not stockpiles. We need skills in rapid innovation and iteration, in coding and in overnight manufacturing process re-design.

Now we must teach Generals how to listen to warnings from 19-year-old coders and not to scare them into silence.

Now we must learn how to build and hide mini factories on the front line with instantaneous comms to PhD technologists in our universities.

And when I talk to veterans at Unbroken in Lviv, they will tell me with pride about 12-month-old drone technology. But when I ask them how on earth a state-of-the-art Russian warship was destroyed by USVs more recently, I receive steely silence and a subtle smile:

So we also need to build security and counterintelligence to the highest level.

What is the organisation you are building?

A question for you, not me.

But I will suggest that it will likely require the adaptability and agility that we see in the tech war that young, brilliant minds are fighting in Ukraine.

And that it will require clear a strategy to meet your next challenge, and a refined Second Strategy to build the organisational capability to execute and iterate it fast.

My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them.  And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

My Fortnight

The theme of the past fortnight has been the courage to define the Result and to adapt Decisions and Actions to get there.

From the defence sector to heavy architectural engineering to the application of AI to transform the provision of strategic insights within the market research industry, the challenge I and my audiences and client Exec teams have been set has remained constant: how do we accelerate decision velocity and reduce organisational latency.

Thank you to my long-term advisory and to my keynote clients for a most stimulating fortnight.

I have also been thoroughly enjoying an early draft of “The Braveheart CIO” by Benedetto Conversano.

Benedetto was my client at IKEA and more recently as CIO of Diageo where we designed and delivered significant transformation together. You cannot buy it just yet – but do connect with Benedetto if you think technology is a part of your strategy and want to keep up with his thinking.

Book Of The Fortnight 

On Strategists and Strategy — Lawrence Freedman

I am taking a risk. I will only start reading the recommended book when I receive my copy on Tuesday.  It is released tomorrow, Monday 2 March.

Lawrence Freedman’s new book has, however, been widely trailed and you can hear interviews with him about it on the BBC Sounds app. It is a collection of his most important essays from the past decade on war, crisis and geopolitics.

The anticipated central warning seems very consistent with our theme of the week, and the FT article that prompted my focus: institutions often cling to what once worked and mistake familiarity for preparedness.

I suspect Freedman will remind us that strategy is not a fixed plan or a confident prediction. It is a discipline that stays effective as circumstances shift — politically, technologically and tactically. Grand visions collapse without adaptation and when assumptions harden into habits.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim