We are continuing our series based on some principles covered in David H. Freedman’s excellent book, Corps Business (Freedman, David H. Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines. New York: HarperBusiness, 2000. Print.). In the book, Freedman analyzes the management principles that have led to the more than 200 years of Marine Corps success in order to glean from them concepts that may be applied to business. He does so with considerable success, in my opinion.

 Principle #2: Find The Essence

“Finding the essence” in Marine management language means discovering the core element, the intrinsic requirement of the mission at hand. This is all about focus. In order to accomplish this, Freedman’s analysis breaks the Corps’ method down into the following questions:

What Are Our Strengths and Weaknesses and What Are Those of the Opponent?

There are many ways to gather and analyze strengths and weaknesses. Some teams just list them on a whiteboard or a sheet of paper. Others put them into quadrants on a fancy chart or seek to pair them up—e.g., our strength versus the opponent’s weakness.

The problem with these methods is that they treat all strengths and weakness as equal. The lists do not, in themselves, help managers determine whether the strength or weakness (ours or the opponent’s) is a matter upon which managers should spend any time, energy or money, at all.

Besides, after you and your management team have created a list of strengths and weaknesses, they must still decipher the causes and effects of these strengths and weaknesses, both internally and in your supply chain.

Far more effective, in my opinion, than just creating lists of strengths or weakness is to unlock tribal knowledge by applying the Thinking Processes to help the management team build a Current Reality Tree (CRT). You see, when your management team does a proper job of constructing a CRT, strengths and (especially) weaknesses that are currently having a negative affect on Throughput will automatically appear in the CRT. Plus, these strengths and weaknesses will also automatically become linked (logically) into a cause-and-effect flow to which your whole management team can agree.

In one effort, you will have both identified these elements and identified their affects on your “mission”—making more money tomorrow than you are making today.

What Assumptions Can We Make?

Another great advantage of using the CRT and broader Thinking Processes approach to “finding the essence” or achieving enterprise-wide focus is that underlying assumptions in the cause-and-effect flow of the CRT are automatically brought to light and challenged, if necessary.

The Thinking Processes provide essential ground rules for bringing to light flaws in the cause-and-effect logic in the CRT and other logical trees.

The following are Categories of Legitimate Reservations (CLR):

1. Clarity- Is every statement clear, and are the connections between statements clear?
2. Entity Existence- Is the statement true?
3. Causality Existence- Does one thing really result from the other?
4. Cause Insufficiency- Does the statement, by itself, cause the next result, or do two or more things need to happen all together to cause the result?
5. Additional Cause- Are there other, independent and important causes of the result?
6. Predicted Effect Existence- A technique to validate or invalidate the logic by showing how the existence of something else proves or disproves the logic or statement. For example, suppose someone makes the statement: "O.J. is struggling financially." We could use the predicted effect reservation to challenge the statement by saying, "If O.J. were struggling financially, one could predict that he would NOT be looking at buying multi-million dollar mansions in Florida."
7. Tautology - Does one entity really cause the other one, or simply explain its existence? For example, "If there are ambulances on the highway, then there is a car accident." The ambulances did NOT cause the accident to occur, their presence simply indicates that an accident may have occurred on the highway." (Circular reasoning)

Setting these ground rules in advance helps eliminate “politics”—helps preclude anyone from taking a position that cannot be supported from reasoning. The ground rules also are there to invite everyone to question the rationale displayed in the CRT until they are fully satisfied that it represents reality in its present state.

What Must We Not Do?

The question of “what must we not do” is also readily answered by applying the Thinking Processes. This question might be answered developing a Negative Branch. An Iowa State University site covering the Thinking Processes says this:

People will usually look at the idea and say, "Yes, I see where your solution might work, but...." They complete the sentence with any number of unintended negative consequences that they fear will happen as a result of the change. For example:

"If we make that much improvement in output, our department won't need as many people."

"If we take the master schedule away from all the departments, we won't know what is coming down the pipe."

The Thinking Process intentionally seeks out these 'Yes, but there is a negative consequence' statements! They are important to preventing a failed implementation. The people who are involved in the affected process(es) will best know what these unintended negative consequences (Goldratt calls them "Negative Branches") will be.

So the Thinking process seeks proactively to identify them and then assists the person who brought the concern forward in figuring out how to prevent that negative consequence from actually occurring. Goldratt calls this "trimming the Negative Branches."

How Will the Mission Affect Morale?

This is one area that can have a big impact, but is seldom given the kind of consideration it deserves in business planning. Morale can be dramatically affected by how an enterprise conducts it business and how it handles management and staff during times of dramatic or intense change.

I do not believe the old saw about “people hate change.” People willingly undergo huge changes in the lives all of the time. They get married. They have children. They change jobs.

People only hate change when they are not yet convinced that the impending change is good for them—good enough to pay the price the change will exact on them.

But, the Thinking Processes can help with these, too. Perhaps potentially negative affects on morale will be presented in a Negative Branch to be resolved.

What Are Our "Bump" [Fall-back] Plans?

Here is another big area that is all too frequently omitted from sound planning. Of course, you only need a fall-back plan in the event of something negative happening, so it is another good place to apply the Negative Branch concept in the Thinking Processes.

What Are We Overlooking?

Here is the really tough one, and one for which I have no direct answer.

The problem here is that it is impossible to know what you don’t know.

I have high confidence in the Thinking Processes when used in a conscientiously applied program of open-minded management. It has a tendency to rapidly and effectively unlock tribal knowledge. Therefore, my best advice is to invite staffers who do the hands-on work to be involved in the Thinking Process sessions.

As the Japanese managers say: “No one knows more about the machine that the person who runs it.” Inviting the hands-on people into the conversation is likely to provide insight into things management might overlook, simply because management is not acquainted with every detail of what needs to be done.

Read the fourth blog in this series.