Unpredictable Patterns #11: Logistics

Amateurs discuss strategy, professionals discuss logistics...the how and when of planning needs to be rediscovered and revalued.

Dear Reader

This week’s note is written in small cabin in Storhogna. Storhogna is a small ski resort in Jämtland, 6 hours north of Stockholm by car. I have been going here for christmases and school breaks for the last 20 years, and have now built a small cabin here that was finished and inspected this week It is a wonderful feeling, and also a new home - I look forward to working and living here more and more over time. It is a different life, a life with the Aurora silently flaming over night skies and cross country skiing interrupting everyday zoom calls - and it is a life that is more open to reflection. I find it promising, and perhaps the start of something new. We will see!

Amateurs and professionals

One of my favorite quotes is about strategy and logistics. It has been attributed to a lot of different military thinkers - like von Moltke and Clausewitz - but the real source could be a relatively unknown United States Marine Corps four-star general by the name of Robert Hilliard Barlow, and the full quote goes like this:

”Amateurs discuss strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability.”

It is a terse restatement of a truth that I think we have all heard in different versions, and the essence of the quote for me is that the planning of the how is as important as the planning of the what.

When an organization starts to slow down, it is usually not because of a lack of ideas - there are plenty of ideas, and a lot of good ones as well, but because of a lack of prioritization and execution. And execution comes down to sustainable logistics - the question of how something is done.

Why, then, is logistics so often overlooked? Why do large organization so often have clear strategies, but still stumble either by not executing at all or by executing in a half-hearted way?

There are a few interesting hypotheses here that we could examine: the first is that it is in logistics we find social and personal friction. It is easy to get commitment to a strategy around a table, because everyone can interpret it the way they want - and even pretend that it does not apply to them. It is in the logistics of the execution of the strategy people really commit and become accountable.

There is no such thing as strategic accountability. Accountability is always around logistics, and we are, generally, conflict averse. We hope not to ruffle feathers and not to upset anyone, and so we agree on the strategy and then we ignore logistics - often under a leadership ideal that puts heavy emphasis on ”delegation”.

But real delegation is only possible if there is a logistical philosophy and style embedded in an organization. Negotiating that may be the most important thing a leader does - and it is important to not just adopt another organization’s logistics.

This will be tempting, since you can avoid some of the friction by saying that you apply, say, a ”Toyota model” or something like that. Organizations excel at finding examples from effective organizations that execute well and copying the logistics they carefully fashioned, rather than carefully fashioning their own logistics and style.

Another hypothesis is that we do not realize how easily logistics break strategy. If you get the logistics wrong the compounding effects of any single logistics mistake are brutal - just look at any project and how it can be delayed by what looks like a small individual delay as that delay staggers the project as a whole when windows shift and dependencies break. If you are building a house and the windows arrive one day late, this may mean that the carpenters do not have the time to install them and that delays the plumber who needs an isolated building and…We underestimate the costs in time that logistical failures generate.

We also undervalue the speed we can execute with if logistics really work for us. We can do things incredibly fast if the how and when works as intended.

Out of a 100 hours of planning, you probably need to spend 50 on logistics, the how and when, rather than the what and why - and through doing so find your own style of logistics, adapted to the work you want to do.

Well ordered paths

But let’s back up. What is logistics? How do we actually think about logistics in the real world? The word logistics has a funny history. It is often attributed to the military strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini. He coined the word based on the french word for quarter or lodgings, logis, and thought of it as the art of ”well-ordering the function of an army to assure its arrival at a namned point”. Others argue that it stems from the Greek word ”logistikos” which essentially means someone who is good at making calculations.

Already here we find something really basic about logistics. It is about the order of things, the sequencing and the determination of points in time and space. A strategy, at its most abstract, always needs to be translated into a set of points in time and space, and then resourced and structured so that the organization can arrive on these points in a swift manner.

It is a matter of calculating paths.

Chess requires logistics as well as strategy

There is a clear analogy here with chess. Anyone who has played chess knows that a key to playing is to consider a move carefully in the light of other moves that the opponent can make. This ”calculation” is related to logistics - it is thinking about where on the board we expect to be in several moves and when we expect to get there.

A strategy can have both an adequate diagnosis and a good global policy, but if the consistent actions under that policy are not properly sequenced or calculated the strategy will fail or lose a lot of its impact. How and when are central pieces to and logistical plan, and it is in the how and when that most of the organizational negotiation of accountability resides.

Again - think about chess. Would it even be possible to play chess with a strategy without carefully considering logistics of every single move?

Logistics can often require some quite detailed planning, and military history teaches us that the great generals were great at logistics - at figuring out how to order their resources in space and time in such a way that they could deliver overwhelming force. Hannibal, Alexander, Nelson — they are all examples of this - as was von Moltke, the German general who was said to make no military decisions without consulting the timetables for the railways.

But we generally resist detailed planning, finding it useless because we live in a changing and complex environment. Better to be adaptive and change with the times, we argue, better to be dynamic than static when the world is in a flux, right?

Jomini’s understanding of logistics as a key element in all strategy was key to his military thought.

Herein hides a false dichotomy, and it is helpful to think about Jomini’s definition. What is a ”well-ordered function”? It is not a perfect order or sequence, and neither is it a spontaneous organization - it is something in between. A conscious, careful laying out of actions in time and space, with a willingness to improvise and adapt. But that adaptation starts from something, it is an adaptation from a chosen path, not an adaptation decoupled from any action.

And this is the weakness of the idea that we should be agile and open and dynamic - all of those strategies need an anchoring point, some kind of chosen path that we aim to travel down. If we do not have that we lack the object of adaption - the intended path forward.

So logistics is not about pretending that the world is predictable and stable - it is about establishing a baseline against which we then can adapt. And refusing to do so in the name of dynamism is a peculiar folly that seems to seek an adaptive strategy from nowhere.

So, logistics is the ordering of a strategy in time and space. It seeks to order the strategy well - so that it can adapt and evolve - but not perfectly.

Logistics ends up being about finding a plausible, preferred path to your objective - and laying it out in detail, fully aware that it will need to change - but also knowing that you can only sketch out mitigation plans and fallback options if you have that first, preferred option ready at hand.

Maps help you move

Logistics is also about knowing the terrain. Understanding the world around you and figuring out if it is possible to progress at a certain pace in a certain landscape. Logistics is about maps and mapping, and no strategy is complete without a map.

Rock art maps from 4000 BCE mapping plots.

Maps are extraordinary mental models, developed over thousands of years. Some of the earliest examples we have of maps date back to thousands of years BCE, and are painted on rock in caves. The map may well be one of the oldest tools of thinking that mankind adopted and developed, and maps are still key to our understanding of the world - and other worlds in the universe.

In fantasy literature it is not uncommon for a book to start with a map that shows the world in which the narrative will unfold - and these maps have become a part of the genre. This is not by accident, and understanding that maps are key to narratives helps a lot when working with techniques like narrative foresight or backcasting. Drawing a map opens the story.

Mapping your organizations environment is not a simple exercise - and will necessarily require adopting a different model than the geographical one. Facebook or Google would not be helped by charting Mountain View and Menlo Park (except for the not trivial work of real estate development). No, mapping the environment of an organization requires rethinking the landscape we want to map.

One approach is simple stakeholder mapping - mapping the network of actors that matter to the organization and how they related. For any larger company this requires mapping competitors (most challenges come not from governments, but from competitors), partners and friends, policy makers, NGOs and thought leaders. And here it is often good practice to really draw this out in a map - to understand what the landscape looks like.

Another, more complicated, approach is mapping what is sometimes referred to as the ”commanding heights”. This term was reintroduced by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in their 1998 book by the same name. The fundamental idea, however, is found in marxism-leninism, where it refers to key sectors in society or industry that determine the overall evolution of society. Arguably, in western society, the press or mass media would be a ”commanding height”.

Mapping the commanding heights is a good way to understand your relative power. How many of the key centers of power in society do you control or influence? And what is the general attitude towards you within these commanding heights?

An interesting example where such a map could have been helpful was Facebook’s launch of Libra. The company was opposed by all major commanding heights at the moment when they tried to launch their new project, and the result was - at least with hindsight - predictable: massive blowback and attacks on not just the idea, but attacks that centered on the inferred intentions of Facebook in exploring the idea of crypto currencies.

A map of commanding heights can also suggest areas of unexpected opportunity. One such, undervalued, area is the local business aristocracies that exist in every single country and market: families and industries that exercise significant influence by force of being embedded in a countries deepest networks and in their history.

Companies that merely navigate by their customer database usually miss these companies and their owners, since they are not immediately visible. Yet, an investment in understanding and approaching the local business aristocracy’s commanding heights may pay dividends for decades to come. It is interesting to observe that US tech companies have not really invested in these relationships in depth. While it is routine for the CEO to call partners and customers, the calls into these deeper network are rarer.

There are many more ways of mapping, and finding out and devising new maps is itself an important task for anyone who wants to really understand both strategy and logistics.

Strategy requires logistics and logistics require maps.

The original disruption

The importance of logistics also suggests a range of strategic options.

Whenever we consider a strategy, we should consider what it would mean to disrupt the logistics of our opponents. In war this can be simple (blowing up bridges) or complex (refusing access to semiconductors), and in business there are equally simple solutions (stopping funding for things we do not like) or complex ones (ensuring a supply of new policy makers who at least understand the issues better and can disrupt the opponents control over academia - one of the commanding heights).

In analyzing something like the tech-lash it is interesting to think about logistics. How is the tech-lash sustained over time? How are new voices and people supplied to support the narratives underpinning the tech-lash? How has the proponents of the tech lash succeeded in controlling so many commanding heights?

There are no simple answers, but these questions are important - and may provide insights into how to shift out of the current dynamic.

So what?

So, we have suggested that strategy without logistics is incomplete at best and a mistake at worst. What can we then do if we agree with this?

First, we can make sure that we ensure that strategies and plans have strong logistics components to them. No strategy meeting or annual planning is complete without a sense of the logistics.

Second, we can realize and acknowledge that it is in logistics, the how and when, the rubber meets the road and real social conflicts arise, and make this a part of what we require from our leaders: not just that they have strategic vision, but that they also have logistical courage.

Third, we can draw maps of our environments - of stakeholders, commanding heights and entirely new ways of thinking about the board that strategy plays out on.

Fourth, we should develop a style of logistics that is our own. What are the routines and tools we use to get our logistics right? How do we ensure that we build a body of logistical wisdom in our organizations?

There is much more - but refocusing from strategy to logistics is key, especially for fast growing organizations where strategy conversations remain socially frictionless as friction increases in any discussion about the how and when of logistics. Finally then - adding those two questions to all planning may help: how and when will we do what we plan to do?

And remembering that this is not the opposite, but the pre-requisite, for being adaptive, agile and dynamic. Without a logistics there is nothing to adapt to.

On the blog this week

Here are two things that may interest you this week, from the blog:

• How goals create solution spaces - a note on why zero visions in policy are dangerous.

• A new episode of Richard Allan’s podcast - in this episode we discuss the fading debate about copyright.

As always, thank you for reading and let me know if you have ideas, questions or feedback! I very much appreciate the notes you have been sending! And if there is someone else you know who you think would find these notes interesting do let me know!

Take care,

Nicklas