Distilling the Complex: An Approach to Enabling Senior Leader Decision-making

“How can we make this slide more understandable to our audience?” I sat in the back of the crowded briefing room as a senior leader asked this question about a complicated, information dense slide that his staff had presented for an external audience. I smiled, given my history of advocating for effective communications. But things soon became uncomfortable as the senior leader remained on the slide, trying to solve the issue on the spot. He was doing what a staff officer should have done before presenting it.

I have reviewed countless products prepared for a senior leader with the same problem—too much information with little focus. This can stem from an officer’s good-faith desire to show their work, a lack of understanding of what is useful for a senior leader, or difficulty in synthesizing a body of work. Staffs are expected to deeply understand problems and their environments. But senior leaders normally do not have time to review staff work. Leaders need to understand the key aspects of a problem and its context clearly and rapidly. Thus, staff officers must not only determine the best method to communicate the problem to their leader, but also what to omit. MG Charles Miller, the US Army’s senior Army Strategist, notes that this theme aligns with advice from various leaders to “keep the main thing the main thing” or “get the big ideas right.”[i]

While complexity can emerge in a tactical environment, it is in the strategic environment where staffs must deal with some of the most challenging complexity. The US Joint Publication 3.0, Joint Campaigns and Operations, describes the strategic environment as “uncertain, complex, and dynamic,” while noting the multitude of related actors and factors to consider on the global stage.[ii] Colin Gray has also pointed to a significant increase in complexity in war since the 1820s, causing issues for today’s military strategists and theorists.[iii] Forces in the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, combatant commands, NATO commands, and many other military and non-military organizations will deal with significant complexity today in the strategic environment. And the pace of change—driven by technological, geopolitical, and other factors—appears to continue accelerating. Staffs and leaders must be able to rapidly analyze and identify the key aspects of challenges in complex strategic and operational environments.

Staff officers are not always trained to distill complex or complicated ideas appropriately. But this is a skill that helps senior leaders understand issues and make decisions. Through experience and research, I have found that we can sometimes visualize and describe complex problems effectively by focusing on what the problem does, versus what it is, while ignoring unhelpful details. These ideas can help staff officers effectively understand and present problems to senior leaders.

Mathematics and Military Planning

Mathematician Timothy Gowers provides the foundation for these tools. He describes challenges mathematicians have dealing with complex mathematical ideas and outlines the utility of thinking about what a problem does or what its properties are versus what it is.[iv] Gowers also addresses omitting unneeded detail. In creating models, he notes that mathematicians try to ignore the extraneous while focusing only on the key elements required.[v] While not a perfect analogy for military planners dealing with complex problems, I have found that, in practice, this latter idea is useful, especially in combination with the former.

These ideas are relevant in military planning for complex or complicated problems. I recall studying a convoluted network on a whiteboard while at the US Army’s School for Advanced Military Studies. Its many nodes and interconnections told a story of complexity but not much else. While it presented a detailed depiction of what the network was, it was unclear how we were going to translate its key elements into something actionable.

That network was somewhat like the diagram of COIN dynamics in Afghanistan from 2009. This graphic laid out the key elements of the strategic environment at the time, becoming infamous in the media for its amount and level of detail. The diagram is like how intelligence professionals map out threat networks. And there is utility in a staff doing this work. But the challenge is how to best synthesize this into something useful that enables decisions.

Using Gowers’ approach, a staff officer would attempt to distill the COIN analysis related to what it does versus what it is. One possibility is a framework used by Oscar Jászi in his 1929 book, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Here, he considered the forces acting on the Habsburg monarchy as centripetal and centrifugal—those forces that helped preserve the monarchy and those that did the opposite.[vi] This provides a useful approach for the Afghanistan analysis (and an example of why reading widely can be helpful for military professionals).

By applying Jászi’s model in this case, a possible result is Figure 1.

Figure 1: Centripetal and centrifugal forces in Afghanistan.[vii]

The analysis in Figure 1 is more useful to help a senior leader engage with the problem. The underlying analysis is necessary, but the staff can omit it when presenting to a senior leader. It should be available as a backup for detailed questions.

There are other considerations. The staff should not oversimplify a problem’s complexity. Lacking a full understanding of a problem can cause a leader to make a bad decision. Also, staff officers must communicate in ways that their respective leaders understand. Some leaders prefer more information than others. However, this does not mean that they want or need to see all the staff’s work. They may simply want assurance that the work is thorough, and evidence based. The relative position in the decision-making process may also be relevant. If the staff has not yet briefed mission analysis or the first steps of operational design, additional useful information may be appropriate.

Another area where staffs can use this approach is for presenting courses of action (COAs). A common technique is to take a complicated chart and highlight the part associated with a COA. The staff then copies the product and highlights a different part for COA 2, etc. But while this makes the staff’s job easier, it may not enhance senior leader understanding. It will likely violate the guideline of omitting extraneous information. Figure 2 provides an example.

Figure 2

Although Tulopia is fictional, I have seen similar slides. In this case, the staff is presenting COAs for improving the communications infrastructure of Tulopia.

Figure 3

One way to present multiple COAs is to copy and paste the figure—developed in Mission Analysis—highlighting different portions as COAs like in Figure 3. But this retains clutter and challenges understanding.

Figure 4

Figure 4 presents another method. In this case, the staff removes extra information and focuses on the COA attributes that relate to the decision. This is more work for the staff but focuses the decision-maker on the key aspects of the problem. Figure 5 provides an even simpler approach.

Figure 5

This version focuses on the COAs’ functions versus what they look like. It omits the maps and associated information, instead highlighting their properties. Again, this requires more staff work but focuses the leader on the key elements.

Multiple considerations remain. The staff officer must consider what is extraneous information. In this case, the geography of Tulopia, distances between nodes, and other factors could be useful for a leader. But in this example, the staff covered those aspects in mission analysis. An option is to use a reference placemat for this information during the COA briefing.

These are representative examples, but staffs can apply this approach whenever they must analyze a large amount of information, whether complex or merely complicated. This will be especially useful to clearly understand the main issues in a changing strategic or operational environment. Other possible examples include products with numerous data entries, spreadsheets used for Lean Six Sigma analysis, charts examining command and control changes, and others. Common sense applies and this approach won’t always be applicable. But it provides another tool for staffs to distill information in a way that enables senior leader decisions.

Conclusion

Outside of mathematics, Gowers’ approach of describing what a complex problem does versus what it is also has applicability to military planning in challenging strategic and operational environments. A staff’s ability to examine and deeply understand these problems is important. Just as important is the ability to distill that problem in a way that effectively enables decisions. In a changing world filled with information and data, this approach can assist staffs in sorting through the clutter to help leaders understand what is most useful.