Army Sustainment VOLUME 46, ISSUE 5 | Page 6

THE BLIND SPOT Mission Command: Lies, Damned Lies, and Metrics  Dr. Christopher R. Paparone and George L. Topic Jr. By I n our past few columns, we discussed various aspects of mission command, particularly in the context of logistics. In this article we will discuss the issue of overreliance on metrics as a core tool for assessing readiness and overall effectiveness during operations. Although we understand the importance of performance measurement, we believe logisticians need to recognize that metrics are essentially control measures that may conflict with key tenets of mission command—particularly the need to encourage disciplined initiative. The complexities of shaping military operations coupled with the tenets of mission command will continue to make the quantitative management style challenging. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, written by Henry Mintzberg in 1994, offers an extensive discussion of the challenges of metrics, strategic plans, and control in general. Here we present a small sampling of his ideas on the use of hard data. The content below is paraphrased from the book and some context is added. Limited scope. Metrics are limited in scope, lacking the qualitative richness of understanding that a leader can gain by visiting operations and talking to those who work in the processes. Monitoring large-scale and complex supply chains through metrics may be akin to knowing what is happening in a soccer game by looking only at the scoreboard. Missing complexities. In a military context, one of the most famous examples from history of the effect of missing complexities was when, in the 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tried to measure victory 4 Army Sustainment in the Vietnam War, missing important complexities, ambiguities, and interpretations of what was happening. Over-aggregated data. Strategic control using macrolevel metrics is a theory worth criticizing. From a high-level headquarters perspective, data is often so aggregated that it becomes ineffective in helping to make strategic decisions. Small innovative changes in logistics processes can have amplified effects that cannot clearly register with macrolevel metrics. Data timeliness. Data timeliness is a universal challenge; untimely data constitutes historical information that confounds dec