Introduction
Have you worked in a unit or organization that seemed very
short sighted? Where it felt like the command was only focused
on the here and now, never looking more than a week out. You
recall thinking that a majority of the members of the organization only worked on the current operation. As an analogy, it was
as if the unit functioned like a youth soccer team and everyone’s
myopic focus was the ball directly in front of them as they
collectively moved like a swarm of little bees. What is needed,
you thought, was to widen the command’s perspective, to look
deeper into the future, the way an advanced soccer team covers
the whole field. As such, the team that learns to work together
and anticipates achieves more victories.
Organizational change is difficult, as demonstrated through the
thousands of books available on the subject. This article is not
intended to offer more solutions to this complex challenge, but
it will show how one operational level command, United States
Army South, has taken steps to evolve, beyond its tendency to
swarm.1 This article explains how the command’s leaders began
to evaluate their security cooperation planning processes and
products by asking a few key questions such as: What are the
activities we are conducting?; What are the objectives of our
security cooperation plan?; How do we know our objectives are
correct?; What is our progress towards achieving our objectives?
The answers to these questions were deemed unsatisfactory. As
a result, senior leaders reallocated finite resources, and empowered the staff to make genuine changes to the security cooperation planning process. This article will show how empowering
subordinate leaders