Last week, Autogram’s Jeff Eaton gave a keynote speech at Confab titled Content doctrine: Bridging the gap between strategy and tactics. The talk identifies a terminological gap in how we talk about teams making decisions. It also highlights a significant problem for people at organizations who haven’t articulated the principles that guide those decisions — or, as Jeff says, their “beliefs about how things work and why.”
Jeff’s positioning of strategy and tactics as unified by a third body called doctrine comes from studying the military, how it works, and how it thinks about how it works. The military might be the field that’s thought longest, hardest, and most publicly about the strategy/tactics divide and how to standardize its own operations.
This is what doctrine is: the shared principles and terminology that organize the tactics, techniques, and procedures we use every day. It’s an organization’s worldview of how it works and the fields it operates in. It’s what doesn’t change even when strategies, tactics, tools, and operations get rethought or refined. But it’s also ideally in a constant feedback loop with those on-the-ground decisions and data points, refining them based on successes and failures.
You don’t need to wade into Sun Tzu, US Army manuals, or the minutiae of Soviet tanks to see the idea of doctrine at work. Other parts of the business world, like logistics or manufacturing, also think about their practices in terms of doctrines. (Besides, as Jeff says, military research is also what gave us Cheetos and the McRib sandwich. It may extract huge amounts of capital for death and destruction, but it’s only fair that we cherry-pick its very best ideas.)
“This really came from trying to figure out why smart people and teams who made what seemed like the right decisions at the time would have their successes reversed a few years later,” said Jeff. Sometimes management or personnel changes or moves on to new projects, and institutional memory is lost. Or pieces of it might be documented (design guidelines, a style guide, marketing principles, legal requirements for financial disclosures) but aren’t integrated with each other. A company might understand its own practices better than its customers’ or competitors’, or vice versa.
Too often, new teams don’t understand why their predecessors made their decisions, because their underlying assumptions or necessary constrictions had never been shared, aligned, and documented across the organization. And doctrine that hasn’t been formulated explicitly is harder to match with new strategy, tactics, and operations, or to change for new conditions on the ground.
Jeff notes that the larger an organization gets, the more these problems compound. Established companies have more history to catch up on, and fast-growing ones can no longer count on being able to easily bring everyone together to establish consensus.
Finally, with a distributed global workforce, parts of which may be hybrid or fully remote, organizations can’t count on a single shared workplace where their principles and practices can be taught, either directly by peers or through osmosis. Digital technology can change how employees or contractors are brought in, onboarded, and shown the ropes, but this requires different toolkits and for implicit indoctrination to be made more explicit.
“A lot of organizations that reacted vigorously against remote work did it because they discovered they couldn’t pass on their doctrine in the ways they were used to,” says Jeff. “The idea that [company culture] will be communicated and passed on informally outside of officially documented channels, turns out to be a bad assumption.”
In many ways, today’s new technologies and patterns of working together echo the transformations that led modern armies and navies to codify their doctrines and create a professional military: new kinds of media literacy, global reach, and a need for new context-dependent approaches to old problems.
Luckily, much of the work of content strategists and information architects, from documenting standards and procedures, intervening early in the processes of redesigns or replatformings, and bringing together different stakeholders in alignment, already touches on the work of establishing content doctrine. It just needs to operate in an expanded field.
“I hate carving out new terms for things because there are a million of them, but I also believe that naming something makes space for it,” says Jeff. “That’s what ‘content strategy’ did for a whole generation of us, and I think the need for this particular discipline is becoming just as apparent.”
“Doctrine matters, because the principles and assumptions that shape our decisions need to be preserved,” he adds. “So we can coordinate around them, so we can pass them on to others, and so we can quickly recognize when the world has changed around us.”
This isn’t just a theoretical intervention: one of Autogram’s specialized workshops helps organizations align their institutional doctrine with their strategic and tactical goals and daily operations. It’s particularly useful for organizations considering a redesign or replatforming, and especially those who are shifting to a hybrid or remote workforce and need to rethink their onboarding processes or intranet. This workshop can be done remotely, onsite, or at a company meeting or retreat.
PS: Slides for Jeff’s Confab keynote are available here, and a full transcript will be available in a future newsletter.
Articles and Announcements
Strategy, Tactics, Operations and Doctrine: A decision-language tutorial, by Venkatesh Rao
Strategies are imagined stories about possible worlds, whose constraints are determined by elements of doctrine, and whose vocabulary is determined by available tactics. Converting those stories into reality through appropriate mixes of deliberative, reactive and opportunistic planning, scheduling, resource allocation and risk management, in the fog of action, is the discipline of operations.
Interhooking, interlocking, nonmaterial, by Erin Kissane
The Nature of Order, [Christopher] Alexander’s four-volume grand unified theory, comes in at a bit more than 2,000 pages, and although I love it, I’m not going to try to summarize it. Instead, I want to glancingly look at what Alexander calls, near the end of his career, “The Fundamental Differentiating Process.” I will horrifically oversimplify this process as 1) Make a thing (or fix a thing that’s weak) by applying one of a series of 15 transformations designed to differentiate and strengthen both the part and the broader whole, 2) run up and down and across the system looking for trouble, 3) adjust as needed, 4) repeat. It’s systems design, obviously—and algorithmic, as Dorian Taylor notes—but Alexander’s mode is specifically tied to his sense of the revelation and strengthening of a latent order that unfolds, as in the natural world.
How an agency principal should oversee a major custom software project, by Waldo Jacquith
If a state unemployment agency’s UI system doesn’t work, in what sense are they a UI agency? If a state’s EBT system goes down, in what sense do they provide SNAP benefits? If the IRS’s Individual Master File crashes, in what sense are they a taxation agency? Load-bearing software must work for agencies to achieve their missions. And yet, under the standard outsourcing paradigm, agencies outsource every aspect of the construction, maintenance, enhancement, support, and hosting of this software. In doing so, they outsource their mission. This is a terrifically dangerous practice.