I have an abiding interest, for some strange reason, in submarine operations. I have worked for decades with active and retired Air Force and Marine people, but never much with Navy personnel. Still, I find submarine operations fascinating, perhaps because they are so precarious (submariners are in constant danger – mistakes so often tend to be fatal), or perhaps because submarines face the daunting intellectual challenge of fighting in a battlefield in which they are largely blind, putting a premium on situational awareness and deductive inference.
The concept of “commander’s intent” is found elsewhere in the military, but never quite as prominently as in submarine operations. Watch YouTube videos of operations on current generation submarines and you will from time to time see the captain tell his entire control room crew “My intention is to ….”, before issuing the first orders to achieve that intent.
Why is this important? Because once everyone in the control room understands exactly what the commander is trying to achieve, they can use their own initiative to help him achieve that objective, and they now know what to warn him about immediately if something looks like it might impede achieving that objective.
This is a simple concept, but a very powerful one that many non-military endeavors could use profitably. Just issuing orders without giving the context - the commander’s intent - of those orders is inefficient, because subordinates have no way of using their own initiative help achieve that intent; they must just follow orders instead of functioning as a cohesive team. But it is far too often the way corporations and other operations function.
Submarines are immensely complex, and they can only operate if every member of the crew function as a team, because almost every member of the crew holds the lives of the rest of the crew in their hands, whether they are in the torpedo room, the reactor room, the environmental (oxygen generation) compartment, the (tiny) kitchen, or the control room. A mistake in almost any part of the submarine imperils everyone. That dependence forces the teamwork.
Lots of other endeavors, not so fraught with danger, would be much improved if everyone involved functioned as a team. But that requires the leader (the commander) to treat his subordinates as a team, to give them enough information about his/her intention and then to trust their initiative to help achieve that intent. This requires a submerging of ego that lots of leaders find hard to achieve. Too bad. It works wonderfully in submarines. It ought to get used more often elsewhere.
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