It wasn’t, in any sense, a planning system, acting slowly on stale and summarized information. Instead, it acted fast on current, raw, and detailed information. The RAF’s force multiplier was an intelligence system.

Military Misfortunes reports, “In the eighteen months before the creation of the Tenth Fleet, the U.S. Navy sank thirty-six U-boats. In the six months after, it sank seventy-five.

RICHARD RUMELT – GOOD STRATEGY, BAD STRATEGY

“Nelson’s challenge was that he was outnumbered. His strategy was to risk his lead ships in order to break the coherence of his enemy’s fleet. With coherence lost, he judged, the more experienced English captains would come out on top in the ensuing melee. Good strategy almost always looks this simple and obvious and does not take a thick deck of PowerPoint slides to explain.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robinson (Penguin Business, 2021) is also an enthralling history of a massive accountability sink. I learned a huge amount from Gill Kernick’s Catastrophe and Systematic Change: Learning from Grenfell (London Publishing Partnership, 2021) about another case study in which interlocking systems combined to create a tragedy that couldn’t systematically be pinned on any single organisation, let alone an individual.

What’s incredible is how he didn’t do it. He didn’t fire or demote anyone. He didn’t change the hierarchy. He didn’t change any technology. The only real change was within himself. He started to identify his potential blind spots, and to look at the world from the crew’s perspective.

Abrashoff observed one of the ship’s usual Sunday afternoon cookouts shortly after assuming command, and noticed a long line of sailors waiting to get their lunch while officers cut to the head of the line to get their food. Not only that, but after getting their food, the officers went to a private deck to eat apart from the sailors.