Which One is Not Like the Others?

This week was a marathon of 13-hour days for me.  I've done longer and more stressful days and I know many of you have, but I've never before done consecutive 13-hour days making info papers, powerpoint briefs, and other products.  I'll not descend into a post-mortem of what led to the long days, but one can assume that a failure of management led to the crisis, adding another set of data points to the posts I've written on those topics.  At one point, nearly cross-eyed after turning in the last brief of an afternoon, I was discussing the finer points of just what bullet scheme was appropriate on a powerpoint slide with a retired lieutenant colonel, now contractor.  Well, really I was saying that the focus on such inanities was stupid.  The point I was making was that the reviewers of such products, paper graders, paid little attention to the substance of the products, only the superficialities.  I'm not talking about glaring errors, here, but very small details.  The retired lieutenant colonel said, "I used to feel the same way, but after I worked at PP&O I came to see that if there isn't attention to detail on the little things, the content is going to be off too."


I'll come back to that statement in a moment.  First, let's talk about the little things.  I'm amazed by the eyes of one of my paper graders.  He could spot a sentence with only one space after it at fifty yards.  On our raft of about 25 papers/products for a trip book this week, he was able to spot differences between similar products (e.g., in the transliteration of Arabic names) at a glance.  I get it.  Products for high level officials need to be flawless.  The frustration on the action officers' part was not so much with the demand for excellence as it was with the staff failures that let to this being an emergency rather than an iterative editorial process.  Also, I know (I hope) that once the superficialities were corrected, someone looked over the papers for content.  I never heard a word about content, though.  I'm hoping that this silence was because we focused on high quality content on a short timeline over the superficialities that were corrected by the system.

Back to the statement that forcing a focus on the little things forces a focus on content.  I thought about that for the rest of the day.  At face value, I rejected it.  I value the content of my ideas and my writing far more than I do the superficialities of formatting.  Substance over superficialities.  Not everyone has the same thought process.  They are less rigorous or perhaps have less of a background or interest in the topics they are working.  Or they are less intellectually attuned.  For these people, the knowledge of close paper grading based on attention to minute details of formatting, etc, are the stick that forces attention to detail on both substance and superficialities.

This got me to thinking about the raft of issues that I have with the inanities of military life.  I've had the same back and forth regarding attention to detail at the Marine Corps Gazette blog regarding whether attention to detail in junk-on-the-bunk inspections, uniform issues, and drill really impact our core mission of combat readiness and winning the nation's battles.  I maintain that attention to detail can be taught by focusing on what matters - battle drills, excellence in your specialty, quality in content in an information paper, etc.  Yet, I think I am missing something.  As a commenter on the Marine Corps Gazette blog wrote, maybe I am over-thinking this.

The Marine Corps, for all its propaganda about being small and lean, is a massive bureaucracy of over 200,000 active duty troops and who knows how many civilians and contractors.  Massive bureaucracies,  nonsense about centers of excellence notwithstanding, must produce a sufficient quality and consistency across their ranks.  They do not have the luxury of encouraging excellence in one division (here I mean business division generically, not a military division) and shutting failing divisions down.  Big bureaucracies must quality-spread.  The flip side of quality-spread is dumbing down or mediocracy.  We can't let all the high performers aggregate in the successful divisions with good leadership because we can't allow other arms to fail.  Thus, we must seek an average and standard level of performance.  We must utilize incentives and disincentives that encourage the average, or really the lowest common denominator, to perform to this standard.  In a few elite units, the high caliber of personnel means that they will relentlessly pursue pure excellence without paying any attention to the superficialities of traditional military discipline.  When you descend to the median or below, this simply won't be the case.  If you let a subpar soldier slip on inane standards, he'll slip on the standards that really matter in combat.  At the lowest common denominator, the pea-brained cannot distinguish between drill, hands in pockets, and parking on the grass on one hand, and battle drills, weapons proficiency and maintenance, and combat discipline on the other.  Those who don't have pride in their intellect will not put out quality content if you do not hold their feet to the fire on the superficialities as well.

This is why we have supervisors that can sniff out the differences in a set of products like a hound dog on a bone.  This is why our promotion boards won't elevate talent ahead of its time, nor will they select uniquely talented people who don't measure up on things like their photo or their PFT score.  Mediocracy sucks, but it is better than a force with peaks and valleys - units who are truly excellent on one hand and those that are mission failures on the other.  Different is bad in a large bureaucracy.  Additionally, this is why our military is tending toward centralization and standardization.  Yes, by taking initiative for training, administration, and evaluation out of the hands of the commander, you stifle the ability of the best to excel.  More importantly, you make it harder for the marginally competent to fail as he or she might if left to his/her own devices.

So, in my process of maturing as an officer in the Marine Corps, my views are coming around to reflect those of my seniors in the bureaucracy.  They said, somewhat condescendingly, that I'd understand once I grew up.  Well, I'm starting to understand.  I also understand that I do not want to become another neutered bureaucrat who upholds the standard of mediocracy and calls it excellence.  I do not want to be just another gray body in a cubicle.  I chafe, I rage against the standards that uphold an acceptable level of performance across a large bureaucracy.  This is not healthy.

A lot of articles have been written about how the military fails to retain and reward talent.  These articles, I'm coming to see, are rot.  In all honesty, I interact with some blindingly incompetent people on a daily basis, but I've also had the honor to work with and for truly talented and excellent officers, leaders, managers, and practitioners.  There are very talented officers who choose to remain in the service and buck the trend of mediocracy.  These talented officers tend to be placed in key billets, often in the operating forces.  Often, these officers must turn to the tools of enforcing inane standards in order to get the mediocre in their midst to perform.  The military retains plenty enough talent to keep the machine going at the required standard.  However, there are a good number of very talented people who reside far above the median line that are simply unable to happily conform to the norms and concepts required to maintain the standards of the large bureaucracy.  These people are going to leave the service and no reforms suitable to a large bureaucracy can be made to entice this population to stay in.  They are simply unsuited to work happily in such a beast.  They will go off to do other things and this is good both for them and for the service.  Like a missing space after a period or a text box that sits too close to the line under the title on a powerpoint slide, they are out of place and the right eye can spot them a mile away.  Either these individuals will eventually move themselves down five clicks and over five clicks and be modified with the right bullet scheme and font, or they'll delete themselves from the presentation altogether.