Heart of the Art

I was fortunate to be trained in leadership for a year at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Towards the end, I was allowed to run the ‘enemy’ in key exercises. I rather enjoyed it; I found I had a natural capacity for subverting the system, running rings round stronger forces, stressing their infrastructure. I have often wondered whether I wouldn’t have done rather better on the ‘dark side’.

In conversation with Myron Rogers we have explored the nature of insurrection as a process for change. He pointed me at 'The Insurgents' by Fred Kaplan.

Kaplan charts the course of General Petraus and the US experience of fighting in a counter-insurgency war. Interestingly he points out how Petraus was forced to become an insurgent within the US military and political systems in order to change doctrine.

I am struck with the parallels between an insurgency and an epidemic. How they are in their early stages quite intangible, how sporadic outbreaks link up, crippling the infrastructure. How they spread rapidly through infecting key nodes. You can also compare this with the populist The Tipping Point by Gladwell.  I am also struck how at their moment of success they are most at risk of complete failure. How the insurgent becomes the state. The disease kills the body.

I often think of change in large organisations as like an insurgency. Planned, managed, top-down change simply reinforces the existing power dynamic. If you want to change the culture, you need to change the way you change. Smart CEs often realise that for all their positional power, the institutional culture is too strong, too embedded, too used to dealing with upstart CEs who won’t be around long enough to really make anything stick.

So instead what might be the manifesto of an insurgency style change? Here are some things that you might want to consider.

• Never fight a fixed battle against a superior force
• Concentrate your energy on carefully chosen weak spots
• Infect agents with your beliefs and values to act on your behalf
• Capture the hearts and minds of the population
• Do not attempt to hold ground
• Stay fleet of foot, constantly changing the point of attack
• Own the story, stay positive, leave others forced to repudiate
• Have no respect for pre-existing borders
• Weaken the infrastructure that maintains the status quo
• Know the landscape better than anyone