Bounding Overwatch: Thoughts for navigating the uncertain fog of rapid and continuous change
Businesses that want to successfully navigate this increasingly chaotic world can benefit from a widely known military maneuver called bounding overwatch.
What is Bounding Overwatch?
Bounding overwatch is a movement technique employed by military units when enemy contact is expected. One sector of the unit becomes the Bounding Element while the second takes the role of the Overwatch. The Overwatch suppresses enemy fire while the Bounding Element moves towards its objective. Once the Bounding Element can find adequate cover, it then becomes the Overwatch, and the other element takes the role of the Bounding Element. It is essentially a leap-frogging technique used to reach the objective while minimizing casualties.
How does today’s market environment resemble the fog of war?
Markets today face an unprecedented amount of change defined by extremely high rates of uncertainty. Uncertainty, complexity, and change are increasing at faster rates across all sectors of industry, society, and government.
Likewise, war is very chaotic, uncertain, and unpredictable. The Fog of War is a simple term that describes the uncertainty experienced in the chaos of war. Military leaders have been contending with it for millennia. To quote Carl von Clausewitz, war is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.
Business leaders can also expect to experience the Fog of War.
I have experienced the fog of war firsthand, both in combat and in the trenches of driving horizon two and three innovations in legacy commercial and government enterprises. It is among the most difficult experiences a leader and an organization can encounter.
Organizations that not only succeed despite the fog of war, might appear as stalwarts, but they had their share of organizational pain and bruising. Those who fail do so, not because of a lack of desire or inadequate management, but because they suffer from the very real innovator’s dilemma. They find it difficult to counteract the inertia of the immediate and short-term. This becomes more pronounced in a time of crisis such as a recession when survival and salvaging shareholder value and any profit becomes paramount. For the enterprise that has not prepared to bound by exploring new business models, and rehearsing the future, it becomes impossible to do so as it’s all hands on deck to address the crisis. Without a bounding element that is focused on the future, the enterprise is engaged in a stalemate, fighting for survival rather than having set the conditions to thrive. Hence why Bounding Overwatch should be employed by enterprises to manage the fog of war in the marketplace.
How Bounding and Overwatch Can Reduce the Fog of War in the Marketplace.
In a period of rapid and continuous change, established enterprises can expect to make frequent contact with unforeseen competitors or disruptive forces (pandemic, economic crisis, etc.). This is where their business strategies would benefit from a bounding overwatch approach.
The legacy part of the company’s portfolio must continue to resiliently perform and deliver revenue (provide overwatch in the market, keep the competition engaged in legacy activities), while select portions of the company’s portfolio bounds into future and new business models. They must work in conjunction and in a synchronous manner to ensure present and future market leadership.
This is another way of describing what O’Reilly and Tush labeled as the ambidextrous organization, skilled at exploiting the present and exploring the future.
How does it do this? The core of the business is the overwatch element that keeps competitors engaged in market share competition by driving operations innovation that delivers the same value at lower costs, higher efficiencies, or enhanced customer experiences. In the meantime, the company must deploy a bounding element with dedicated resources to discover new business models and scout the future to drive future top-line growth. This group serves to both move the enterprise forward but also outflank the competition.
Like in a military unit, no one element is less or more important, both serve the function of delivering present and future market leadership. The element that bounds (using McKenzie’s three horizons) is focused on Horizon Two and Three business models, but when these innovative business models reach maturity, they become Horizon One and assume the overwatch role. A new element is then deployed to bound forward.
What is the doctrine that should govern market leadership in highly uncertain environments (the Fog of War)?
This doctrine is one that is characterized by Strategic Design, Systems Thinking, Foresight Development through Scenario Planning, Lean Experimentation, and Agile Practices. However, these practices must mature beyond product development and be coherently synchronized into strategy development and execution. These practices must become the core competencies of the bounding element.
Let me break down how these core competencies work together to enable bounding maneuvers. The core of Strategic Design is to simplify the complex, solve “wicked problems,” and uncover unseen and emerging needs that yield new value propositions needed to thrive in a changing future.
These value propositions arise in ever-changing and increasingly complex ecosystems where parts must be understood in the context of the whole. System Thinking allows managers to assess the entire system in which their business operates. Focusing on one part alone with assumptions grounded in the present can be catastrophic.
While Systems Thinking allows for understanding the part in light of the whole, Scenario Planning creates plausible futures that might arise from external and uncertain forces directly affecting the business ecosystem. These futures enable decision-makers to test the most sacred of business assumptions and expand decision-makers’ thinking to new possibilities. It allows them to Develop Foresight and stress test decisions across various scenarios, and asses the plausible second and third-order effects of those decisions across the ecosystem.
Lean Experimentation at the strategic level gives enterprises the malleability needed to learn fast and make strategic pivots that will deliver on their vision. The overall goal of Lean Experimentation is to test your business’ riskiest assumptions early and with just enough investment to determine if the market wants what you intend to offer. It allows you to rapidly fail and make necessary pivots based on empirical evidence.
For its part, Agile gives the enterprise the tactics for building and iterating faster than the rate of change. It allows you to rapidly build working software and change based on what you learn from your lean experiments.
All these practices synchronized and mastered by the bounding portion of the enterprise give managers the ability to successfully navigate accelerating rates of change into the future. Like military leaders who will never eliminate the fog of war, these practices will give business leaders the discriminating judgment and skilled intelligence to navigate the uncertainty to more positive business outcomes.