I once saw a panel of RAF commanders asked by a Staff College cohort what one thing they would like to change. I was surprised when the first panellist replied that they would wish to see more delegation of resources to avoid the frustration and delay of seeking approval up the chain of command and justify the most minor or vital of needs. I was less surprised that this was a priority than that it was their top priority over anything else worthy of improvement. I even thought it rather arrogant that a commander felt they had all the answers and could fix anything if only they, not their superiors, held the purse strings. Then, the next panellist agreed with their colleague, followed by the other two. Such unexpected unanimity made me think again.
I realised that the desire for resource delegation is a symptom of a problem far bigger and as old as hierarchical organisations, if not older. It may not be efficient or effective to salami-slice resources and delegate them piecemeal to local commanders. Still, it does avoid headquarters at all levels becoming ‘Handbrake House’ and either sitting on requests or just vetoing them. Multiply this effect by several levels in a deep hierarchy like ours, and getting things done can feel like fighting the tide.
It was a problem familiar to Bomber Harris,[1] as he explained once when interviewed:
‘I’ve been haunted all my life in the Service – and I always issue it as a warning to my successors – by the ease of saying “No”. And when you’re dealing with an organisation where a request from you goes up through half a dozen different bodies, any one of them, (to put it crudely, if he’s in a hurry to get out to lunch or something like that,) can put a “No” down.’
‘Basically, it’s the human fault of it’s easy to say “No” and the work is done. If you say “Yes”, you’ve got to do some work about it and people who are under great pressure, with a tremendous amount of work already on their shoulders, don’t easily adopt another spade full.’
Harris’s solution was not to delegate resources but to withhold delegation elsewhere:
‘I developed a habit in the Service and in my own Command, I always said ‘I’m the only fellow who can say “No”.’ I had to modify that because of the size of the Command, but I told the senior heads of the departments, ‘You can also say “No”, but you’d better come immediately to me and explain why you said it. And that, I think, eased a lot of pressure on the Groups’ commanders at the time.’
It’s so simple it’s brilliant; the more you think it through, the more brilliant it appears. Instead of ‘No’ being the zero-effort choice and ‘Yes’ requiring work, it levels the playing field, so neither is the soft option. Rather than wasting more senior time in the quest for approval, decisions to proceed can be made quickly at the lowest level, and only rejection entails escalation. The bias is thus toward action rather than inaction, with rapid approval, saving time and driving improvement at all levels, harnessing innovation. Yet, if there is a good reason to say ‘No’, this remains an option, subject to senior leader endorsement. By disempowering people to say ‘No’, we empower them to say ‘Yes’.
Three factors influence success when applying this principle:
The benefit gained is proportional to the seniority of the person who can say ‘No’. Left of arc, if superiors at each level can say ‘No’, the status quo is maintained, and there is a strong retarding effect on any request. Right of arc, if the most senior commander is the only one empowered to say ‘No’, almost every request should be actioned quickly, the only delay being to requests that will likely be rejected anyway.
Trust is a vital enabler and works up and down the command chain. While we still teach the doctrine of Mission Command, its application is variable, especially in ‘business as usual’ work rather than in operations. That doctrine stresses the need for subordinates to understand their commanders’ intent both one and two levels up, but equally important is that commanders know their people well enough to trust and empower them. Just as Sun Tzu recognised the importance of ‘knowing yourself’, Harris valued his ‘brilliant’ deputies, whose thinking he understood and felt comfortable empowering because he trusted their judgement. Speaking later in that same interview about his deputy, Robert Saundby, Harris noted that:
‘I could absolutely rely on him to do either what I said should be done or what he knew I would want done.
‘Just by luck, Saundby was one of my Flight Commanders in Mespot in the early 1920s, Ralph Cochrane was the other Flight Commander. I was very lucky to have them both because they knew my ideas and I knew theirs.’
Trust is underpinned by professional expertise so that decision-makers appreciate the need for what is being requested and the opportunity cost of rejecting a request. As Harris put it:
‘He’s got to [understand] what goes on in the works, otherwise he’ll very easily drop spanners into it.’
While Harris was speaking in 1977 and had tried to keep up with developments, it’s tempting to see his advice as the product of wartime conditions, where resources were no object and risk appetite was higher. Not so, as he recalls:
‘I’ve had so many in peacetime, Good Lord, simple little things that were essential: ‘No, no, no’. It was like pushing at a cotton wool curtain.
He tells of a time when he was refused authority to order some big butterfly nuts to stop the throttles vibrating closed on his Virginias. Each nut cost but half a crown, yet he was denied. He cited this at his annual inspection as an example of bureaucratic ‘drag’ and was told he would get his butterfly nuts. At this point, he admitted that he already had them, having ordered them himself!
This reminds me of the adage that it is better to act now and seek forgiveness later than to wait on prior approval and highlights two important truths: that explaining the problem to the person empowered to decide can yield results and that local initiatives can solve the problem more quickly if the local commander is suitably empowered. Both argue that senior commanders should disempower their teams to say ‘No’ and empower them to say ‘Yes’. It is surely better to create policies and processes that support effective ways of working than to force people to circumvent procedures if they are to succeed.
The tyranny of ‘No’ is alive and well today, which is hardly surprising as it stems from an aspect of human psychology that is deeply ingrained and unlikely to change. As we aim to be more agile and innovative, we need to minimise the friction that hierarchy imparts to our decision-making and release the potential of all our people by empowering them to say ‘Yes’ by default and ‘No’ by exception. I think Bomber Harris was on to something good that is overdue for a revival. I invite you to imagine how different things would be if hierarchical organisations operated according to his model.