Obama gave a really good, candid interview about the bin Laden operation on the May 8, 2011 60 Minutes program. I only bring it up because he said a couple of things in the interview that struck me as good reflections on solid leadership practices and the right approaches to team management and the role of planning when undertaking a complex project.
Photo by Joe Crimmings
Groupthink is always something one needs to worry about when running an organization (for example, I worry about how often my Amble team members won’t push back on my opinions given my position). Groupthink is even more common and likely when a small team has to work in isolation for security reasons, and when disobedience on the ground can be deadly, as with the team that organized the bin Laden killing. So I was fascinated to hear this exchange between President Obama and his interviewer, Steve Kroft (emphasis mine):
KROFT: I mean it’s been reported that there was some resistance from advisors and planners who disagreed with the commando raid approach. Was it difficult for you to overcome that? And what level of confidence did you have?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know one of the things that we’ve done here is to build a team that is collegial and where everybody speaks their mind. And there’s not a lot of snipin’ or back-biting after the fact. And what I’ve tried to do is make sure that every time I sit down in the situation room, every one of my advisors around there knows I expect them to give me their best assessments.
And so the fact that there were some who voiced doubts about this approach was invaluable, because it meant the plan was sharper, it meant that we had thought through all of our options, it meant that when I finally did make the decision, I was making it based on the very best information.
What a great example of using negative feedback constructively: having someone hold your feet to the fire will usually make the end result much better.
My second favorite exchange in the interview occurred around the halfway mark. Earlier in the interview, they had discussed how much planning had been done (they’d known about the compound since at least last August), including months of precise training and gaming out scenarios with a model of the compound. In light of that, this later exchange is a great example of one of my all-time favorite Eisenhower quotes: “Plans are useless. Planning is essential.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah. And we also knew when one of the helicopters went down in a way that wasn’t according to plan. And, as you might imagine that made us more tense.
KROFT: So it got off to a bad start?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it did not go exactly according to planned (sic), but this is exactly where all the work that had been done anticipating what might go wrong made a huge difference.
KROFT: There was a backup plan?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: There was a backup plan.
(Again, emphasis mine.)
Of course, I suspect they had multiple backup plans. Actually, I’ll quibble with Obama’s statement above: if you do enough planning and training, the notion of a “backup plan” starts to be less meaningful: you just have an intended course of action and the readiness and ability to improvise well when things don’t go as expected (which is always).
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