On the front in Ukraine, the lines are constantly changing. Local commanders have a tactic they rely on in these situations. Rather than relying on extensive upfront maps and detailed plans from generals, considerable autonomy is given to these local commanders. There are a lot of unknowns—you can gather intelligence, yes, but there’s always a rate at which that intelligence is wrong.

How do you act and take territory with incomplete and ever-changing information?

Recon-In-Force

It’s actually pretty simple. You combine your reconnaissance efforts with an actual attack. You go scout ahead, and you do so with enough force to actually probe enemy defenses. In this way, you not only see where the enemy is, but you also see where they are weak.

Recon-In-Force isn’t a new idea. But it is a very valuable idea.

It:

• eschews top-down planning

• can react instantly to new information

• can operate on incomplete or incorrect information

It’s fast, and it moves at the speed of war.

Business is harder, though, right? 😬 

It’s too bad entrepreneurs, senior leaders, and front-line managers can’t learn anything from this. Battlefield strategy and what happens in the boardroom are nothing alike, right?

Except there is an equivalent strategy in business. And you’ve been told to use it, and you probably don’t.

Minimal Viable Product.

You don’t really know what the market wants. You can conduct surveys and focus groups, but they can be noisy. And customers may not always know what they want, especially until they see it.

Sound familiar? This sounds like the fog-of-war intelligence situation we heard about above. Ever-changing situations, noisy data. How do you act?

Drone flyovers and satellite imagery help. But eventually, you have to go out there and discover for yourself. You do this by trying some actual tanks and infantry fighting vehicles for this recon. In product terms, you actually try to build a thing. But you’re using that thing as a measure—not necessarily a play!

We see with an MVP whether or not there is a product-market fit at all, and if there is, if there’s a path to scalability. This hits both sides of our SWOT—is the opportunity there? Can we build on or leverage our current strengths to capitalize on that opportunity? That’s what MVPs are about.

MVPs are Recon-In-Force.

So, why don’t they work?

With Recon-In-Force, two very, very important things happen.

First, if there’s resistance, the recon unit disengages and retreats.

Second, if there’s a breakthrough, the recon unit is reinforced.

In other words, local commanders have an actual strike force waiting in reserve and will use that to pour through the opening in enemy lines. The recon unit is not expected to go out there and fight on its own.

Leaders attempting to use the MVP pattern in their businesses fail on both counts.

Failure to Disengage

First, most MVP attempts should be expected to fail. Similar to Recon-In-Force. Our recon units return, re-arm, and head back out to another location. So why don’t our MVPs?

Instead, most MVP attempts become zombie projects. There is no breakthrough; we either continue to probe in the same direction or change direction, but still insist that the dev teams maintain the MVP forever.

Basically, no one bought the thing. Yet we still have to maintain it, forever, despite revenue not coming in to support it. If we abandon it, wouldn't that be a waste?

Alternatively, someone’s ego gets in the way. So we have to maintain it forever because we can’t let the VP of Fucking Up get his feelings hurt and find out his idea of sardine-flavored ice cream was a bad idea.

Another kind of failure is when there is no breakthrough, yet it’s reinforced anyway. When this happens, you see no product market fit, but people will massage the numbers or narrative until the failure to find that fit is reframed as a success, and so more company resources are poured into a front that will never break through.

In all these kinds of failure of the first kind, the fix is always the same: if there is no breakthrough, disengage. Do not waste resources attacking a front that’s well defended. I know, real Sun Tzu shit, huh?

Failure to Reinforce

When our MVP team strikes gold, but we can’t take advantage of that, there’s nearly always one central cause: there’s nothing left to send as reinforcements.

Unlike our failure to disengage, which can have multiple causes from ego to the sunk cost fallacy, the failure to reinforce comes from a single cause: managing for utilization over results.

We’ve talked about this in Zone 3 Management—managers confuse their role from getting results to just making sure they spend their entire budget. They keep no reserve, so when an opportunity shows up, they have no one to send.

We talked about how Recon-In-Force isn’t a top-down approach. Local commanders can make decisions. But when it comes to reaching deep for reinforcements, they need to be able to call on their own command chains. In business, it’s often the reverse: top leaders see lower-level leaders as resources to “keep busy,” rather than giving them goals and then hearing from those lower-level leaders what they need to win.

What this looks like on the battlefield is instead of a commander keeping anything in reserve, he commits his entire force to “probing” the front line. But without anyone to take advantage of a break in enemy lines, this isn’t Recon-In-Force at all. This is just a wild, unfocused attack on all fronts. It’s destined to exhaust your forces, gain no ground, and get a lot of your guys killed.

Similarly, when managers say MVP, but they’re chasing a dozen “MVPs” with no plan on how to exploit them, they aren’t doing an MVP. They’re just doing poorly planned, poorly focused “everything/me-too” products. The senior leaders haven’t decided where to attack, and either an indecisive strongman or a committee of cowards has gotten together and decided to pursue all the ideas, like that makes them geniuses.

But Business is Hard 😭

(Cue sobbing noises from Private Equity Bois who got confused when a decade of zero percent interest rates tricked them into thinking they had real talent…)

No, business is not hard. You won’t die if you lose. You won’t become subjugated if you lose. War is hard. You’re going to get killed on the battlefield, die tortured in prison, or have your rights and family torn apart by authoritarian goons.

It’s because of this that the military focuses very strongly on what fucking works. They don’t have the huge error margins in business that we do, where we get time to pamper our egos when a rising tide lifts our boat.

War is basically an evolution of systems, processes, and strategy writ large. Literally, only the strong survive. Finding methods and tactics from there is a great way to find something that sure as shit works.

MVPs don’t fail because business is harder than war. They fail because our Peter Principle’d managers are softer and more entitled than battle-hardened veteran officers. They lack the discipline to follow through or the humility to admit they could learn something from someone else.

After all, isn’t it all those developers and product people who are lazing around in their home offices, not working, that’s to blame for why my brilliant genius product idea failed for the 19th time? Perhaps the real solution is a return-to-office, allowing me to personally supervise them as they struggle to understand my completely ambiguous Jira ticket?

Take Aways

In an ever-changing atmosphere where your information is either wrong, noisy, or out of date, there are still ways to succeed.

In the military, one of these tactics is called “Recon-In-Force,” which probes not only where the enemy is, but where his weaknesses are.

The equivalent business tactic is the “Minimal Viable Product,” which probes product-market fit similarly.

Most attempts to roll out the MVP tactic fail because managers fail to disengage when their MVP fails, and fail to pursue any opportunities the MVP may expose.

To avoid this, have clear exit conditions for your MVPs. Make them blameless. Do not “blame the troops” when they don’t break through. Blame the enemy defenses.

Manage for results and reserve. No, people don’t need just to be standing around. But you need a system of easily interruptable support work (like tech debt, minor process improvements, etc.) that your people can work on when they have downtime to reduce pressure on you to keep them busy with things all the time.