In his famous essay 'On The Psychology of Military Incompetence', Dr Norman Dixon sets out a series of aspects that appear with suspicious regularity in the management of history's great military disasters. These are Dixon's 14 points (it is clear that decalogues were not yet fashionable in 1976):
- A serious waste of manpower and a breach of one of the first principles of warfare: economy of force.
- A fundamental conservatism (clinging to outdated traditions and an inability to benefit from experience).
- A tendency to reject or ignore information that is indigestible or clashes with prejudices.
- Tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate one's own potential.
- Lack of decisiveness and tendency to abdicate the obligation to make decisions.
- A stubborn persistence in carrying out a certain task, despite the presence of decisive evidence to the contrary.
- Failure to exploit the possibilities offered by an advantageous situation.
- Lack of adequate recognition.
- Preference for frontal attacks, often directed against the enemy's strongest point.
- Faith in brute force.
- Lack of use of techniques such as surprise.
- Undue predisposition to find propitiatory victims for military setbacks.
- Suppression or distortion of news from the front, usually justified by the need to preserve morale or security.
- Belief in mythical forces, such as fate or bad luck.
If we do the exercise of stripping the list of its warlike connotations (something as simple as substituting enemy for competitor, military for commercial or front for market), we will obtain a valuable manual to avoid the behaviours that lead to disaster in our organisations. A manual for those who exercise leadership at the highest level and which, as far as communication is concerned, mentions two highly topical issues: the tendency to distort or suppress bad news and the tendency to reject or ignore information that clashes with our prejudices. The lesson is simple: the road to disaster is paved with valuable information which, regardless of all logic, we prefer to ignore in order to continue doing "what has always been done".
Luis Sala