McChrystal Doctrine

McChrystal Doctrine asks you to decide in advance who you will be on a bad day. That is the whole point of a doctrine.

A doctrine earns its keep on the worst day, not the best. Anyone can behave well when the sun is out and the boss is pleased. The doctrine is for the rainy Tuesday when nothing works.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Keep it like a good key: accessible, unlabelled, and used often.