The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 7

bloodshed of that war. Lessons were drawn exclusively from the past. The past importance

of firepower and trench-warfare was transformed into expectations of how a future war would

be conducted; that was to be a war decided by the strength of fortifications and the extent of

the artillery fire against enemy infantry.

[Text Box starts] May: Why and what can be learned?

The fact that Germany could achieve such a complete surprise is, more than anything else, evidence

that in Germany, in 1937-40, even with Hitler as leader, the processes of executive judgement worked

better than in France or Britain. Or, to put it the other way around, however much more civilised their

judgements of values and objectives, leaders in France and Britain exhibited much less common

sense in appraising their circumstances and deciding what to do.

This is obviously not to say that the Germans showed greater wisdom – far from it. The basic

values that governed German choices were Hitler’s – mad cravings to gain land and glory, to

exterminate Jews, to enjoy a killing war. But neither do I mean to say only that Germany succeeded

while France failed. German processes of executive judgement – the ways in which the German

government decided how to act − worked better than did those in the French and British governments,

a truth Marc Bloch touched on when he commented in The Strange Defeat that the German victory

had been a “triumph of intellect” and observed in a letter to his sometime collaborator, Lucien Febvre,

that the victory owed much to Hitler’s “methodical opportunism”.

At any time, executive judgement involves answering three sets of questions: “What is going

on?”, “So What?” (or “What difference does it make?”); and “What is to be done?” The better the

process of executive judgement, the more it involves asking the questions again and again, not in the

set order, and testing the results until one finds a satisfactory answer to the third question – what to

do (which may be, of course, to do nothing).

The tests for “what is going on” include distinguishing what is actually known from what is

presumed to be true, then probing the strength and reliability of the presumptions. The test for action

choices also have additional questions: “Exactly what is to be done?” (What to do?” becomes “What

to do?”), “How will success or failure be recognizable?”, “Why is the particular action under

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