The world’s best StarCraft players (a real-time strategy video game) can issue 600+ actions per minute (APM).

The commands: move, split, attack, hold, retreat, scout, mine, repair, and more.

With a push of a button they control their units with an uninterrupted stream of precise instructions. All the while keeping an eye on the minimap, building new infrastructures, or researching upgrades.

They are athletes of micromanagement.

But Starcraft caps the number of units that players can control at 200, because micromanagement doesn’t scale.

The limits of top-down control

In the real world, leaders can’t micromanage individual soldiers or teams. They can’t see everything. They can’t issue real-time orders to direct every action in the fog of war.

Napoleon made all major strategic decisions himself. He said “I alone know what I have to do“. But even he recognized the need for initiative taking and autonomy in service of speed and adaptability.

One of his major innovations was to divide his army into “Corps d’Armée”: permanent, self-sufficient mini-armies, containing all arms of service (infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers, and a staff) that operated semi-autonomously within a clear set of guidelines and in service of the “commander’s intent”.

That’s what allowed Napoleon’s Grande Armée, 650,000+ men strong at its peak, to “march divided and fight united“.

Note: this reminds me of Spotify’s famous “loosely coupled, but tightly aligned teams” model.

Napoleon achieved unrivaled levels of success on the battlefield at the time, often at the expense of the Prussians.

Those defeats forced the Prussians to question their rigid, top-down command style (Befehlstaktik, or command-type tactics). It was too slow to cope with what they described as the “high tempo and flexibility” of Napoleon’s forces.

In order to beat Napoleon, the Prussians needed a system that would enable them to match the French’ s speed and counter the “individual genius” of Napoleon

That’s how Auftragstaktik (mission tactics), which later evolved into ‘Mission Command’, was born.

‘Mission Command’ is the alternative that works

‘Mission command’ was created to solve the problem of speed and complexity in warfare.

It was born from the realization that top-down control fails when armies (or companies) become too large and the battlefield too chaotic for leaders to manage every detail.

It acknowledges that in any operation, unexpected opportunities and threats rapidly appear, requiring responsibility and decision making at the point of action so that those closest to the problem can operate at the ‘speed of the problem’.

‘Mission command’ is a relatively old concept, but its principles only get more relevant as our world gets more complex and fast paced.

Don’t take my word for it, listen to 4-star general General McChrystal who led the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) against Al‑Qaeda in Iraq and later U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In his book, “Team of Teams”, McChrystal explains that when he took over JSOC in Iraq, they were losing to AQI despite better people, money, and technology. The battlefield was too interconnected and dynamic for traditional command‑and‑control. Linear planning and rigid control didn’t work.

They went from ‘losing’ to ‘winning’ only after transforming JSOC’s operating model. One that optimized for adaptability and speed, instead of efficiency.

He turned JSOC into an adaptive network of cross-functional teams.

His teams operated with high context and clear strategic intent within explicit boundaries. They could sense and respond as fast as the situation evolved on the ground.

Before: analysts in the US had intelligence but couldn’t act. Operators in Iraq could act but lacked intelligence. Both waited for information to flow through approval chains.

After: daily 90-minute video calls linked thousands of people across agencies. Analysts embedded with operators. Intelligence flowed horizontally, not just vertically.

That’s Mission Command in action: strategic context everywhere, decisions at the point of action.

And McChrystal accomplishments speak for themselves. He oversaw the capture of Saddam Hussein and the operation that killed Abu Musab al‑Zarqawi, the leader of Al‑Qaeda in Iraq.

What ‘Mission Command’ actually is

Mission Command brings two core principles together: clearly communicated commander’s intent and decentralized execution.

1. Commander’s Intent

Before any operation, leaders articulate what needs to be accomplished and why it matters. But not how to do it. This is the “commander’s intent”: the purpose of the mission and the desired end state.

In military terms: “Secure the bridge to enable the main force to cross and continue the advance.”

Not: “First platoon moves left, second platoon provides covering fire at 0400, third platoon...”

The intent gives subordinates the context to make decisions when plans inevitably fall apart. When the enemy doesn’t behave as expected, when communications fail, when the bridge is more heavily defended than intelligence suggested.

Because plans always fall apart.

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” - Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke.

I like Myke Tyson’s version more.

Clear commander’s intent describes what success looks like and why it matters without telling how to achieve the outcome.

It is a pre-requisite that enables decentralized execution.

2. Decentralized Execution

This means pushing authority down to those closest to the action.

Subordinates are not just permitted to take initiatives, they are expected to make decisions, and act without waiting for orders from above.

L. David Marquet, the retired United States Navy captain and author of “Turn the Ship Around!” says it best: “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information”.

He implemented this idea through the “I intend to...” phrase, where crew members stated their intended actions rather than waiting for orders.

Decentralized execution isn’t chaos. It’s ‘disciplined initiative’ within clear boundaries, including:

• Rules of engagement: The non-negotiables on how we operate

• Resource constraints: What we have to work with (budget, headcount, tech, equipment)

• Coordination requirements with adjacent units: How we work and sync with other teams

Within those boundaries, leaders at every level have the authority and responsibility to figure out how to accomplish the mission.

The Critical Difference

Traditional top-down control says: “Here’s what to do. Do it exactly this way.”

‘Mission Command’ says: “Here’s what we need to achieve and why. You figure out how, within these boundaries.”

The first optimizes for compliance and efficiency.

• It assumes the person giving orders has the best information.

• It works well in stable, predictable environments

• But breaks down when circumstances change, and plans become obsolete.

The second optimizes for speed and effectiveness.

• It assumes the person closest to the problem has the best information.

• When plans fail, people adapt, decisions get made, things get done.

• And collective actions remain coherent because everyone knows the big picture.

Why ‘Mission Command’ works at scale

Mission Command isn’t just a feel-good philosophy about empowerment. It’s about not losing to the enemy/competitors who move faster than your approval chain.

And it works because it solves three fundamental problems that plague command-and-control organizations:

• Information asymmetry

• Speed (or lack thereof)

• Cognitive overload

Problem 1: Information asymmetry

The person at the top has the best view of the overall strategy. But the person on the ground has the best view of the tactical reality.

In traditional hierarchies, we try to solve this by pushing information up (reports, dashboards, status meetings) so leaders can make informed decisions, then pushing decisions back down.

But Information loses fidelity as it travels up the chain. Details get filtered, context gets lost (or worse, manipulated), nuance disappears.

It’s the corporate version of the telephone game, except the stakes are higher than getting the phrase wrong. And by the time a decision comes back down, the situation has often changed.

With ‘Mission Command’, leaders push strategic context down, instead of pulling tactical information up,

Problem 2: Speed

Modern warfare, and modern business, move faster than hierarchical approval chains.

If every decision needs to go up three levels (or more), to get reviewed, discussed, and approved, before coming back down, you’re always reacting to yesterday’s reality.

By the time you respond to a situation, it’s already evolved.

Mission Command solves this by collapsing decision-making to the point of action. The team that sees the problem has the context and authority to solve it. It can move at the ‘speed of the problem’.

Problem 3: Cognitive overload

There’s a limit to how much complexity one person can process.

Top-down control tries to solve this by creating information silos and adding management layers to coordinate between silos. But this creates communication overhead, slows decisions, and distances leadership from reality.

Mission Command distributes cognitive load.

Instead of one brain trying to process everything, you have hundreds of brains processing in parallel, each empowered to act on the information they have within clear boundaries.

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The leader’s job isn’t to make every decision. It’s to create the context that enables good decisions everywhere.

With ‘Mission Command’ leaders don’t give up control. They control indirectly through shared context instead of directly through top-down commands.

This is why mission command performs better in complex, fast-moving environments.

How to apply ‘Mission Command’ in your organization

‘Mission Command’ sounds good. But how do you actually implement this in business?

First, let’s be honest: business isn’t war (most of the time).

From winning a war to thriving in the infinite game of business

Armies try to win a war or a battle. That’s a finite game. Even the Hundred Years’ War between England and France eventually ended.

But companies are playing the infinite game of business. There is no final victory, no end date, just the need to keep playing, adapting, and thriving quarter after quarter.

This changes how you implement the principles of ‘Mission Command’.

In battle, the commander’s intent might last hours, days or weeks. In business, your strategic context must persist and evolve across quarters and years.

In business, communicating clear strategic intent and enabling decentralized execution is more than leadership or communication problem.

We need to go beyond documents and presentations.

It’s a context infrastructure problem.

Building an organizational context infrastructure

Teams need a system that gives them continuous access to the shared context they need to make good decisions.

Imagine it’s 4pm on Friday. A customer calls with an urgent request. Can your team answer these questions without scheduling a meeting?

• Can I say yes to this?

• Should I prioritize this over what I’m doing?

• Who needs to know?

• What happens if I’m wrong?

In practice yes when they have clarity on these five fundamental questions:

1. Why do we exist? Our purpose in terms of customer and business outcomes. Who we serve, what problems we solve for them, what business impact we are expected to generate.

2. How do we know we’re winning? The metrics that define success. What we optimize for.

3. What should we prioritize now? Our goals with time horizons, written in a way that we can say “yes, it’s done!”. Goals can flow down from the top (vertical goal setting), or emerge in response to customer needs and priorities (horizontal goal setting).

4. What do we own? The services we provide, resources under our care, and decisions we have authority to make.

5. What are our boundaries? The constraints and guidelines (e.g. technical, legal, brand, security) we must operate within.

The answers to these questions already naturally emerge in conversations, interactions and negotiations that you have every day in your organization.

What is usually missing to turn all those conversations into structured context is a system that everyone has access to and can easily update

Organizations can apply the principles of ‘Mission Command’ when they make the organizational context:

• Searchable within a single source of truth.

• Accessible to everyone.

• Written in a shared language. (e.g. a goal, or a resource means the same thing for everyone).

• Linked together so the dependencies between teams become visible and explicit.

Here is an example of what it could look like in practice for a Data Engineering team:

Common mistakes to avoid

Announce “we’re empowered now” and expect teams to figure it out.

Without structured context, you get confusion, not autonomy. Teams don’t know what decisions they can make, what standards to follow, or how their work connects to the bigger picture.

The other trap: creating elaborate context documents that nobody reads. The context becomes a thing you did once at an offsite, not a living system that guides daily decisions.

Start small, then scale.

Start with one team. Document their five context questions. Make it accessible. Use it and refine it in every following alignment conversation, to turn words pronounced into a meeting into structured context.

Then expand: two teams, then five, then ten. Don’t try to do all teams at once. Build the habit before you scale the system.

Within a quarter, you’ll have a living map of how your organization actually works. Within two quarters, teams use it to coordinate without leadership involvement.

Within a year, your operating system has become one of your main competitive advantages.

It’s hard, but worth the effort

Building this infrastructure takes discipline, time, and a commitment to changing how leadership works.

But the payoffs are massive.

You stop being the bottleneck. Right now, how many decisions are waiting on you? How many meetings are you in just to give permission? With Mission Command, teams make those decisions themselves. Faster and often better, because they have the information you don’t.

Problems get solved before you hear about them. Instead of firefighting, you hear: “We spotted this issue, here’s what we did and why.” The cavalry doesn’t wait for orders anymore.

Your best people stop leaving. Talented people quit when they’re treated like ticket-takers. They stay when they can make real decisions, see real impact, and grow. Mission Command is the difference between “I execute tasks” and “I own outcomes.”

You can actually scale. In top-down controlled organizations, doubling headcount means 10x’ing coordination meetings. With Mission Command, teams coordinate through shared context, not through you. Growth creates capacity, not overhead.

You build something competitors can’t copy. They can poach your people, copy your product, undercut your pricing. But they can’t copy an organization that consistently out-executes them because decision-making happens at the speed of the problem, not the speed of the approval chain.

The alternative? You stay the bottleneck. Your best people leave for places that trust them. You build a bigger team that moves slower.

Mission Command is hard to build, but losing to the competition is harder.

Want to go deeper?

We work with leaders to build the context infrastructure that makes Mission Command real.

Clarity on the five questions every team needs, the boundaries that enable autonomy, and the interaction rules that let teams coordinate without you.

Let’s talk about how to make your organization move at the speed of the problem, instead of the speed of your approval chain.