This concept is elemental to any competent manager. Which is funny, because I've had very, very few managers who've ever understood it.
Oddly enough, the ones who utilized it most were in the military, using the "Swiss Cheese" method of failure analysis. In order for a failure to actually occur, there had to be a complete path all the way through the "cheese", where the problem wasn't caught by any "slice". So a failure at the lowest level was also a failure at each level all the way to the top, and each level was required to figure out why it wasn't caught at their level. Very effective system.
For all its failings, the military has tons of good management practices. After all, leading people is their core business and they do it in some pretty severe circumstances. They also have extremely good incentives to get it right.
Surprise, surprise, the military has been around a few years/centuries. Some of that experience has stuck...
I remember an ex-colleague saying that as an RAF person, he knew he could go on to a totally new airfield and ask for "XYZ Role" officer - and there would be an answer and direction to appropriate person.
Military knows to design also for "deceased personnel" (redundancies etc)...
My mother (civilian MOD employee working at an "airbase" which was in fact just a lot of office buildings, no airfield, although it did have machine guns and a nuclear bunker unlike most office parks) used to have an email address which basically said what her job was [I don't remember the exact address, something involving REG twice because she worked for the REGistry of the RAF's REGiment], and yup, the day after she retired that address still worked it just dropped in somebody else's lap.
So many IT outfits have problems that come back to "Oh, that was going to Bob and Bob left" and it infuriates me every time I see it, because we've known for decades how to avoid this problem.
What’s odd is that the MOD does that and the rest of the civil service carries on using name-based emails, despite people moving round every year or two.
There is a huge problem in the civil service of information being local to teams. Important information sots in inboxes or a shared drive if you’re lucky.
Finding out who to contact in another department on a given topic can take days and usually requires asking your private office to check (because they at least have the other department’s private office contact details). Otherwise people just look for emails in published documents and email out in the hope that at least one of them still works in the right department.
This could all be so easily solved with permanent, shared mailboxes per team. I suspect the reluctance is in part due to how much easier it would make FOIs.
Well then you need at least two email addresses per person. One role-based, one personal - promotions happen, you may want to keep being able to contact the human, not the role.
Yes, you do. But for the military this does not really matter, one of their defining characteristics is that they care MUCH more about "getting the job done" than about cost. This leads both to massive inefficiencies and to their extreme resilience to "bus factor" type events. It's a decent tradeoff for the military, it probably wouldn't be for commercial entities.
In Sweden we used to have a conscription army. It was said that they got really good at leadership and training since they could afford to experiment. If they screwed up one year they could just scrap the whole batch since they anyway got a new cohort every year.
The Israeli claim a lot of their startup culture comes from the high degree of responsibility their (very young) conscripts get in during their mandatory military service. I can imagine that someone who's been an 18-year old tank gunner in actual tank-to-tank combat has a different outlook on acceptable levels of risk than most people.
> For all its failings, the military has tons of good management practices
Military needs consistency, predictability, and uniformity. It needs a lot of good management practices to achieve that with people and parts that are not consistent, predictable, or uniform.
The military has to account for leadership moving up or out, a constant influx of new people, and the operational challenges of what they do, and a different perspective on money. Military dysfunction is different than private sector
Companies tend to focus on chiseling pennies and hope for the best.
Oddly enough, the ones who utilized it most were in the military, using the "Swiss Cheese" method of failure analysis. In order for a failure to actually occur, there had to be a complete path all the way through the "cheese", where the problem wasn't caught by any "slice". So a failure at the lowest level was also a failure at each level all the way to the top, and each level was required to figure out why it wasn't caught at their level. Very effective system.