2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

Mission command is a recognised term in the military and high-reliability organisations as a way of achieving goals in dynamic, uncertain, and complex environments with limited information and minimal to no control of operational teams. It is only possible when organisations invest in the competence of its team members and leaders, where the goal is clear and unified, and the leaders are able to delegate and trust their teams to operate to the best of their ability to achieve the goal. If those teams can’t, they go back up the chain of command safe in the knowledge they will be listened to and supported. David L. Marquet’s book ‘Turn the Ship Around’ embodied this concept.

Developing leaders and their teams to operate this way takes time and resources, which is why it is normally only the military and HROs who can manage it.

What Ben and Gareth will demonstrate with you in this dynamic, emotive, and powerful workshop is that development can happen in the same way that food is cooked in a pressure cooker. The pressure is increased, the exposure is intense, and the reflective debriefs are critical and unsettling.

The Interpersonal Skills LAB module Discovery of Nexus is this pressure cooker. Three missions developing in complexity and learning bringing mission command and non-technical skills/crew resource management to life.

The simulator works by having a Mission Control (3-4 people) providing guidance and intent to four teams of three people (an InterLAB commander, and two operational crew) to terraform a planet. Information is incomplete, communication is limited, assumptions are many, goals are potentially conflicted, and only limited information is available to the crew and mission control.

You will not have experienced a facilitated workshop like this before. It is where teaming skills and mission command come to life. It is a humbling experience, even for experience leaders as shown below.

“I would consider myself well-versed in mission command. I even have some Von Moltke in German on my bookshelf :-) and yet I fell into the same trap strategic level leaders do and let loose with my long screwdriver! The great thing about the simulation was there is no hiding in it, and the ability to rapidly debrief and then course correct made me a believer in the value!” – Jayson Coil, Incident Commander, Wildland Firefighting Incident Management Team.

You can’t lead teams in a VUCA world unless you understand and practice mission command. This workshop makes leadership tangible.

Emphasis: you don’t need to have done the InterLAB workshops on Monday to attend this workshop. They are both standalone sessions. However, you will get much more value if you attend both as they work at different places in the organisation. Monday is very much about teams; this is about team of teams.