The "Size" Series - Essay-1: "Size" & Complexity
France surrendered in 6 weeks - The German army was smaller - Running at machine guns - Outmaneuvring machine guns - Zooming out/in
Introduction
As introduced in my first essay, this series explores “size” and its implications in an organizational context. In this essay, we explore how the scale (the forest or the trees) we organize collective action at, impacts organizational outcomes; namely the complexity an organization can handle. This capacity for complexity will enable us to develop a working definition of “size”.
To develop our understanding of scale and its interaction with complexity, we will be exploring the below historical event:
How did the German army manage to defeat the combined forces of Britain, France, and Belgium in 6 weeks during World War-2?
The inspiration for using this question comes from James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy, which opens with the same line of inquiry; Wilson uses the above-mentioned battle (the Battle of France which took place in 1940) to highlight how differences in the “organization1” of the German and French armies was a major factor in the collapse of France2. From there he proceeds to describe how different organizational arrangements emerge.
I will be using the description of the differences in “organization” between the two armies to introduce the interplay between scale and complexity based on my reading of Yaneer Bar-Yam’s work on complexity3.
“Organization” as the key explanatory factor
In this essay, I rely on Wilson’s assertion that “organization” was the key explanatory factor of the outcome of the Battle of France. Below I summarize Wilson’s refutation4 of some common misconceptions about the German success (I thought we’d get these out of the way first):
Was Germany’s attack a surprise? It wasn’t. Germany had already invaded Poland and Norway, and intelligence gathered by France pointed to an imminent attack.
Was the German army bigger? It wasn’t:
The German army had fewer soldiers.
It did not have as many tanks as France. The best French tanks were larger and more powerful than the German ones (they didn’t have radio capability, however, which meant it was difficult to coordinate their actions).
Was technology a deciding factor?
As late as 1943, a typical German infantry division had more horse-drawn vehicles than motor-driven ones (it required twice as many tons of hay and oats as oil and gasoline).
Key breakthroughs in the battle were achieved by foot soldiers; they paddled rafts across the Meuse river and then had to climb up steep banks or dodge enemy fire across open fields.
Was political fanaticism a factor? There is disagreement amongst historians about the role played by Nazi ideology in motivating soldiers.
Was the German strategy superior? It wasn’t; it was very risky and had many vulnerabilities that were never exposed.
World War 1 & Trenches
To understand the organization of France’s army in World War-2, we need to examine the widespread adoption of trench warfare in World-War-1. By the start of World War-1 firepower technology ( machine guns and artillery) had become more advanced than mobility technology (e.g. tanks). This meant that you could protect a position by shooting at an enemy that had to cross an open field on foot from a stationary position and therefore put an emphasis on defense and the development of trenches.
The below video provides a more visual summary of the development of trenches.
Word War-2
What France learned from World War-1
The below video from the movie War Horse shows how difficult it was to advance on enemy positions supported by machine guns/artillery. This was the main French takeaway from World War-1; they set up their army to fight a stationary war of attrition; they organized around a squad whose task was to fire, support, and defend a machine gun. This was reflected in the training of soldiers which put little emphasis on maneuver. This also led to large investments in advanced “trenches” like the Maginot Line. Most importantly, their assumption of a static war led to a hierarchical command structure that didn’t enable fast decision-making (decisions took days).
German organization
Germany’s context led it to different conclusions. The treaty of Versaille, which brought World War-1 to an end, restricted the size of the German army, which meant that they couldn’t afford a stationary war of attrition. They focused on figuring out how to overcome the trenches and came up with two solutions:
Make soldiers bulletproof (by putting them in tanks) and;
Make soldiers hard to shoot at by focusing them on infiltrating enemy weak points and attacking machine guns from the rear.
The Germans decided to focus on infiltration warfare (Blitzkrieg) - tanks were used to exploit an opening created by infantry. So Germany organized its army into small units armed with light weaponry capable of independent action. Officers were delegated substantial decision-making powers and incentives/evaluation systems were designed to reward fighting prowess and risk-taking. Responsibility for success and failure was shared by officers and foot soldiers and there was mutual respect between the two groups. Furthermore, to the extent possible the army was staffed on a local basis (e.g. soldiers from Bavaria were grouped together) which enhanced group cohesion.
The command system at the higher levels was focused on the “what” leaving the “how” to the lowest possible level of decision making. The below video summarizes the importance of speed of decision-making to the operation of the German army.
Observations
Zooming In and Out
In the below paragraphs, we introduce how we will think about the relationship between complexity and scale.
Imagine the French army generals using an interactive map to decide on how to organize their army; they would have zoomed out to a coarse scale, defined the enemy as a big unit, and concluded that stationary machine guns are a good option for aiming at a big target acting coherently (i.e. advancing on a trench). Additionally, they would have reasoned that a big unit cannot change direction easily, and didn’t make the speed of decision-making a priority in the design of their command structure.
The Germans on the other hand zoomed in. They didn’t want to give the French one big unit to shoot at and designed their organization at a finer scale. The independent units (coordinated by the “what” set by generals) were able to make decisions based on local knowledge (e.g. weak points or environmental factors) and act accordingly.
Size and Complexity
A simple way to think about the relative complexity of systems is to compare the amount of information it takes to describe them (for example: as measured by the number of characters). The French army was designed to act as a large coherent body protecting a position against another large coherent body. The resulting organization had limited options for action at a fine scale; machine guns are pointed in the same direction, at the field of battle (with the infantry servicing them). The preceding sentence is a reasonable fine scale description of the system, and its brevity suggests that the system had a low degree of complexity.
In contrast, the German army had more options for action at fine scales as it comprised a network of units that could make decisions based on the imperatives of the situation each faced. In order to describe the system, you would need to describe the possible actions for the individual units as well as how the units might interact. The resulting system, therefore, had a higher degree of complexity.
Once the Germans stopped acting like a big uniform unit, the French army struggled to cope; big machine guns aren’t particularly useful for preventing enemy infiltration. The mismatch in complexity at a fine scale directly impacted the outcome of the Battle.
In modern times, matching the complexity of military forces to their environment (including the opponent) is standard practice. The US Navy for example is organized to deal with a low complexity environment (Open water with a limited number of enemy forces) and is organized at a large scale (Big ships). On the other hand, the US marines who deal with more complex littoral environments (e.g. different places for the enemies to hide) are organized at a finer scale. We generalize the above discussion as follows:
Size is relative to the environment; if there is a mismatch between the complexity of a system and its environment, there is trouble. An organization is “too big” if its complexity is lower than that of its environment. The system needs to match the complexity of the environment at all scales.
Next
So when we think about “size” we need to think about the complexity of the environment and how an organization addresses that level of complexity. In the next essay, I explore how the hierarchical and networked modes of organization impact a system’s potential complexity. I’ll be using examples from my own experience; a failed consulting project and a weird company with 5 CEOs.
In future essays, we discuss some sophisticated examples of how organizations such as Amazon and Spotify use a loosely coupled architecture/organization to create an organization that can act with high complexity at different gradations of scale.
How group action is coordinated.
I should clarify that I have no particular interest in World War-2 or wars in general. I had previously come across this example and found it useful; the starkness of the differences in the “organization” of the two armies will help us understand the interplay between scale and complexity.
The main resource used here was his book Making Things Work.
I relied on Wilson for this. I didn’t conduct research outside of Wilson’s book and the videos included in this post.