Overview:  Why the “Staff Ride” Format

Battlefield Leadership’s battlefield experiences are designed to help corporate executives and managers reflect on leadership issues using the battlefield as a metaphor for many of the challenges faced in today’s competitive marketplace. After an initial briefing and strategic overview, we spend time on the field together, walking and riding over the very ground contested by military forces and armies long ago.

This “staff ride” format is derived from long-standing military practice. More than a century ago, military students of leadership began visiting old battlefields with senior officers, staff members, and facilitators to analyze historic decisions and their consequences. These experiences developed an understanding of fundamental combat leadership practices and fostered team-building by providing leaders and their staffs a shared experience focused on the types of situations encountered in actual battle. The method was later expanded to military students in advanced schools so that they could think about future battle challenges and contemporary solutions within the context of significant actions from the past. Later, the method was applied to senior civilian government leaders, many of whom were from corporate leadership backgrounds, who were shaping and directing military policy without the benefit of military experience.

Connection to the Corporate World

Success with those audiences, and a sense of the direct applicability of the lessons from the battlefield to the corporate environment, led to using the staff ride method with corporate executives who were interested in building strong teams and engendering leadership qualities within those teams. We still use the label “staff ride” for these specialized leadership experiences, keeping in mind that:

• History is important and we want to “get it right” but history is only a vehicle for discussion of contemporary concerns;
• The staff ride format is a seminar in which people change physical positions often and openly share views on a broad range of issues, and;
• The team building which inevitably results from this kind of shared experience may be as important as its substantive content; and,

The battlefield is a source of metaphors: Napoleon at Waterloo, Moore in the Ia Drang Valley, Winters at Bastogne, or Longstreet at Chickamauga, … any number of other battles and leaders could support the very same leadership learning goals as Gettysburg and Normandy. The battlefield simplicity helps us meaningfully and realistically appreciate such ubiquitous leadership considerations as the pivotal importance of plans alongside the overriding importance of improvising within the framework provided by these same plans.

We ask how information is gathered and how decisions are made, communicated and modified. We explore the effect of leadership style on situational followership. We contemplate human motivation in the face of tremendous obstacles. We confront the capricious and seemingly random operation of “chance” or “luck” in human affairs. We see leaders of many types in trying situations, and we have the luxury of information and leisure necessary to analyze their performance in a way that is objective and blameless.