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Be able to BLUF up front
One of the skill sets that I picked up at TOPGUN that I thought was absolutely phenomenal — and this was reinforced throughout my entire military career — is this concept of being able to BLUF up front and then amplify your information later. So BLUF is an acronym. It stands for putting the bottom line up front. And what that really means is, a recurring theme in any organization is, that time is precious. There’s always more items vying for your attention than you have time to give to them. You go to these meetings or you find yourself at a situation in time, and someone’s giving you a 30 minute preamble to finally get to the point. Some of the most effective leaders I have ever worked around — heads of nations, the President of the United States — they’re all very good about kind of doing two things.
They’ll walk into a room and they’ll say, “Here’s what we need to accomplish.” And they’ll just put it right out there in front for everyone to start to digest. Then you start getting the amplifying information afterwards. And so that does a couple things. One, it sets the tone and the tempo real quick of what the meeting’s about — that we’re about business. Okay, now that we’ve done that, let’s give you some more data, some more information you can use to make a well-informed decision. People who write for magazines or for newspapers are phenomenal. You know, you read the headline that grabs your attention. You read that first paragraph, that’s going to draw you in and that’s going to get you into the rest of the content, which is going to give you the amplifying information. But if you only read that first paragraph, you’d still get about 80% of the content you needed to make a good decision.
And so that’s the concept here. It’s the ability to, as they would say in writing, don’t bury the lead. Don’t put the best part at the very end of your story. Put it right at the beginning, make sure that everyone in the room knows exactly what’s at stake. Then you can amplify that information and you can work forward. And so if you find yourself in a moment in time where it’s time critical when you’ve cultivated that type of environment, then you know that you’re going to get to the brass tacks. You’re going to get right down the business real quick and then save all the extraneous stuff for later.
Build consensus beforehand
A lot of success in an organization isn’t in the meeting room. It’s what happens beforehand. And so you can build consensus, you can build that network that’s going to be behind you, before the moment it’s required. And so in my case, as a TOPGUN instructor, as an example, I knew that I needed to gain consensus to get a vote through the TOPGUN staff on changing how we were going to do business for the entire US Navy and Marine Corps. Well, you there’s really two paths you can take. I actually tried the first path once it didn’t work out well for me. And that’s where you kind of spring this new information on the TOPGUN staff in the meeting. No one’s seen it before and now they’re asked to make this value-based assessment in real time. And it just led to a lot of very challenging questions and it was very difficult for people to understand what I was trying to achieve.
So that was a moment of adversity and it did not go well. But I learned from that moment and I realized that when I wanted to put something forward in the future, I went to the key decision makers weeks before the meeting. And I would share with them what I was planning to bring up and why I thought it was important. And I would address their questions in private that they had. And sometimes they’d have a question that I couldn’t answer, but I’d get back to them before the meeting with the response. And so what you found was that you’d already built consensus. And when you walked into the meeting and you proposed your new way forward, everyone felt comfortable with it. And you were able to get it passed very quickly because you’d already addressed everyone’s individual concerns. And now it was just the finer points.
As I went further in my career, especially when I found myself working in the high levels of the US government aiding in diplomacy, a lot of times, in my case, the Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, would say, “Look, we need to find a pathway to achieve success for the United States. How are we going to do that?” So the first thing I’d do is go back to my desk. I’d pick up the phone. I would talk to one of the communications directors from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization over in Brussels, Belgium. If it was something to do with the Indo-Pacific, I would call friends that I had in South Korea or in Japan with their Ministry of Defense. And I would say, “We’re contemplating this type of action. You know, where do you stand on this position? Do you have a way for us to gain better alignment with you?” Because at the end of the day, a lot of times that’s how success is achieved. It’s not just you doing an action. It’s bringing a team along with you where you can align viewpoints, where you can get multiple stakeholders to say that this is the course of action we need to pursue. You can do that just by easily picking up a phone, seeking additional sources of information. And I found that as I did grow as a leader, one of the things that was most effective was to take someone who would be a little bit reticent to speak up and draw them into that conversation in a way that helps them to highlight their strengths. “Jim, we’re talking about this specific type of challenge. I know you faced something like this two years ago. What do you recommend?” “Jane? I remember three years ago, this happened to you. How did you overcome that challenge?” You want to find a way to build consensus as much as possible.