Musings of an Analyst

Organizations, like spacecraft, rockets, and airplanes, rely on guidance, navigation, and control systems. Recently, I have been thinking about the similarities between guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) systems, the management and leadership systems in organizations, and how learnings from one type of system might be useful to the other type of system.  At their core, GN&C systems seem to implement functionality that is very analogous to the goals of management systems in any organization.

  Guidance systems are an analog for Leadership & Strategy

  Navigation systems are an analog for the system that provide Situational Awareness

  Control systems are an analog for Execution & Real-Time Management

Navigation systems are designed to know where the larger system is.  Guidance systems are developed to chart the path that the larger system should follow.  Control systems manage the actions of the larger system to keep it as close to the path defined by the guidance system as possible.

These three systems are intended to interact in a way that yields the desired result.  From where I sit, there seem to be parallels between these physical systems and how organizations work.  Leadership seems to fill the role of the guidance system.  Given where we think we are, where should we go and what path should we follow.  Control systems, which in most physical systems work at much faster time scales than guidance systems, take many small real time actions to provide the small course corrections to manage towards the defined path.  Navigation systems inform both the control system and the guidance system where things are.

In physical systems, the ideal guidance system will define a path that gets to the target end state with the minimum energy or cost and avoids known obstacles.  The corrections provided by the control system will ensure that the size of the response is appropriate.  In control systems, it is important to find a Goldilocks approach.  Too aggressive of a response will destabilize the system and often destroy it. A response that isn’t aggressive enough allows increasingly large deviations from the desired path and often results in the system being destroyed.  Both the guidance system and the control system require a navigation system that is “accurate enough.”  There will always be some error and uncertainty in how well the navigation system can know where it is.  Accuracy is expensive.  10% more accuracy is often much more than 10% more expensive.

Instability in the guidance, navigation, or control system, will cause the whole system to be destroyed.

To me, the parallels between organizational dynamics and GN&C dynamics are clear.  In spacecraft, rockets, planes and organizations, survival depends on knowing where you are, having a path to where you want to go, and having the system in place to execute.  

Leadership needs to steer the system along a good path.  The front-line folks are analogous to the end-effectors that are part of any control system.  Middle management is the rapid response control algorithm that determines the actions needed for the organization to travel along the defined path.  And the marketing and execution systems within an organization need to provide “accurate enough” information about where the organization is that the leadership can chart a good path and that the actions of the control system take the system towards its desired goal.  In rockets, spacecraft, planes and organizations, success depends on having coordinated systems that listen, adjust, and guide.  

In the future, I will spend more time musing about the analogy between increasingly complex control systems and organizational dynamics.  This musing was just the introduction to the analogy.