For the past few weeks I’ve been doing research on the First World War for a website that will accompany Canadian actor Paul Gross’s upcoming film about Passchendaele.

During the research, I was doing other consulting work and happened to be chatting with a Deloitte Touche consultant about corporate wikis and how you need to give up central command and control if you want a wiki to work well and with a minimum of effort.

“I suggested that here,” he explained. “But the feeling is: ‘trust is good but control is better.'”

Well, in a lovely piece of synchronicity, a lesson from how Canadians fought the Battle of Vimy Ridge shows how wrong that attitude can be.

During the First World War the Canadian Corps was led by a self-trained military savant named Arthur Currie. As you may recall, early in the Great War thousands of Canadians were slaughtered in the Battle of the Somme. The men were mowed down by German artillery and machine guns and really had no idea where they were going as they charged through the relentless mud and enemy fire.

The British military leaders of the day had very hierarchical and classist views about command, control and who got to have key information. Like, say, maps.

Curry didn’t think much of that. As part of his obsessive planning for the assault on Vimy Ridge, he had 40,000 maps published and distributed to his troops. The maps showed trenchworks, enemy positions and the routes and stages of the carefully timed and coordinated assault. The only thing Curry’s men didn’t know until the last minute was when the attack would be.

Curry trusted them and gave them the information they needed to take the ridge and save their lives. Or, to look at it another way, he distributed intelligence and counted on his team to make use of that intelligence and local real world conditions to make the best ad hoc tactical choices to serve the overall strategic goal âe” the synchronized defeat of the Germans a couple of kilometres away.

Quick side trip, to WWII this time. During the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, physicist Richard Feynman was in charge of some key calculations about the implosion of a nuclear bomb. The Manhattan Project was, of course, ensnared in a bramble of secrecy. So, even though Feynman had a team of young engineering whizzes working for him he couldn’t tell them exactly what they were doing.

Like Curry, Feynman bridled at this notion. Going against orders he told his charges what was at stake, and worked on a clever method for distributing the calculations that needed to be done. The team realized how important the project was to the war effort, improved on Feynman’s diffuse calculation method and got the math done nine times faster than it was thought possible.

Feynman had trusted his team and had harvested the fruits of work divided among team members given the trust and tools to be their best.

By the way, the Canadian Corps won the battle of Vimy Ridge and Curry’s tactics were used in other successful assaults. The distributed computing methods Feynman used are employed in supercomputers today.

Both stories illustrate how powerful and liberating it can be to replace control with trust. To many IT folks, who are used to being the spider at the centre of a web of processes and security, this idea makes no sense. But, what we’re learning about the Web is that a lack of scarcity and an abundance of diffuse capability means that trust trumps control. Old rules don’t apply and just slow organizations down.

Curry wasn’t just trusting his team with this week’s sales numbers. He was betting his job, his team’s lives and the outcome of a war that reshaped Europe. He picked trust.

Feynman was responsible for calculations that shaped a weapon that could destroy cities, or the researchers developing it. He put his faith in his team.

So when we think about how our teams should function in a distributed online environment we can just look back on wars already fought and won.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...