Circle of Competence

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In the Marine Corps, formal missions are briefed to teams in a format known as The Five Paragraph Order. I vividly remember sitting outside the Starbucks in San Clemente, CA over the summer of 2011 drinking cup after cup of coffee writing Five Paragraph Orders by hand pretending I was directing a squad of Marines in battles past.

I was living in the relative ease of a beautiful summer in Orange County at Camp Pendleton attending a school which was a combination of both classroom and fieldwork designed to teach the next generation of Non-Commissioned Officers how to lead Marines in combat.

Spending the summer at Camp Pendleton felt like a vacation compared to the heat of the Mojave Desert and 29 Palms California, where I was normally stationed. I was happy to give up the better portion of my Saturdays for a bit of classroom work in exchange for the ocean breeze.

A critical component of the Five Paragraph Order, of which I spent many Saturdays that summer obsessing over, is the Commander’s Intent which consists of four parts:

1. Center of Gravity

2. Critical Vulnerability

3. Exploitation Plan

4. Endstate

It is the first two components, center of gravity and critical vulnerability, which remind me most of Charlie Munger’s quote from above and his love of what he calls your, “circle of competence.”

Circle of Competence

Credit Farnam Street

As the above image depicts, your circle of competence represents the boundaries of your “earned knowledge” or your expertise. I’m fond of competence as a magnetic leadership quality but it’s important to recognize that the most damaging thing a leader can do is not to be incompetent, rather it is to believe you are competent in an area which you aren’t.

As Mark Twain reminds us much more eloquently than I ever could, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

There’s an important difference between the aphoristic, “fake it ‘till you make it” and legitimately believing you hold expertise in an area where you do not. The former is a way to push yourself slightly outside of your comfort zone as a means of improving, while the latter will get you and your team into trouble.

It is important for leaders to understand both their own, and their team’s circle of competence as this allows them to do two things:

1. Understand where they can play with an advantage

2. Identify training and enablement opportunities to expand the circle

Critical Vulnerability

In combat planning and operations Critical Vulnerability is the inverse of Center of Gravity. What unique weakness do you, or your team, have which exposes you to a greater likelihood of failure?

Successful offensive operations are generally designed to leverage your Center of Gravity to exploit your opponent’s Critical Vulnerability. For leaders of teams everywhere it’s important to understand your critical vulnerability so you can either:

a) work to make that vulnerability more resilient

b) design a system which does not increase the probability of failure by exposing it

While effective leaders don’t dwell on their critical vulnerability to the point of pessimism they are clear eyed and rational about its existence as a means of working through those scenarios which might lead to failure.

The pre-mortem is a common exercise in both the military and corporate world which attempts to predict the ways in which a product, operation, or project will fail before it begins. An effective way to run a pre-mortem is to begin by listing your team’s Critical Vulnerability and hypothesizing on the ways in which that vulnerability might be exposed.

Center of Gravity

Understanding where you can play with an advantage brings us back to the Commander’s Intent within the Five Paragraph Order. This advantage is your Center of Gravity.

There is perhaps no truer adage in combat than, “never fight fair.” Leveraging your Center of Gravity, or working comfortably within your circle of competence, is the way you do exactly that.

When you leverage your center of gravity you identify your unique strength which gives you an edge. It is this edge which allows you to produce repeatable, successful results by improving the probability that you will be successful. As Annie Duke teaches in her fantastic book Thinking in Bets outcomes are generally a poor indicator of the quality of our decision making, generally due to hindsight bias. However, if you are rational and clear about your center of gravity and leverage that center of gravity consistently you are more likely to be successful.

Conclusion

It’s important to note the concepts of Circle of Competence, Center of Gravity, and Critical Vulnerability are all unique. That is to say, your Critical Vulnerability is not just the point at which you pass the perimeter of your Circle of Competence but is actually your single greatest weakness. On the flip side, your Center of Gravity is not the entirety of your Circle of Competence, rather it is your single greatest strength.

These concepts are useful to me in understanding the limits of my own leadership while working to build stronger, more resilient, effective teams. While they can seem academic at times, the more you look for them the more you’ll see people and teams leveraging them in the real world. Many of the greatest performers do so intuitively.

By labeling and understanding these concepts it’s my hope that you can deconstruct what looks like intuitive greatness to make success a repeatable outcome for your team.

See y’all next week.