Who did you send forward?

I ask because every organization runs on a picture of the ground it cannot personally stand on. The picture is only as good as the person the organization sent to see it. That is a fact that has been true for centuries, and it is still not, in most organizations I sit with, treated as a decision worth deliberate investment.

I am not here to argue against data. Data informs future decisions. It is the disciplined record of what an organization has been able to observe, and in a mature enterprise it is indispensable for planning and forecasting. What data cannot do is tell you what is happening right now in the place where the decision-maker is not. Something has to happen, be observed, recorded, transmitted, and summarized before it appears on the dashboard. By the time a leader sees a signal in the numbers, the signal is history. Data is for what comes next. It is not built to tell you what is happening now.

What tells you what is happening now is a person. Specifically, it is a person the organization has trained and trusted and deliberately placed at the point of contact with whatever ground it needs to understand. The decision about who to send forward, and how much to invest in them before they get there, is one most organizations have never made consciously. They send whoever was available. They train them on procedure. They evaluate them on activity. And then they wonder why the signal coming back is thin, late, or unactionable.

I led a scout platoon before I commanded a company, and much of what I know about ground truth I learned there. Scouts moved ahead of the main body. They were the eyes and ears of the battalion — the commander's picture of the ground before he committed six or eight hundred people to it. Scouts were among the most selective positions in the unit. You did not send weak soldiers forward. You sent your best. And you invested in them before you sent them, because the quality of what came back depended entirely on the quality of who you sent.

There was also a discipline in what they were asked. Scouts did not wander looking at whatever caught their attention. Every operation began with a set of specific information requirements — in Army doctrine, Priority Intelligence Requirements — that the commander had designated as critical to specific pending decisions. Each was a single question, ranked in priority, tied to a decision on the commander's decision support matrix. If answering it would not change a course of action he was about to take, it was not a requirement. It was noise.

When I moved from that platoon to company command, the geometry changed. I had three platoons and one body. I could only be in one place at a time. In the other two locations, I had to rely on leaders I had trained and trusted. I remained the decision-maker. What extended was not my authority but my reach — and that reach was only as good as the leaders I had invested in before I needed them.

Civilian organizations have the same geometry and often the wrong investment in the people who would produce ground truth. The caseworker sees what is changing in the neighborhood a full quarter before the demographic dashboard shows it. The branch manager knows a small-business client is in trouble long before the loan report flags it. The teacher watching a class of thirteen-year-olds knows, in September, which of them will not be in school in April. These are the scouts of the sector — the enablers of the mission at its point of contact. Most sectors do not treat them as such. They are the lowest-paid, least developed, most quickly replaced positions in the organizational chart, and their reporting is rarely routed to any table where a decision that matters is being made.

I have my own version of what a leader owes the ground. Wherever I go, regardless of the weather, my first day on the ground I run the city I am in. Not the concierge route. The city. When I run, it is for me — to see it, to smell it, to taste it, to interact with the people who live and work in it, and to better understand the environment I am about to operate in. That is how I get grounded. It is not a leadership technique and I am not recommending it as one. It is how I make sure the meeting I walk into on day two is informed by something the meeting itself cannot give me.

The failure mode is rarely that executives disrespect ground signal. Most say the right things about it. The failure mode is that the organization never invested in the people whose observations were supposed to become the signal in the first place, and never named whose job inside the organization it was to develop them. The organizations that keep sending whoever is available will keep getting the caliber of ground signal that decision produces.

Who did you send forward, and what did you invest in them before you sent them?

If your organization's honest answer is that you sent whoever was available and hoped they would figure it out, that is the answer.