Application in Business

With regard to achieving surprise in the business environment, the Marines experience with IO, while maybe not 100 percent applicable to your immediate situation, strongly suggests that a disciplined follow-through should accompany every well-intended use of information to shape the rules of the competitive encounter(s).

Consider the following strategies for achieving stealth, ambiguity, and deception, respectively, which will allow you to act when your opponent is unprepared or otherwise confused and off balance:

• Conceal your intentions or coordinate your efforts so that your first moves do not announce the timing or direction of your initial attack or block your later efforts.

• Announce a list of plausible courses of action and make a selection among them only after your opponent attempts to prepare for all of them; in this manner, you create options for yourself while he is confused.

• Use all channels available to you when deliberately conveying selected information to influence the behavior of your rivals; perhaps the most effective channel is the media.

Only through painstaking effort will you be able to surprise your competitors . The slightest slipup can spell disaster for even the best of plans.

Stealth, ambiguity, and deception have become more difficult to maintain in warfare as military formations have become larger and more dispersed and as electronic surveillance and other forms of intelligence gathering have become more effective. Similarly, the three means to achieving surprise have become more difficult in the business environment because of the widespread proliferation of information technology, requirements for full disclosure of financial information, and frequent staff turnover . Nevertheless, these are not excuses to make your competitors intelligence gathering efforts easier or more fruitful through the sloppy management of information on your part.

Every time your organization makes a public announcement, creates a web page on the Internet, attends a trade show, or even calls on a customer, you are making available to snooping competitors information that could telegraph your next move. How meticulously do you scrutinize this information leakage? If you do not scrutinize it all yourself ”and you cannot ”your guidance for and supervision of the release of information via these channels must be thorough. You should also spend more time contemplating how you can use these channels to create ambiguity or deception in the minds of your competitors.

Remember to remind your people constantly of the need to maintain secrecy about new initiatives. The creation of your own IO cell could be the most effective means to safeguard your organization s intentions and devise methods to degrade the quality of information available to competitors. Finally, stealth, ambiguity, and deception should have their own section in your OpOrd.

Surprise, it seems, is difficult to achieve, but with an increasing reliance on information and information technology come increased opportunities to use information to your advantage.