Step III: Course of Action Development

Step III Course of Action Development

As the A-Team’s Hannibal Smith says, “I love it when a plan comes together.” Before that magical moment occurs, you must first have a plan. The Army loves to church up basic terms and therefore refers to plans as “Courses of Action” or COAs. During this discussion, we’ll explain how Army organizations develop the COAs that enable leaders to make informed decisions and ultimately select the best option.

Step 3 has one prime objective: enable leaders to choose the best option for solving a complex problem. At this point, your team received its mission, analyzed it, and implemented your leadership’s initial guidance to achieve their endstate. Now it’s time to use the outputs from the previous steps and head to the white board to sketch out some options that might work. Remember, only two types of plans exist: those that could work and those that won’t work. Regardless of if we want to admit it or not, no plan is ever 100% guaranteed to achieve its objectives. Your team’s job is to give your leadership the best odds possible.

How The Army Does It

During COA development in our past lives, we combined all the work we did in the previous two steps and sketched two or three COAs that could accomplish all the boss’s key tasks and achieve their endstate. At the end of the day, each COA had to have the following attributes:

• Feasible: we had enough time and resources to accomplish the plan.
  • Good Example: COA 1 requires both ten hours of mission time and our entire tank company.
  • Bad Example: I know the boss said we have 12 hours for the mission, but it’s no big deal COA 1 will take at least a day. Also, we’re going to need at least two more tank platoons.
• Acceptable: the COA balanced advantages with potential costs and risks.
  • Good Example: We anticipate we’ll have enough combat power for the next mission after COA 1.
  • Bad Example: Yeah, COA 1? That bad boy will kill us all.
• Suitable: the COA achieved the prescribed endstate.
  • Good Example: COA 1 will seize Objective Wookie two hours before our suspense. We’ll include two hours of flex time in the event something goes wrong.
  • Bad Example: I know the boss said to seize Objective Hawk, but that place has a ton of mosquitos. Let’s go to Objective Falcon instead.
• Distinguishable: each COA significantly differed from its other COA friends.
  • Good Example: COA 1 includes an air assault while COA 2 involves dismounted infiltration.
  • Bad Example: So COA 1 and COA 2 look the same? Let’s give them different names and call it a day.

Each COA sketch included a paragraph describing the concept, the decisive operation (the thing that must happen or the COA categorically fails), and the associated key tasks (things that should happen, but the COA can still work if a few slip through the cracks). Also, these sketches also contained the previously defined mission statement and the operation’s concept broken down into sequential phases.

How You Can Use It

The example format and further explanation below provides further context.

What We Learned

Capacity and ability are two fundamental and often overlooked considerations while assigning your team tasks. The adage of “work flows to the competent” is true in every organization. Therefore, just because a particular person or team has the ability to handle the heaviest lifts does not mean they have unlimited capacity to do so forever. 

Constantly identify opportunities to offload tasks from your varsity’s plate and save them from running a 100m dash in a 90m room daily. Their sanity and blood pressure levels will thank you. We all know how things worked out for the horse in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Task Organization, or TASKORG in Army parlance, warrants additional discussion. By this point, you should have an idea about which tasks will require the most time and resources to accomplish. Examine your organization and determine if you can temporarily rearrange your team to augment the portions that will carry the majority of the load during the operation for which you are planning.

Granted, subject matter expertise will limit the extent of this realignment. Asking the summer intern working in HR to drop transmissions in the service bay is probably not the best option. Although young people will always surprise you with their skills, the odds are long that this move will accomplish its intended purpose.

Therefore, simply ask your teams what tasks the organization can take off their plates. No doubt, they are always juggling mundane administrative tasks that the guy from accounting who spends the majority of his day telling fishing stories can handle. Also, ask them what tasks are outside their traditional skillset. The HR interns might not be awesome at dropping transmissions (again, they could surprise you), but they could very well Microsoft Excel anyone in the galaxy into next Tuesday. It’s been said that your service techs prefer to turn wrenches instead of updating data spreadsheets.

These different alignment approaches constitute the TASKORG portion of your COA sketch. The HR interns should not be the service tech’s Microsoft sous chef in every option. Identify each COA’s pain points and seek to alleviate them by arranging your team in innovate ways.

TASKORGs go back the fundamental purpose of this step: give your leadership options to solve the problem. Get creative. If your plan doesn’t break the laws of physics or local criminal codes, the worst thing anyone is going to tell you is “no.”

If you do COA development right, you should have multiple options that can solve the problem, incur an acceptable level of risk, achieve the desired endstate, and significantly differ from one another. If you find yourself in the A+ realm, each key task supporting the COA should have an owner (pro tip: don’t exceed seven key tasks; I don’t know why seven is the magic number, but it has always worked in the past). Ensure to balance these task assignments with each owner’s capacity and capability.

This approach is a descriptive vice prescriptive approach. In other terms, we’re describing techniques subject to ample creative interpretation rather than providing black and white methods akin to IKEA assembly instructions. Hopefully, this article did not ruin your afternoon in the same fashion of later. Nothing destroys a Saturday afternoon like you and your significant other building a bookcase made from the finest particle board in Sweden.

If you choose to employ this process in your organization, you can pick and choose the components that work for your team as long as you provide your leadership with solution options. We’ve used techniques ranging from sketch COAs on printer paper to 80+ chart PowerPoint presentations. Our methods failed only when our leadership made uniformed decisions because we failed to provide them enough information.

That wraps thing up for this episode of our MDMP series. Tune in next week when we explain the process involved with selecting a COA. These were fun times during which we became acutely aware of our plans’ deficiencies during treasured moments of “aggressive performance counseling.”

If you want to learn more about developing COA development, please watch The U.S Army’s Command and General Staff Officer College’s overview on the topic available at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HhWFd0Mbkk.