Arkaro Insights

From Parachutes to Profits with Adrian Stratta

• Mark Blackwell • Episode 27

Share episode

What if your business could adapt and thrive in chaos the way military units do? In this fascinating conversation, Adrian Stratta bridges two worlds that rarely intersect meaningfully - military operations and corporate leadership. As a retired officer from the British Parachute Regiment with 20 years of subsequent business transformation experience, Adrian offers unique insights into how military thinking can revolutionize corporate strategy.

The discussion centers on "mission command" - a military approach that ensures everyone understands not just their immediate task but how it connects to the overall mission. This creates organizational resilience when plans inevitably falter. Adrian explains how this principle translates perfectly to business environments where change is constant and unpredictability is guaranteed.

A shocking revelation emerges when we learn only 28% of executives can correctly identify their own company's strategy when tested. This disconnect between leadership vision and frontline execution creates vulnerabilities that military thinking can address. Adrian contrasts the military's collective "we" mindset with business's tendency toward individual achievement, often at the expense of organizational goals.

The conversation explores how military intelligence gathering - collecting information from the edges of operations rather than centralized sources - provides a template for more effective business intelligence systems. Successful organizations, Adrian argues, create frameworks for sharing information across traditional silos.

Whether you're leading a team through transformation, struggling with strategy execution, or simply fascinated by organizational behavior, Adrian's journey from paratrooper to business consultant offers valuable lessons about leadership in uncertain times. His closing advice - understand your environment, listen actively, and share opportunities rather than hoarding them - provides a practical framework for applying military wisdom to business challenges.

See more here Military Strategy: VUCA Lessons from the Parachute Regiment

Send your thoughts to Arkaro

Mark Blackwell:

Hello everyone, welcome to our Arkaro Insights. We've got a great guest today. I'm going to introduce to you Adrian Stratta. He is a retired officer in the British Parachute Regiment 20 years experience doing transformations around the world, a wide variety of industries, great insights from that, and really keen on empowering people and enabling people to get their jobs done. And, I must say, probably finally and importantly, he is an author, and so we're going to I'm sure we're going to hear about the book sometime during today. It's a great book, so looking forward to hearing more. So, adrian, maybe just step back. Tell me, how did you get here in your life?

Adrian Stratta:

Yeah, that's a very good question when I ask myself all the time because how did we, how did I get here? That was part of the reason for the book actually Dusty Boots to Bordrum follow your dreams. It's the follow your dreams bit. I think I kind of touch it. And the reason why the book came about was because I spent nearly 20 years in the army, which is great, learned a huge amount. I wasn't sure what to do when I was at university. I met my wife at university. She was trained to be a doctor and, um, I was in the ta officer training corps as well and I went off to go and look at this thing called the parish of asian, because I didn't really know who it was all I knew it was this poster from my wall of some chappy in the desert somewhere and I I absolutely loved it.

Adrian Stratta:

It was sort of a clashing of symbols. It all made sense. They kind of liked what I was saying and doing and it was a coalition of the willing, should we say. But that really worked. And right from the very I mean within.

Adrian Stratta:

I went through the whole Sandhurst and training thing and within two weeks of arriving in 2 Para we were parachuting into the omand. I mean, you know, it was always all big boys, dreams all come come to fruition at once. I was very aware that I was a little cog in a very big machine. Very quickly. And there was, you know, it's a recently tested war machine from the falklands, you know. So there was some very able things. And my platoon sergeant said to me he said said, adrian, if you ever stop laughing, it's time to leave the army. And I said, I did. I laughed for 20 years. It was great. So from that point of view it was. It was great Ups and downs always, but it has helped me my life lessons all the way through. I mean, you don't realize the subliminal learning you're doing. Yes, I was a young leader, but the young platoon commander versus the company commander very different animal because you've learned and you're understanding the environment you're in. And, it's fair to say, I was unsure what to do. I knew I wasn't going to go into the city and make money that wasn't me necessarily but I was fascinated how business made and take made and took their decisions. I was very fortunate, they, I was enabled to do an mba, um through the military, which very few people do. I was very lucky and that was like a light bulb and it was all about change and transformation. And I was involved in the first ever uh, putting the first ever balanced scorecard into defense, which was amazing, because how do you evaluate the value of defense? And they had an old system I can't remember what it was now, but it was your moral, physical and conceptual power. And then we were trying to put it into a business. What's the value of the Padres candles? I was always being asked that one. I mean it was great, huge value. But what's the pound, shillings and pence versus a Challenger tank or a combat aircraft? I mean, so that was fascinating.

Adrian Stratta:

The worst job I did in the army but the best job I did for my commercial career, and so my last job in the forces was in South Africa and I was there working for the Foreign Office, really helping the South African Ministry of Defence to restructure and reorganise themselves, which was fascinating. If all jobs were like that, I'd still be in the forces. But actually it was the adding back piece. I loved it was transforming, not only there, but the previous job in the MOD, introducing the Defence balance scorecard, was all about adding back and looking at the military through a completely different lens, and that, I think, shaped a lot of my thinking, a lot of my processes. I was fortunate to be offered a job by pwc and deloitte come and work for us, which would be fascinating, and I would have loved to have got the t-shirt, but I, regrettably I, I think regrettably I turned them down both because they were just going to shove me back into the mod from where I was escaping.

Adrian Stratta:

So what was the point? Where do you move forward? But, yeah, you, it's nice to have that name behind you, but I've already had the name. I already had the, the military, um, and the whole point of the journey. So we, we drove home from south africa, my wife and I were cashed in our flight tickets and drove the length of Africa, hence the book Follow your Dreams and events happened. So that was a story of a whole about resistance and resilience and just getting through really.

Adrian Stratta:

But what I really loved about writing that book in lockdown in COVID was the ability to look back and understand the perception of what was happening and think about it, and it was that whole reflective piece which was great because the last chapter was all about how does the military mind adapt to the commercial mind? And for 20 years of restructuring, turning around as the interim, you're sort of no pun intended parachuted into a company to sort of get the reins of a business that's going in that direction and it should go in that direction, which was fascinating because all of a sudden you have the levers of control but an agenda from the board or the investors or whatever to go in a certain direction and change the business. And it was just like being given a mission or a task to go to somewhere new that you hadn't expected to go because there's a problem. So I thought it was absolutely fascinating. How does the military mind adapt to the commercial world?

Adrian Stratta:

And it's something we've spoken about and I loved your mnemonic of the VUCA, the sort of way you're operating in chaos and you're operating in confused, uncertain and ambiguous spaces, and you can probably tell us about that a bit more. But that's been my life, that's what I've always done, and that was always that in the existence of the military role was you're dumped into something, how are you going to make that work as an interim MD, director or whatever it was? In a business, you're put into a position of, yes, nice is to have the authority, but how do you actually turn that business around? And that's what I think we should explore, because actually, how does that military mind work and how does that? And so what's the relevance for business, which I think you want to get to, which is great?

Mark Blackwell:

absolutely, because most of my life has either been spent in a small business or in a large business. And in the large business you know that it's structured in large organizations, hierarchical silos. You know it's why I was fascinated when I was in the corporate world about integrated business management to try to break the silos down. But you know it was a great structure for like the Tayloristic model when we call it LAMO linear, anthropocentric, mechanistic and ordered. You know there are still big signs of that in the corporate world. And my favorite is we still believe that a 12 month budget is possible and sensible.

Mark Blackwell:

I think that's probably right, yeah, and you know when everything tells us it's not. And yet many of the practices formal, informal and the way that the behaviors are formed, you know, in many large organizations, are a legacy of this type of thinking. Yet, at the same time, people are saying, yes, but we've got tariffs, we've got financial crashes, we we're in a VUCA world volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and so there's a lot of talk about it, but I feel not enough. So what discussion in terms of double click? What does that mean for us as business people, as executives, as employees, and translating from an old fashioned world to a new fashioned world, as employees, and translating from an old-fashioned world to a new-fashioned world?

Mark Blackwell:

Why I really wanted to talk to you was because, as so many of these things are, you double-click and find VUCA was invented in the military and you got there first, right, and so it's innate in your world. And so maybe, with your lens of having something that was innate but 20 years later, you could help give some advice about what might be relevant from the lessons of VUCA in the military to the business world absolutely, and I think, um, the VUCA world, I mean, I I think when I was going through training and stuff, it was all about the OODA loop as well.

Adrian Stratta:

Get inside the OODA loop. So you know, observe, see, do, act or whatever it is. Uh, so so stuff is happening. How are you reacting to it? I'm going to pick up a word you used slightly earlier, which was the so what factor. Yeah, which is great. I think that's like a light bulb going off in my head because we, we would um get, I was.

Adrian Stratta:

I'm going to talk about a thing called mission command, which is now becoming very business centric as well, and something you've picked up on is that was it? About 28 percent of people only really understand the corporate strategy? Most people do not, and when I came through training, you know the strategy was a thing to keep the door open, wasn't it? That was ignored especially. Well, a lot of time and effort goes into that strategy. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there, so that's a thing that needs to be addressed. So mission command is quite a theory, a doctrine. It's certainly been prevalent for my period in the military. It's only sort of doubled down and got more so and sort of thought about.

Mark Blackwell:

So can I just stop you there, Sorry mission command.

Adrian Stratta:

What do you mean by that? So mission command is a mindset of how you're translating your task to your people. And do you understand that task at a very high level, so it can work at the very strategic level of we're going to invade country X or not, we're going to protect country X these days, and so what's the grand strategic plan? Does everyone that plan? And at every stage you ask the so what? Question, so what? What are the actions on what if this doesn't happen? Because you know, if you've got your strategy, you're going from a to b and look at shit happens, excuse my french. So what? What are you going to do about it? All the way down to planning very detailed operations, no plan survives contact with the enemy, certainly being in the Parachute Regiment. You know it was very important for us because you can't guarantee all the commanders leave the aircraft and survive on the ground operation or an exercise, it doesn't really matter. Nothing will happen to plan because the friction of life, of jumping out of a plane is inherently complicated, difficult and nothing goes to plan. So we've always operated in this period of environment of chaos and confusion and making sense of that, that confusion, but it's, it's the triggers. Are you measuring the right things? Are you adapting to the or seeing the right triggers, or seeing the right um uh turn of events, or are you reacting to those turn of events? The same in business as it is in the military world. Uh, the military just has a different connotation of what you're going to do about it. Uh, so there's the so what factor and there's the mission command. So so, going back to the plan, you're doing your plan. You're going to do X, y and Z. Does everyone understand Me as the commander? I'm giving my mission and I then have to feed back my confirmation of that mission. So you're asking me to X, y and Z, that means I've got to do A, b and C. Is that what you hire, commander? Do you agree with that interpretation? So, automatically, there's a confirmation that I've understood the strategic direction and my part in that strategic direction, and then I then have to cascade that down. So the same process happens to my junior commanders and it's like a whole cascade up and down the chain of command, if you want to call it a chain of command. So everyone's on board. But then, of course, in the partial regiment, pre-jump insertion, everyone's briefed on the plan. So you know it's a thing from the regiment. You know, airborne initiative If your commander's not there, how are you going to step up and carry out that mission?

Adrian Stratta:

Well, I don't necessarily see that in the commercial world, necessarily, although I've got a quantifier that I know, you're, you're, you know I'm going to say about it is that how does the military mind then compare to the commercial world? But just finishing on the mission command, there's all these actions on and so forth. So it's a mindset of how you're, you're, passing information from. This is your mission, this is what you're going to do down to a tactical action, and it's that cordial thread, that golden thread that's going to operate all the way through the business. So all elements of that organization can't be siloed because they're all tied together by the mission. It's a very agile and flexible organization. I'm in the Parachute Regiment and we have our airborne gunners, we have our airborne artillery, we get signals, we get logistics. All those things are bolted together to create the mission and they're constantly changing. So it's a bit of this, a bit of that. We form, reform, restore, norm, train and you build up trust. So it's a training thing. That's because in the military, this is what I was going to go on to say. We think in a collective way, we think in a we, it's we, we are going to achieve it. Whether it's me or somebody else, it's irrelevant, we are going to do that.

Adrian Stratta:

Whereas in the commercial world and this is what I say in my book is that the commercial people, they're at the contact battle 20, they're fighting that war all the way through and then and it's attritional they're going to do x, y and z. Yes, new companies could come and they could be. They, they can rewrite the rule book, etc. Etc. And they don't have their legacy issues. But that's the point.

Adrian Stratta:

Everyone in the commercial world is individually focused about what they can do, because they can't stop and collectively train.

Adrian Stratta:

You can't take BP away from being BP, train them up and put them back in as BP 2.0.

Adrian Stratta:

You just can't do that. What you can do is take people out, so you can take someone out from their role in that business and train them up, but then they go back to the same business appointment that they left, with the same constraints and everything else around them. So you've got to think differently about how does the individual develop and nurture their skills and bring those other attributes from other parts of business together. And that's that back to your Vukka uncertainty and how to do that and there's various ways and that's where the mission command. Well, that's just adapting to making sure that people don't operate in a silo, but they're rewarded as individuals as well. So my bonus as a sales representative is to go and win that business, never mind if that business completely throws the rest of the organization out of whack and it's misaligned and it misses its targets. I've got my bonus and I've been rewarded. So it's got to have a collective element to it and I think that's been an interesting learning point all the way through.

Mark Blackwell:

There are ways in which you can make commercial organizations more collective. If you have a leader that focuses on communicating what is the vision and mission of the organization, it starts making people unable to do something. So there's two statistics One of them you said is there was an Australian study and they gave the executives who should know what's going, a multiple choice test and only 28% of them could recognize their company's strategy, vision and mission level strategy in a choice of four multiple choice options. Many statistics to show that really, we might good at communicating annual budgets that's the targets but we're not so good at communicating. This is the high level goal and this is the high level strategy in which to get there. So you can do it, because the other thing what happens is you must have seen them as a parachute regiment the plane drops out, but the gunners land in the wrong place, the radio is broken or whatever horror story I'm sure you can tell me and they have to make decisions on their own.

Adrian Stratta:

but exactly, and that's my point yeah, that's exactly my point, that everyone's told what the mission is and their part and their part in the mission, and if you, if they can see the sort of how it stitches together of what, what could happen, because nothing will go to plan and that's the inherent reality of warfare really, or even peacemaking, the whole, you know, whatever environment example you want to give. But I think that's right. I think everyone's given the budget mark and and and in commercial worlds and and they're told and everything's measured in a financial way. What I loved about the balanced scorecard argument, it was financial and non-financial. In fact, the financial targets are only a quarter of all the targets employed. How very interesting. And in order to do the balanced scorecard, I'm not going to leverage on that, just on that thing, but it was a way. Do you understand your engagement and part in the business? But it was a way. Do you understand your engagement and part in the business? And actually, do you know who you're interoperating with, if that's such a word? So it brought people together in a planning process, but it was very hard. It was very hard to get it rolled out into the way people are thinking and the old military used to have this.

Adrian Stratta:

What is the moral component of warfare? Does everyone understand why we're here to fight or what we're here to do? I mean, we don't do that in the commercial world. You don't sit people down like you did with Barry, and say, right, barry, you're here to fly this plane from A to B. And what are you here to do? Is it to empower that businessman in the back or take that person on holiday or what? Who cares? I'm just there to fly the plane because that's my part in the wider business process of going from A to B. I think it's more than that. I think Barry completely understood that actually he's invested in getting that plane from A to B in the smoothest possible way, not only for his own outcome but for the outcome of his passengers. And they recognised it was a team play on the aircraft as much as it was the wider air traffic and engineering and fuelling and all that sort of stuff. And I think that's one example.

Adrian Stratta:

But then you're operating in a sort of slightly closed environment of an airline or a transport company because you're in that area, although you're operating in other people's space, but you're you're in an environment that you can various control some of it. In business it's completely different in some regards, because if you're trying to sell computers or whatever is, my computer is better than another computer, so there's a quality issue of your intellectual property, if you like. Will people buy it for that price point? So there's so many, many more variables in some regards you've got to come across, overcome and um, yeah, everyone's got variables to deal with, but how do you deal with variables?

Adrian Stratta:

Therefore, you get expert silos that only see part of the business in in that sort of not necessarily myopic way, but they can see that that. So how do you bring all that together? How do you stitch all that together? My earlier argument if you give them the overall, we all understand the strategy and their part in the strategy. That's the bit that's missing for me. If everyone understood their role in the wider plan, therefore, it shouldn't become as a shock.

Mark Blackwell:

So I'm just about to expose my military incompetence and lack of knowledge here. But you know I'm thinking in the military, you know. You say we've got to attack this position three miles away and we're going to do a left flanking attack, not a right flanking attack or whatever right, so for me that's competent to me.

Mark Blackwell:

So that's a simple rule. So if you do get landed in the wrong place, you know that this mission is going to be in a right flanking mode and so that you can adapt by knowing that rule. So look at some you know. Look at the classic business examples you find at experts like easyjet or or southwest airlines. They know we are, our rule is we are going to win by being no-frills service. So if you find yourself somewhere in New Mexico ordering the food supplies or whatever it is for the next flight, you know what the high-level rule is. So you're likely to make a good choice in what you're doing. It's the same am I going a left-flanking attack or a right-flanking attack? But far too often in business you ask people and they don't even know if they're winning by left-flanking or right-flanking. All they know is they've got to try to win the budget.

Adrian Stratta:

So that's the feedback loop, isn't it? It's the. Are they getting the right feedback loop? Here's an irony that EasyJet transport more business passengers than they do holiday makers. Yeah, which is an irony, isn't it? Whereas Ryanair is completely opposite. So what is it about? No frills? There's really no frills, or, but actually you would argue it's destination.

Adrian Stratta:

Point to point yeah so if you're Ryanair and you're going to a European city and you land 50 miles outside that European city and it takes just as long to get in, or it is a flexibility and upgrade so you can have the speedy boarding and you can have the seat allocation.

Mark Blackwell:

But isn't that clever?

Adrian Stratta:

Yes, Because your price is actually being stretched. Now we're flogging you a flight for 30 quid, but actually it costs you 300 quid to get from A to B. How does that work?

Mark Blackwell:

But for me there are simple policies, whereas businesses that fail, they get lost. Because if you ask 10 people in the business what's our mission, you know how are we going to win at high level? There is no answer.

Adrian Stratta:

And I find it amazing. I mean, I was the business transformation director of a large transport company that had all versions of all formats of travel, 27,000 employees across Europe, you know, and individually within that it's a federated business as well. So company x wanted to do so. So you know, actually, to this there's no, you do it this way. So so how do you get people on board? And I think that's the fascinating way. I mean, that was transport, so it's taking people from a to b largely, you know your customer, yes, or your, sorry, your stakeholder is public sector, because it's the local authority that's providing a grant for providing that service. And then you obviously people pay. So it's a complicated billing environment, if you want to call that. How do you get people on board? How do you get the customer service? How do you get all those people to say it's a good train ride or a bus ride or whatever ride works? So how do you mandate that? How do you mandate the efficiency of the business? How do you mandate the engineering of that business?

Adrian Stratta:

So many different modes of of of getting people employed, and I would wager a lot of time and effort was spent on getting the strategy out and understood, I reckon I still reckon your statistic of 28. Why is it 28? I'd take issue with that as well, but uh, but you know how come that only a third really understand the strategy? Because it's not relevant. If you're driving a train or a bus, actually, do I really need to understand the strategy? Well, well, yes, you do, I would argue, but but how, where and why and where is that relevant?

Adrian Stratta:

And what we used to do to make increase efficiency was we used to have these communities of experts, expertise. So you'd bring the engineering people together, you get the driver productivity people together and they would have their forums and and so forth, and you'd integrate the two. So it's that cross fertilization of ideas and the impact of your driver on that engineering and so forth. And then fuel efficiency Well, if you've got a heavy lead foot, we can measure your lead foot. So you're using technology again.

Adrian Stratta:

So actually the whole thing was a coaching environment where, yes, we might have been in the head office trying to direct something, but actually we're passing that down. So it's that whole servant leadership, that whole devolving and empowering. So the point of the spear of that business was actually the driver, the most important person, or the pilot of the plane, which is Barry. Right, he's the point of the spear and he's actually conveying that strategy to the passenger. How are we enabling him and I think that's taken your OODA loop completely in full circle and you're starting at the other end to make sure they understand the strategy- If I think about what is happening in the modern business world again, I see patterns in the military.

Mark Blackwell:

So the military has always sent out scouts and people as far away to the outside to be the information gathering sources. That's how information is gathered, whereas old-fashioned businesses start to think, oh well, there's going to be a centralized unit of competitive intelligence and they'll gather documents, whereas the reality is information on what is happening, on how to win, is at the coalface, it's at the extremities. Maybe is there anything, as you look back on your time, about information gathering that could be applicable to modern business it's huge.

Adrian Stratta:

I mean, the point about the military is where and how do you um amalgamate your forces to apply greater power over and above your energy? And if your enemy in a traditional I mean second world war or even first world war you're all in trenches and you're shooting at each other, or or in the old days where you're marching with a little drummer band and Napoleonic were forced to close and beat the hell out of each other, that was quite interesting. The modern military is diffuse, it's a complete spread. And actually Afghanistan, iraq, dare we say, northern Ireland, who is your enemy? And how do you understand that enemy? And it's a very. Who is the enemy today is the ally of tomorrow.

Adrian Stratta:

You go to the modern conflicts of the Middle East or Ukraine. Who would have thought we'd have war in Europe again? So how do you get that intelligence? And it's a whole cascade. I mean, no plan is written without the intelligent assessment. So actually the intelligence is gold dust and so it should be for business.

Adrian Stratta:

So what's happening out there? You've got the human intelligence of the people at the front line. What are they seeing, what are they having? How's that getting filtered back and digested? You know, you told me to attack that hill. Actually, there's twice the number of enemies on that hill. What are we feeling? That's not going to work, so intelligence me on that hill.

Adrian Stratta:

When we realize that's not going to work, so intelligence is is absolutely critical, as it is um in in planning your logistics. I mean, the military, like business, likes to concentrate its resources in certain areas where it can then overwhelm its components, um, and if it's diffuse, or you can't pin the tail on the donkey, as it were, because it's walking around and disappearing, that's a very hard scenario to operate within. So then, the corollary of that, what then you have to do is empower the lower-level commanders to bring back that information and tell you that's your sales forces out there doing information and feeding that back. But then how do you collate and how do you bring all that information back? So you know, intelligence is only information that's been assessed and gathered and organized, and organized, absolutely no different to business that's what I mean.

Mark Blackwell:

you know, in mccrystal's team of teams. He talks making it a regular discipline of common dashboards that everyone has access to the same information, and the goal of a leader is share. You know that is share and make sure the system is sharing so that people in the line of battle can make the right decisions with the right level of information and up-to-date information.

Adrian Stratta:

But in a commercial terms, and that works for military, obviously, because it's lives. But in a commercial I'm the sales director and I'm going to do a sneaky little deal over here that's going to make me a lot of money because I'll get bonus on that way. And do I need to share my information? That's my gold dust and that's the theory that's the breakdown of. You've got to sort of stop that behavior as best you can because that could actually well okay, well done to the businessman to get that extra contract. But is that helping the business and where does it fit? And it'd be a very hard organization to say no, you can't have that business. I mean, you've got to adapt and accept it as much as you can.

Adrian Stratta:

I was working in an airline business, turning it around from loss to profit and we won a bit of business. But actually that bit of business useful, well done actually increased our cost and our overheads significantly and it really did not fit with our business plan. So we had to spend money to make that work. So it was not a useful bit of business to to win. We still did it and made it work, but it really not choosing your fight, which fights you want to.

Mark Blackwell:

Not every battle is worth winning, you know to win the principle of war. Yes, indeed Brilliant. Adrian has really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. If you were going to give a new business person three bits of advice from your lessons in the military as they're starting out their commercial career, what would they be?

Adrian Stratta:

You've got me there. Well, you've got two of these and one of these. So listen, understand your environment. So, listen and understand your environment. Don't be dogmatic, actually be utterly flexible and listen to and understand what happens. So so, listen, understand your environment and then actually have a bit of confidence to ask questions. So ask. So I think they're more soft, soft points rather than hard skill sets understand your environment, listen and learn. But actually, if you see an opportunity, don't grab it and don't be share it, don't be selfish about it. Share it because, uh, you could be the next hero, but you'll be a hero amongst the team brilliant, fabulous.

Mark Blackwell:

Thanks for that. A great conversation. Looking forward to more and by the final plug for your book, please yes.

Adrian Stratta:

Oh, absolutely Dusty Boots to Bordram. Follow your dreams, it's on Amazon now, great.

Mark Blackwell:

See you later. Thanks a lot, cheers, bye, bye, brilliant, thank you.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Mark Blackwell

Host