Week 18 Day 7: Assignment: Write Commander's Intent for Your Current Top Priority

Take your team's top priority right now. Write two sentences: what needs to happen and why it matters. Then add no more than three constraints -- the non-negotiable boundaries. Share what you wrote with your team and ask: 'Does this match your understanding of what we are trying to accomplish?' The gap between your intent and their understanding is the clarity gap you need to close.

Here is the exercise template. Write your answers before reading further. Priority name: [one phrase]. Sentence one (the what): 'We need to [desired end state] by [timeframe].' Sentence two (the why): 'This matters because [specific, time-sensitive reason].' Constraints: (1) [non-negotiable boundary], (2) [non-negotiable boundary], (3) [non-negotiable boundary]. Now test it. Show what you wrote to two people on your team without explaining it verbally. Ask them to tell you back what they think the priority is, why it matters, and what the boundaries are. If their version matches yours, your intent is clear. If it does not, revise until it does. The verbal explanation is the cheat -- if you need to explain what you wrote, the writing is not clear enough. Add the final Commander's Intent statement to your Leadership Operating Manual under a section titled 'Current Commander's Intent.' Update it whenever the top priority changes. Over time, you will build a library of intent statements that documents not just what your team worked on but why it mattered. This connects to the Value Pyramid from Week 11 -- Commander's Intent is how the pyramid's logic gets communicated to the team in actionable form.

The write-then-test protocol follows what educational researchers call 'retrieval practice' (Roediger and Butler, 2011) -- the finding that actively producing information (writing the intent) and then testing comprehension (asking others to repeat it back) produces significantly deeper learning than passive review. The instruction to avoid verbal explanation during the test addresses what communication researchers call 'grounding' (Clark and Brennan, 1991) -- the collaborative process through which conversational partners establish mutual understanding. In verbal communication, grounding happens automatically through real-time feedback, clarification, and repair. In written communication, the text must stand alone, which forces the writer to be more explicit and complete. The exercise template's structure deliberately mirrors the Army's format for Commander's Intent in Field Manual 5-0: purpose (why), key tasks (constraints), and end state (what) -- adapted for civilian organizational contexts. The instruction to build a library of intent statements over time creates what Weick (1995) calls an 'enactment archive' -- a record of past sensemaking episodes that enriches future sensemaking by providing analogies and templates. The cross-reference to Week 11's Value Pyramid reinforces the course's structural principle of connecting frameworks: Commander's Intent is the communication mechanism through which the Value Pyramid's logic reaches the people who execute.