What to Do & What NOT to Do: Military Lessons Applied - LCI Congress Chris Fussell Presentation Take-Aways

In this 2017 episode, I used a Chris Fussell keynote to name a familiar construction failure in plain language: acting alone. The phrase mattered because late owner questions, uncoordinated design, and isolated field fixes all start to look different once the team sees them as a shared-awareness problem.

Acting alone is a communication design problem

In the episode, I said, "Now, we call these instances acting alone." The point was not personality. It was the way siloed communication lets important information sit with one person too long.

Shared awareness is different from central control

Chris contrasted central control with a system where people share enough information to act independently and accurately at their level. That is different from isolated execution. A project can have active people and still fail to learn if the wider team never gets the signal in time.

Move the question upstream

His example of daily windows of shared consciousness points to a simple project question: when did this issue first become visible, and what kept it from moving earlier? Tracing one recurring late question back to that point is a better review than counting messages after the fact.