Intent Is Not Inspiration – The leaders who scale are not the ones who make the most decisions — they are the ones who make their intent clear enough that other people can decide without them.

Most leadership advice treats intent as a motivational flourish — the inspiring “why” you bolt on after the real work of setting targets and handing out tasks.

That gets it backwards.

Intent is not the decoration on top of a plan. It is the thing that holds the plan together once the plan starts to fail. And every plan starts to fail.

Instructions do not survive contact with reality

I have watched detailed plans break in four different eras — mainframe to client-server, on-prem to cloud, waterfall to agile, and now AI. The technology changed completely each time. The failure mode did not. Someone wrote down exactly what should happen, reality did something else, and the people on the ground were left holding instructions that no longer fit.

Stephen Bungay calls this the alignment gap: the difference between what you want people to do and what they actually do. He argues it cannot be closed by writing more detailed instructions — more detail just creates more things that can be wrong by the time anyone acts.

The idea is older than Bungay. It comes from the Prussian army under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who accepted that no plan survives first contact and built a command philosophy around it — Auftragstaktik. Tell people what to achieve and why. Let them work out how, in the moment, with the information they actually have.

That is not a loss of control. It is the only control that holds when the situation moves.

Intent Is Not Inspiration – Intent is the thing that travels

The US Army still runs on this. Its doctrine defines commander’s intent as a clear, concise expression of the purpose of an operation and the end state it wants — specifically so subordinates can act to achieve the desired results “without further orders, even when the operation does not unfold as planned.”

Read that last clause again. The whole point of intent is the moment the plan breaks.

L. David Marquet made the same discovery on a nuclear submarine. He gave an order that could not be carried out, and the officer started to carry it out anyway — because he had been trained to obey, not to think. Marquet’s fix was a phrase: “I intend to…” Instead of asking permission, his crew stated what they meant to do and why, then acted. Responsibility moved to the people closest to the problem.

Stanley McChrystal scaled the same principle across a whole task force: shared consciousness so everyone understood the purpose, then empowered execution so they could act on it. Eyes on, hands off.

In every case the leader’s job is the same — make the intent clear enough that it can travel to where you are not.

Intent Is Not Inspiration – Why most leaders give instructions instead

If intent works this well, why is it so rare?

Because instructions feel safer. Telling someone exactly what to do gives the comforting illusion that you still control the outcome. Explaining why you want it is harder, slower, and exposes your reasoning to challenge.

It is easier to say “do this” than to say “here is what I am trying to achieve, here is why it matters, and here is what I am willing to trade away to get it.”

So leaders default to the how. Then the situation shifts, the how stops making sense, and either the work stalls or someone quietly does the wrong thing correctly — which is worse.

What clear intent actually requires

Intent is not a slogan on a slide. It is a discipline, and it is more demanding than giving orders, not less.

When I set intent now, I make myself answer four questions out loud:

• What outcome am I actually after — described so I would know it if I saw it?
• Why does it matter — what becomes possible if we get it, or breaks if we don’t?
• What are the hard constraints — the lines that do not move?
• What am I deliberately not optimising for — so people know what they are allowed to sacrifice?

If I cannot answer those, the problem is not my team’s initiative. It is that I have not finished my own thinking, and I am about to outsource that gap to people who will fill it with guesses.

The test is simple: could someone act well on this with me out of the room? If not, I have given them a task, not an intent.

Intent is becoming the job

This used to be a leadership nicety. It is turning into the core of the work.

As execution gets cheaper — automated, distributed, increasingly handed to AI tools that will produce a competent output from a weak instruction — the scarce input is no longer the doing. It is knowing what is worth doing and why, stated clearly enough that a person or a system can run with it.

An AI tool will happily generate a confident answer to a badly framed intent. So will an anxious junior. The cost of unclear intent has not gone away; it has gone up, because the output now arrives faster and looks more finished.

The most valuable thing a leader produces is no longer the decision. It is the intent that lets good decisions be made without them.

Sources used

• Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results (Nicholas Brealey, 2010) — the knowledge, alignment and effects gaps; Auftragstaktik and von Moltke. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL29748305M/Art_of_Action
• L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (Portfolio/Penguin, 2012) — intent-based leadership and the “I intend to…” practice. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314163/turn-the-ship-around-by-l-david-marquet/
• General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015) — shared consciousness and empowered execution; “eyes on, hands off”. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529127-team-of-teams
• Headquarters, Department of the Army, ADP 6-0: Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces (2019) — definition of commander’s intent. Official Army Publishing Directorate page: https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/Details.aspx?PUB_ID=1007502 — direct PDF: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-0-000-WEB-3.pdf