I'm very concerned that my students understand how to "front-load 30 percent." This is a skill that many of the Type A personalities who populate the military, and politics, have not mastered. The inability to front-load 30 percent has caused the loss of many lives, both U.S. and Iraqi, in our current imbroglio.
 
Front-loading 30 percent involves two concepts. First, that in presenting a brief or an argument, you have to be clear immediately what your point is. That's the front-loading part. The military sometimes expresses this with the near-acronym BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front. (I'm also fond of KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid.) This by itself is a learned skill: you'd be surprised how many people have never gotten it through their heads that in transmitting information, what counts is not their personal experience in arriving at their conclusions, but only the conclusions, and their justification. I express this with a picture of a birthday cake: when the lights go down and people begin to sing "Happy Birthday," what you'd better carry through the door is the finished birthday cake. Not the flour, the eggs, the milk, and a story about how, at some point, you could combine them. The cake. And it had better say "Happy Birthday."
 
So learning how to front-load is step number one. Still, most of the aggressive, in-your-face people the military so prizes get this one fairly quickly: the ability to come on strong goes with the personality type, after all. The sticking point is the 30 percent.
 
This second skill involves understanding that front-loading  does not mean, as many Type A personalities apparently think, that what has to be front-loaded is always 100 percent. You can front-load any amount on the scale from 0 to 100 percent. (Note to the wise: reality rarely justifies l00 percent.) The force and clarity of your presentation has nothing to do with certainty about your conclusion. You can front-load 30 percent, or for that matter 2 percent, or yes, 95 percent.
 
If you're "fairly sure" you have evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, you say you're "fairly sure." (I'd call this front-loading 60 percent.) If it's "highly possible" that your troops will be greeted as liberators, you say that (I put "highly possible" at about 25 percent). If your wildest dream, best-possible-case, scenario is that the whole operation will be a "slam-dunk," you front-load that at 5 percent. And then you outline the other possible scenarios. What you don't say is that the operation will be a "slam-dunk" and let it go at that. That's confusing the need to be clear about your bottom line (BLUF) with l00 percent surety.
 
Front-loading 30 percent goes against the grain for many Type A personalities. If you're presenting something, you want to be very enthusiastic, very sure, very "modo" (motivational).  It seems difficult to be modo with 30 percent. Not to mention wimpy. 
 
But you're not being wimpy in front-loading 30 percent. The world is. And you know what? The world is almost always, in this sense, wimpy. It doesn't offer absolute certainty. Not, at any rate, in war, where the enemy is always trying to undo your best-laid plans. Remember Clausewitz's "fog of war"? If something can go wrong in battle, it will. Go ahead: start with a plan. It makes you feel you control things. But you can be pretty sure too (that's 85-90 percent) you can just tear it up after five minutes.
 
Part of the reason the ability to front-load 30 percent is in such short supply just where it's most necessary - I mean in the military, where over-reaching and false optimism quickly lead to loss of life-is that very few JOs are rewarded for being able to do it. A good deal of being a good JO, as a former JO buddy of mine noted, was "being able to figure out what the CO wanted before s/he said it and have it on the desk when s/he came in." You look for ways to please. And the usual way to please in a military (or political) command situation is to tell the boss what s/he wants to hear. The CO is pleased with the JO, and the JO gets stroked. Everybody's happy, until events prove them all wrong. People die, and everybody still alive looks like an idiot. (In the military, they don't lose their jobs either, they just carry on to the next time they do it wrong.)
 
The way the CO's approval is frequently expressed is by saying that JO "X" is a "team player." The translation of this is usually, X says what I want to hear.  It ought to mean: X front-loads only the amount s/he has back-up for.
 
Here's what it usually looks like to the JO or staff member. Your CO, who might be the Commander-in-Chief, wants to hear l00 percent. You're only certain about 30 percent. You might feel uneasy about going for more, but it's the CO's pet conviction, and in the heat of presentation you confuse getting the bottom line up front, the finished cake, with front-loading l00 percent. Somehow it just feels better to be absolutely totally positive. The CO is beaming, and you get complimented for being a "team player." Looks like a "slam-dunk" to me.
 
Here's another example of when you will have to remind yourself about how to front-load 30 percent. It involves interpreting recon photos. You look and look, comparing these photos with others where a certain blob has been shown to be a mountain, and this there is clearly a stream. So those you have pretty close to l00 percent on those. But that building in the middle? Is it a school or the WMD? Sure, could be some fiendish form of WMD. A trailer used for portable testing, say. (15 percent, perhaps.) But it could also be temporary housing for a school (also 15 percent--or higher). If it's a school, your boss doesn't get to say he's found WMD. And you know that's what s/he wants you to find. What do you front-load?
 
For me this is a major impasse of military ethics. If it's 30 percent you front-load 30 percent. If 15 percent, then 15 percent.  No excuses, sir/ma'am. You don't go for 100 percent just because you know it'll make your CO happy.

No, nothing but your code of ethics and sense of professionalism are preventing you from saying you believe it to be l00 percent. But if those little things don't stop you, you're in the wrong profession.

If you go for the 30 percent you can back up, and you see the disappointed look on the CO's face, so what? You may not get a medal, but you'll survive, with your honor intact, perhaps a few less lives on your conscience, and with the knowledge that you will, in fact, have upheld the highest traditions of the military. 
 
That's from the JO perspective. COs, for their part, need to cut back on the pressure for staff members to be team players, which they're going to interpret as telling you what you want to hear. Better, don't "want" to hear anything but the truth. Demand that staff use the whole scale, 0-100 percent, and be able to justify their decision for a particular number.

When the military works, this is what it does. When it doesn't, it always front-loads l00 percent and rewards the "team players." That works fine until all of a sudden it becomes clear the whole team is in deep kim-chee.

I think it's clear which version of the military we want fighting our battles.