War, PowerPoint, and hypnotised chickens

Standards and templates at work in a military staff

Abstract

This article discusses concepts to explore decision-making processes in a military headquarters. Military planning is commonly perceived as a systematic and structured approach to organising ways and means to achieve military ends. While standardised procedures and decision-making tools are crucial for large military organisations to function efficiently, these devices are not neutral. Routines within the staff organisation carry implicit beliefs shaping the perception of war as a managerial problem with an optimal solution that can be elicited through a process and presented in a bulleted list. By examining organisational outcomes as socio-material assemblages, this article sheds light on how daily routines influence potential solutions and shape what can and cannot be thought. Conventional approaches in organisational studies have either overlooked the role of organisational tools or studied them as a matter of technology adoption. The entanglement of the social and material in organisational life should be observed and described empirically to understand how order is reconstructed after it has broken down.