The art of command lies in making intentions clear. – Bernard Montgomery
Most of us can think of a committee report or department directive that everyone agreed with—and then quietly moved on from. Execution is hard.
The final step in the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) is issuing an order to execute the agreed‑upon course of action (COA). In the Army, the most formal way to communicate that plan is through an Operations Order, or OPORD. Creating and disseminating a commander’s approved plan is its own demanding process.
One practical advantage the military has—especially before a deployment or during extended training cycles—is time. We were not constrained by an eight‑hour workday or the assumption that weekends were off‑limits. When the work needed to get done, we stayed until it was done. That reality makes producing something as detailed as an OPORD possible in a compressed window. Higher education quite reasonably operates under different constraints, and that places limits on how literally we can adopt the tool. But even in a simplified version, this is not trivial work.
The underlying need remains the same in a community college. Having an executable plan for an approved course of action—one where everyone understands their role, the expectations placed on them, and how both individual performance and mission success will be assessed—is just as critical as coming up with a thoughtful strategy in the first place.
Higher education institutions are full of good ideas: strategic plans, task forces, committees, initiatives with carefully crafted names and polished logos. And yet, execution often falters. The reasons are familiar—competing priorities, unclear roles, unshared assumptions, fuzzy communication, or a lack of clarity about what success actually looks like. An OPORD helps bridge the gap between planning and execution.
At its core, an OPORD is structured without being rigid. It is designed for imperfect conditions. It assumes teams are distributed, busy, and not all sitting in the same room. Used well, it can be a powerful tool.
Writing an OPORD does not guarantee success. History offers plenty of reminders of that reality, including the U.S. military’s withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan. But a well‑written and well‑disseminated order does guarantee something important: no one on the team is confused about what is supposed to happen. Think of it as the transition point from vision to action.
Action itself is never automatic. But one thing I see consistently in community colleges is strong leadership. Strong leadership combined with shared understanding of the mission will take you most of the way toward achieving meaningful outcomes.
For the purposes of this series, I’ll use a simplified OPORD structure:
Situation: The context, front and center.
Mission: The short, specific, and time‑bound objective.
Execution: Who does what, when, and why.
Sustainment / Command and Signal: Resources, communication, and continuity. Remember the PACE plan from the last post? What happens when leaders move on in the middle of an initiative?
I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: the military does not automatically do things better. What it does have is experience earned in the ultimate school of hard knocks. There are lessons there that can be selectively and thoughtfully borrowed.
One of those lessons is this: agreement is not the same as understanding. A course of action coming out of MDMP reflects alignment at the leadership level. Understanding is achieved only when everyone knows what the plan means for them. That is why we issued OPORDs—and why the concept translates so well beyond the wire.
In the next post, I’ll start where every good OPORD starts: the Situation. Before we talk about tasks, timelines, or metrics, we need to be clear about context—what conditions exist, what constraints matter, and what assumptions we may be carrying without realizing it. Fortunately, a solid MDMP provides most of the context an OPORD needs. In higher education, getting the situation right is often the difference between a plan that looks good on paper and one that actually survives contact with reality.
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