Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

The trouble was, as a new SEAL officer in training, The PLO is for
the boys concept simply hadn’t held true. In training scenarios I had
encountered, the PLO or OPORD brief had, in reality, always seemed to
be about impressing the instructors or the senior officer in the room with
our PowerPoint prowess. Through more than a year and a half of training
in the SEAL pipeline, there were always SEAL instructors and/or SEAL
officers sitting in on the brief to evaluate. Without fail, the instructor
staff would tear apart our plan and, in particular, our brief, hitting every
detail. Their criticism focused mostly on the presentation slides
themselves, with one clear message: there needed to be more—more
slides, more graphs, more timelines, more charts, more phase diagrams,
more imagery, more everything. It was humbling but also overwhelming.
As a junior officer in a SEAL platoon, my job was to oversee the plan
and put together the OPORD brief to best capture the tactical plan
developed by our SEAL chief, a number of key players within the
platoon, and me. I would compile all the information together into a
Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and along with those key players
deliver it to the operators in the SEAL platoon and troop that would
execute the mission. While the junior SEAL operators were preparing
gear and the SEAL chiefs and leading petty officers were debating
tactics and figuring out who was in charge of what portion of the
mission, the officers worked on PowerPoint slides to assemble all this
information into a brief.
Military mission planning seemed daunting. There were so many
moving pieces and parts to every combat operation; so many variables.
The OPORD briefing format we were given was developed for a 96-hour
planning cycle: it assumed we would have at least four days to prepare
for a combat mission. The format consisted of more than seventy