--- title: "Plan, Prepare, Execute, Assess: What the U.S. Army Operations Process and Peak OS Share About Organizational Execution" url: "https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/plan-prepare-execute-assess-what-the-u-s-army-operations-process-and-peak-os-sha" author: "Jeff James Martin" organization: "Collective Genius" date_published: "2026-08-30T07:00:50.207Z" date_modified: "2026-08-30T07:00:50.207Z" reading_time_minutes: 13 cluster: "Organizational Execution" tags: ["Organizational Execution", "Peak OS", "Operating Rhythm", "Decision Making", "Organizational Intelligence", "Continuous Improvement", "Mission-Critical Teams"] description: "Explore how the U.S. Army Operations Process and Peak OS connect planning, execution, assessment, decisions, and adaptation in complex organizations." --- # Plan, Prepare, Execute, Assess: What the U.S. Army Operations Process and Peak OS Share About Organizational Execution The U.S. Army Operations Process and Peak OS were developed in very different environments, yet both connect planning to preparation, execution, continuous assessment, decision-making, and adaptation. Army doctrine describes an ongoing cycle of planning, preparing, executing, and assessing. Peak OS creates a comparable organizational execution cycle through long-term planning, OKRs and KPIs, Weekly Camp, Triage, Team Surveys, and recurring quarterly, semiannual, and annual planning. One of the most important ideas in U.S. Army doctrine is also one of the easiest ideas for growing companies to overlook: **A plan is not an operating system.** The Army's Operations Process is built around four connected activities: **planning, preparing, executing, and continuously assessing**. Commanders and staffs use that process to understand changing situations, make decisions, direct action, evaluate results, and adjust as necessary. The activities may be described separately, but they operate as a continuous system rather than as isolated management events. That distinction immediately stood out to me when comparing Army doctrine with Peak OS. Peak OS was not developed from Army doctrine. It emerged from more than two decades of working with hundreds of founders, CEOs, investors, and leadership teams and observing the recurring operating habits that distinguished teams that executed consistently from those that struggled as complexity increased. Yet the systems converge around an important idea: **Planning creates direction. Operating rhythm turns direction into execution. Assessment creates learning. Decisions turn learning into adaptation.** For military and former-military leaders now building companies—especially in aerospace, defense, robotics, advanced manufacturing, autonomy, and other frontier technologies—the logic may feel familiar. ## The Army Operations Process Is Bigger Than Planning There is an important doctrinal distinction worth making for readers familiar with Army terminology. The Army's **ADP 5-0, The Operations Process**, describes the larger framework of planning, preparing, executing, and continuously assessing. In 2022, the Army reintroduced **FM 5-0, Planning and Orders Production**, as a dedicated planning manual containing tools such as the Military Decision-Making Process, troop leading procedures, running estimates, and planning products. That separation is meaningful. Planning matters enormously, but planning is only one part of execution. Growth companies frequently make the opposite assumption. They invest heavily in annual planning, establish a strategy, create a set of priorities, communicate the plan to the organization—and then expect execution to take care of itself. Three months later, priorities have drifted. A product launch depends on an Engineering milestone that has moved. Sales is operating from assumptions Product no longer shares. Hiring has changed the capacity model. A customer has created an unexpected opportunity. A funding timeline has shifted. The plan still exists, but the environment around it has changed. The problem is not necessarily that the annual plan was wrong. The problem is that the organization treated **planning as an event rather than execution as a continuous process**. That is precisely what both the Army Operations Process and Peak OS are designed to prevent. ## Peak OS Also Connects Planning to an Execution Cycle In Peak, long-term direction and short-term execution are deliberately connected. The Mission establishes why the organization exists. The Three-Year Vision establishes where the company intends to go. The One-Year Plan defines what success should look like at the nearer horizon. Quarterly or semiannual OKRs then establish the focused outcomes the organization is pursuing next. But Peak does not stop there. The system continues through Weekly Camp, KPI and OKR reviews, Triage, Team Surveys, Quarterly or Semiannual Sessions, and the Annual Session. The result is a repeated process of planning, execution, review, decision-making, learning, and adjustment. The *Peak Teams* framework describes the cadence as a recurring cycle of repetition, review, and reflection rather than something completed once per year. That is one of the strongest parallels with the Army Operations Process. In both systems, the plan creates the initial framework for action. Then reality begins providing information. The organization's ability to execute depends on what it does with that information. ## Planning: Create the Direction Before You Start Moving The planning component is the most obvious parallel. Army doctrine describes the Operations Process as a means for commanders and staffs to understand the operational environment, visualize an end state and approach, make decisions, and direct operations. Peak addresses the business version of this problem through Mission, Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, and OKRs. A leadership team first creates enough shared understanding to answer: Where are we going? What will success look like? What matters most during the next stage of the journey? What capabilities must we build? Who owns the outcomes? How do the different functions contribute to the whole? These questions become increasingly important as the organization grows because the company stops being a single team and becomes a **team of teams**. At that point, CEO intent alone cannot coordinate the organization. Engineering, Product, Sales, Manufacturing, Operations, Finance, People, Customer Success, and other teams have their own expertise, constraints, priorities, and time horizons. The plan has to establish enough common context for those teams to make hundreds of smaller decisions without continually returning to the CEO. Peak's planning process also draws information upward before leadership planning and sends the resulting plan back through functional and divisional teams afterward. Those teams think through the plan, challenge assumptions, identify dependencies, refine their own objectives, and provide feedback into the broader organizational picture. *Peak Teams* describes this bottoms-up involvement and cross-functional discussion as an important part of creating alignment rather than merely cascading goals. The output of planning is therefore not simply a document. It is **shared understanding sufficient for coordinated action**. ## Preparing: A Plan Has to Become Executable Preparation is where the Army comparison becomes more interesting. Army doctrine separates preparing from planning because deciding what to do does not mean the organization is ready to do it. Preparation includes activities that improve the force's ability to execute the plan before and during operations. The larger Operations Process explicitly connects preparation with planning, execution, and assessment rather than treating preparation as administrative work after planning is complete. Peak contains a similar principle. Before Annual, Quarterly, or Semiannual Sessions, teams do pre-planning work. They review their areas, gather input from sub-teams, reflect on results, complete Team Surveys, and prepare their thinking before the leadership team meets. Preparation also continues after leadership planning. The initial company plan moves back through the organization. Functional teams consider what the company-level objectives mean for their own work. They identify what must be true for execution to succeed. They surface resources, constraints, timing issues, and cross-functional dependencies. A company may establish an objective to launch a new hardware platform, for example. That objective is not executable merely because leadership agreed to it. Engineering may need specific technical milestones. Manufacturing may require supplier commitments. Quality may need a new validation process. Finance may need to release capital. People may need to fill specialized roles. Business Development may have commitments tied to delivery dates. Program Management may have customer or government milestones that constrain sequencing. The act of pushing the plan through the team-of-teams structure creates another level of understanding. This is one reason Peak planning does not end when leadership leaves the room. **Preparation converts strategic agreement into organizational readiness.** ## Execution: The Plan Meets Reality Army doctrine defines execution as putting the plan into action. But the doctrine does not assume execution means mechanically following the original plan. Commanders and staffs continue to assess conditions and make decisions during execution as the situation changes. That distinction is fundamental to Peak as well. The purpose of the Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, and OKRs is not to create a document everyone admires. They exist so teams can execute. Once the planning period begins, people go back to their functional work. Engineers engineer. Sales teams sell. Manufacturing teams produce. Finance manages capital. Leaders make decisions. Customers create new information. People leave. New people join. Competitors move. The operating system must keep all of that work connected to the organizational plan. Peak's Weekly Camp is one of the primary mechanisms for doing so. Teams review company and functional OKRs and determine whether they are On-Course, Off-Course, Done, or being intentionally pushed. KPIs are similarly reviewed as On-Course or Off-Course. Items that require discussion or a decision do not turn the review into a lengthy status meeting; they move to Triage. That structure matters because execution requires two seemingly competing capabilities: **Focus on the plan and responsiveness to reality.** Without the first, teams become reactive. Without the second, teams become rigid. A strong operating rhythm creates both. ## Assessment: Compare What You Intended With What Is Actually Happening Army doctrine describes assessment as a continuous activity that supports decision-making by determining progress and helping refine plans. It explicitly compares **intended outcomes with actual events** and asks questions such as: Where are we? What happened? Why did it happen? What does it mean? What opportunities or risks are emerging? What should we do next? That may be the clearest conceptual bridge between the Army Operations Process and Peak OS. Peak uses different mechanisms at different time horizons to answer the same broad organizational questions. At the weekly level, OKRs and KPIs create visibility into execution. At the quarterly or semiannual level, the leadership team reviews the One-Year Plan from a new vantage point, incorporates what it has learned, makes necessary adjustments, and creates the next set of OKRs. Team Surveys add another layer by assessing not only business performance but how effectively the team itself is operating. At the Annual Session, the organization can look back across a full year of learning before refreshing its Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, organizational needs, and next execution horizon. This creates nested assessment loops: **Weekly:** Are execution and metrics on course? **Quarterly or Semiannual:** Is the One-Year Plan still right, and what have we learned? **Annual:** What has changed about the organization, the environment, and where we are going? Assessment therefore becomes more than reporting. It becomes **organizational learning**. ## Metrics Are Useful Because They Create Better Decisions The Army's assessment doctrine makes another useful distinction: monitoring activity is not enough. It distinguishes measures concerned with whether tasks were performed from measures concerned with whether desired conditions actually changed. Army doctrine frames these as different assessment questions—roughly, whether the organization is doing things correctly and whether it is doing the right things. The business equivalent is important. Companies frequently confuse activity with progress. A team can release features, hire people, schedule customer meetings, create campaigns, and complete projects while the organization still fails to improve the conditions that matter. Peak's use of both OKRs and KPIs is designed to create visibility into different dimensions of execution. The One-Year Plan provides broader success measures. OKRs create focused capability-building and cross-functional execution. KPIs provide ongoing measures of business performance. Reviewing them together creates a more useful operating picture than looking at activity alone. *Peak Teams* describes this as measuring the business in order to learn the business. The purpose of the measurement is not the dashboard. The purpose is to create information that improves judgment. That becomes especially important in frontier technology, where weak signals may appear long before a missed annual financial target. A manufacturing yield issue, engineering delay, hiring gap, customer milestone, supplier problem, cash constraint, or regulatory dependency may reveal execution drift months before the financial results expose it. Organizations that see those signals early have options. Organizations that see them late have explanations. ## Rapid Decision-Making Has a Particularly Strong Peak Parallel One of the most interesting parts of the Army Operations Process is the **Rapid Decision-Making and Synchronization Process**, or RDSP. Army doctrine describes RDSP as a technique commonly used during execution when leaders need a timely and effective solution rather than the more extensive process used to develop an optimal plan. The existing intent and plan provide the context; leaders quickly understand the situation, develop a viable response, and direct adjustments. Peak's Triage process solves a remarkably similar organizational problem in a business context. An OKR goes Off-Course. A KPI misses. A customer issue emerges. Engineering discovers a dependency. A hire falls through. A strategic opportunity appears. The organization does not need to reconvene Annual Planning every time something changes. The issue enters Triage. Peak's ACT framework then moves the team through three steps: **Assess the situation.** **Consider alternatives.** **Take action.** The result should be a decision, a next action, an owner, and timing—not another meeting about the same problem. The parallel is not that Triage is a civilian version of RDSP. It is not. The parallel is the operating principle: > **When reality changes during execution, the organization needs a repeatable way to recognize the variance, understand it, make a timely decision, synchronize the response, and continue executing.** That is much different from reacting randomly whenever an issue appears. It is disciplined adaptability. ## Adaptation Does Not Mean Constantly Rewriting the Plan Army doctrine makes an additional point that should resonate with CEOs who operate in volatile markets. When adjustment is required, commanders are instructed to make the changes necessary to correct meaningful variance while preserving as much of the existing plan as practical. The objective is not constant change; unnecessary changes create additional disruption for subordinate organizations. That is very close to Peak's philosophy of adaptability. Fast-growing companies often mistake changing priorities for being agile. Every customer conversation creates a new priority. Every board comment changes the roadmap. Every missed KPI leads to a new initiative. Every new executive introduces another management process. The organization becomes responsive to everything and committed to nothing. Peak creates different places for different kinds of adjustment. A weekly execution issue may belong in Triage. A quarter's learning may change an OKR. A Quarterly or Semiannual Session may reveal that the One-Year Plan needs modification. A significant change in the company or market may require deeper reconsideration. But the existence of new information does not automatically mean the strategy should change. That gives the organization an important capability: **adapt without drifting.** ## Battle Rhythm Keeps the System Alive Army doctrine uses the term **battle rhythm** for the deliberate schedule of recurring command and staff activities used to synchronize work and make effective use of leadership time. The doctrine notes that these activities can occur at daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly intervals depending on the organization and planning horizon, and that the rhythm should evolve with the situation. Peak calls its version an **operating cadence**. Weekly Camp. Quarterly or Semiannual Sessions. Annual Session. Team Surveys. Each exists at a different time horizon and for a different purpose. *Peak Teams* describes this repeated cadence as the backbone for learning, alignment, communication, and reinforcement of the team's operating behaviors. The deeper principle is that good execution cannot depend on someone remembering that it is time to communicate, assess, solve problems, or realign. Those behaviors need to be built into the system. Operating rhythm makes them habitual. ## Why This Matters in Frontier Technology The parallels become especially relevant when looking at frontier-tech companies. Many of these organizations face a combination of technical uncertainty, long development timelines, capital intensity, regulation, government stakeholders, physical operations, supply-chain dependencies, highly specialized talent, and rapidly changing markets. The annual plan matters. But the ability to **operate the plan** matters more. Imagine a defense technology company with a major delivery objective. Engineering is managing hardware and software dependencies. Operations is working through test infrastructure. Manufacturing is dealing with supplier lead times. Quality is validating new processes. Business Development is managing customer expectations. Finance is managing runway and capital requirements. People is recruiting scarce technical talent. The board is evaluating progress against the investment thesis. Each team can be highly competent. The company still fails if those teams cannot maintain a common operating picture, coordinate dependencies, surface weak signals, make decisions quickly, and adapt together. That is why military and former-military leaders often recognize something familiar in Peak. They may not use the terms Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, Weekly Camp, Triage, or SCALE. But they understand the deeper operating beliefs: **Mission matters.** **Plans need owners.** **Preparation matters.** **Execution must be visible.** **Information should support decisions.** **Teams need recurring synchronization.** **Reality changes.** **Learning needs to modify action.** **Decisions cannot all wait for the person at the top.** ## Similar Execution Problems Produce Similar Operating Principles The Army Operations Process was developed through generations of military experience. Peak OS emerged through a very different path. I spent more than two decades inside hundreds of companies watching leadership teams succeed, struggle, scale, miss plans, recover, raise capital, replace leaders, build products, enter markets, and learn how to work together. Over time, recurring operating behaviors became increasingly visible. Those observations ultimately shaped Peak OS and the SCALE behaviors of Symbiosis, Communication, Alignment, Learning, and Empowerment. The fact that many of those ideas parallel established military doctrine is meaningful precisely because the paths were different. The environments are not the same. The organizational challenge underneath them often is. When multiple specialized teams must execute a common mission in a changing environment, the organization needs more than a plan. It needs a way to **plan, prepare, execute, assess, decide, learn, and adapt continuously**. That is the deeper parallel between the Army Operations Process and Peak OS. And for military leaders moving into companies where organizational execution may determine whether an ambitious frontier technology ever reaches the world, it may be one reason the Peak operating model feels immediately recognizable. ## Related Insights [What Is Peak OS?](https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/what-is-peak-os-mq7jqhdx) [What Is Organizational Execution?](https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/what-is-organizational-execution-mq4rcx9p) [What Is Organizational Intelligence?](https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/what-is-organizational-intelligence-mq7jys1i) [What Is a Business Operating System?](https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/what-is-a-business-operating-system-mq4qmt39) [What Is Operating Rhythm?](https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/what-is-operating-rhythm-mq4qywur) ## Key Takeaways - The Army Operations Process treats planning, preparation, execution, and assessment as a connected system rather than separate events. - Peak OS similarly connects the Three-Year Vision and One-Year Plan to OKRs, KPIs, Weekly Camp, Triage, and recurring planning cadences. - Both systems use recurring assessment to compare intended outcomes with changing reality. - Army RDSP and Peak Triage share the principle of making timely adjustments during execution without restarting the entire planning process. - Both approaches distinguish disciplined adaptation from constant reactive changes to the plan. - Operating rhythm creates the recurring synchronization required to keep specialized teams aligned. - These parallels are especially relevant to aerospace, defense, advanced engineering, and other mission-critical frontier-tech organizations. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the U.S. Army Operations Process? The Army Operations Process is the framework described in ADP 5-0 for conducting the major command-and-control activities of planning, preparing, executing, and continuously assessing operations. It is intended to help commanders and staffs understand situations, make decisions, direct action, and adapt as conditions change. ### What is the difference between ADP 5-0 and FM 5-0? ADP 5-0 describes the broader Operations Process. In 2022, the Army reintroduced FM 5-0 as a dedicated manual for Planning and Orders Production, consolidating detailed planning resources such as the Military Decision-Making Process and other planning tools. ### Is Peak OS based on Army doctrine? No. Peak OS was developed from more than two decades of work with hundreds of founders, CEOs, investors, and leadership teams. The significance of the comparison is that Peak and Army doctrine independently converge around several principles of organizational execution. ### How does the Army Operations Process parallel Peak OS? Both connect planning to preparation, execution, recurring assessment, decisions, and adaptation. Peak implements these ideas in a business environment through Mission, Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, OKRs, KPIs, Weekly Camp, Triage, Team Surveys, and quarterly, semiannual, and annual planning cadences. ### What is the business equivalent of continuous assessment? In Peak, continuous assessment occurs at several horizons. Weekly Camp creates recurring visibility into OKRs and KPIs. Triage turns meaningful exceptions into decisions and actions. Quarterly or Semiannual Sessions reassess the One-Year Plan and establish the next OKRs, while Team Surveys create feedback about how effectively the organization itself is operating. ### How is Army RDSP similar to Peak Triage? Both address the need to make timely adjustments during execution rather than restarting a complete planning process whenever conditions change. Army RDSP and Peak Triage are different systems designed for different environments, but both emphasize understanding the changed situation, considering a response, making a decision, and synchronizing action. ### Why is this relevant to aerospace, defense, and frontier-tech companies? These organizations frequently coordinate highly specialized teams across hardware, software, manufacturing, operations, quality, customers, regulators, capital providers, and external partners. Their execution challenge therefore depends heavily on shared understanding, visibility, synchronization, decision-making, and adaptability. ### Does comparing Peak OS with Army doctrine mean companies should operate like military units? No. Military and business organizations have fundamentally different missions, authorities, risks, and cultures. The relevant comparison is at the level of organizational execution: how complex organizations connect planning with action, coordinate specialized teams, evaluate progress, make decisions, and adapt without losing alignment. Source: https://www.collective-genius.com/insights/plan-prepare-execute-assess-what-the-u-s-army-operations-process-and-peak-os-sha