What is mission command Auftragstaktik?

Mission command Auftragstaktik is a concept in personal epistemology: Specify the result you want, not the exact steps to get there. This preserves autonomy and invites better solutions.

Example: You need a weekly report summarizing project health. You could delegate it by writing a twelve-step procedure: open this spreadsheet, copy these cells, paste into this template, format the header, check the conditional formatting, export to PDF, email to these people by 4 PM Friday. Or you could delegate it by saying: I need a one-page project health summary delivered to the team by end of day Friday, covering schedule status, budget variance, and top three risks. The first version specifies method. The second specifies outcome. The method-based delegation breaks if the spreadsheet changes, if the template moves, if the team switches tools. The outcome-based delegation survives all of those changes because the delegate can adapt their approach while preserving the result. More importantly, the delegate might discover a better method than your twelve steps — an automated dashboard, a Slack summary, a five-minute video walkthrough — because you left the how open.

This concept is part of Phase 27 (Delegation Patterns) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for delegation patterns.