Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by Stanley McChrystal

The models of organizational success that dominated the twentieth century have their roots in the industrial revolution and, simply put, the world has changed. The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency. Today, the challenges faced by our Task Force are shared by contemporary organizations, which, like us, developed tremendous competencies for dealing with a world that no longer exists.

At the very core of his plan was what he later termed “the Nelson touch”: the idea that individual commanders should act on their own initiative once the mêlée had developed. Noting that plans could be easily foiled, he gave a final, simple piece of advice: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

Complexity, on the other hand, occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically—the interdependencies that allow viruses and bank runs to spread; this is where things quickly become unpredictable.

In popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with “leverage”—the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.

When hackers infiltrated the Associated Press’s Twitter account in 2013 and sent out a message claiming the White House had been hit by two explosions and President Obama was injured, the Dow Jones fell 143 points in a brief but widespread market panic. The tweet was deleted as soon as it appeared, but its momentary presence was enough to trigger both impulsive human behavior and the high-frequency trading algorithms now used throughout the markets, which “read” the news and perform trades in response in mere nanoseconds. One trader saw the Associated Press–induced flash crash as “a comment on how vulnerable the markets are to random pieces of information.”

Complexity produces a fundamentally different situation from the complicated challenges of the past; complicated problems required great effort, but ultimately yielded to prediction. Complexity means that, in spite of our increased abilities to track and measure, the world has become, in many ways, vastly less predictable. This unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction. The new environment demands a new approach.

Robustness is achieved by strengthening parts of the system (the pyramid); resilience is the result of linking elements that allow them to reconfigure or adapt in response to change or damage (the coral reef).

AQI was not concerned with efficiency. Through trial and error, they had evolved a military structure that was not efficient but was adaptable—a network that, unlike the structure of our command, could squeeze itself down, spread itself out, and ooze into any necessary shape. There was space between our forces—both geographically and in our communications sharing—that created safe pockets in which the enemy was able to nest, and seams into which they could expand. AQI learned to live and operate in the gaps of our system.

This is about more than the feel-good effects of “bonding.” It is done because teams whose members know one another deeply perform better. Any coach knows that these sorts of relationships are vital for success. A fighting force with good individual training, a solid handbook, and a sound strategy can execute a plan efficiently, and as long as the environment remains fairly static, odds of success are high. But a team fused by trust and purpose is much more potent. Such a group can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.

Groups like SEAL teams and flight crews operate in truly complex environments, where adaptive precision is key. Such situations outpace a single leader’s ability to predict, monitor, and control. As a result, team members cannot simply depend on orders; teamwork is a process of reevaluation, negotiation, and adjustment; players are constantly sending messages to, and taking cues from, their teammates, and those players must be able to read one another’s every move and intent. When a SEAL in a target house decides to enter a storeroom that was not on the floor plan they had studied, he has to know exactly how his teammates will respond if his action triggers a firefight, just as a soccer forward must be able to move to where his teammate will pass the ball. Harvard Business School teams expert Amy Edmondson explains, “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.” Without this trust, SEAL teams would just be a collection of fit soldiers.

When details emerged about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, news reports played up the drama of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed as the force was landing, portraying it as a catastrophic anomaly that nearly derailed the mission. While it was certainly not part of the plan, such a divergence was also not unexpected: the sheer tactical complexity of special operations almost guarantees that at least one critical variable will come loose between planning and execution. Almost none of the hundreds of raids the team had conducted together had proceeded exactly as expected, and mechanical failure was par for the course. The men in Abbottabad regrouped within minutes, set up a different infiltration route, and accomplished the mission.

The SEAL team in Abbottabad had not planned for the helicopter crash, just as Captain Sullenberger’s crew had not planned for the bird strike, and the Carty-Caterson team had not planned for the marathon bombing, but all were capable of adjusting to the unexpected with creative solutions on the spot, coherently and as a group. Their structure—not their plan—was their strategy.

The aviation industry was faced with two possible ways forward. They could continue to try to mitigate risk, attempting to control for ever more specific contingencies: the FAA could add United 173 as a case study in flight school; they could alter emergency checklists to include explicit reminders instructing a particular crew member to check the fuel gauge every five minutes. Such instructions would reduce the likelihood of fuel exhaustion the next time an indicator light failed. But they would do nothing to prevent overreaction and teamwork failure in the face of any of the other thousands of minor glitches that might occur. Worse, an overemphasis on fuel procedures might well create a new blind spot, just as the overemphasis on landing gear procedure had eclipsed fuel monitoring. Alternatively, they could focus on risk adaptation instead of mitigation, accept the inevitability of unexpected mechanical failures, and build flexible systems to combat these unknowns; they could build a better managerial boat to navigate the volatile seas of complexity. NASA believed that the dwindling ability of flight crews to adapt to unforeseen events stemmed from the captains’ attempts to control and plan for everything in a vehicle that had become too sophisticated for that to be possible. Champions of the iconic Mission Control room where hundreds of experts crowded into one space to facilitate real-time communication and adaptation (which we will investigate further in later chapter...

Where org charts are tidy and MECE, teams are messy. Connections crisscross all over the place, and there is lots of overlap: team members track and travel through not only their own specialized territory but often the entire playing field. Trust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy. But this overlap and redundancy—these inefficiencies—are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy. Great teams are less like “awesome machines” than awesome organisms. Our small operational teams understood all this instinctively—they trusted one another and within their units they had a clear and shared sense of purpose. They were adept at responding instantaneously and creatively to unexpected events. But all that behavior stopped where the edge of the team met the wall of the silo.

Until we fixed the blinks we would not be fully effective. We needed operational teams to gather, organize, and relay data to analysts in Baghdad, Tampa, and Washington. These analysts would then need to examine the data and communicate conclusions to the original team for follow-on action. Simultaneously, we needed to disseminate the relevant takeaways to the thousands of people in our organization; and we needed administrative higher-ups to modify operations and allocate resources based on the analysis. All this would have to take place in the span of hours, not weeks, and each situation would be different from those that came before. We had to find a way for the organization as a whole to build at scale the same messy connectivity our small teams had mastered so effectively.

Our circumstances were unique, but the problem is not. Though teams have proliferated across organizations from hospitals to airline crews, almost without exception this has happened within the confines of broader reductionist structures, and this has limited their adaptive potential.

Here, we run up against a fundamental constraint in the empathetic bandwidth of the human mind. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers). This limitation leads to a kind of tribal competitiveness: victory as defined by the squad—the primary unit of allegiance—may not align with victory as defined by the Task Force.

On a single team, every individual needs to know every other individual in order to build trust, and they need to maintain comprehensive awareness at all times in order to maintain common purpose—easy with a group of twenty-five, doable with a group of fifty, tricky above one hundred, and definitely impossible across a task force of seven thousand. But on a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a relationship with every other individual; instead, the relationships between the constituent teams need to resemble those between individuals on a given team: we needed the SEALs to trust Army Special Forces, and for them to trust the CIA, and for them all to be bound by a sense of common purpose: winning the war, rather than outperforming the other unit. And that could be effectively accomplished through representation. Command Command of Teams Team of Teams We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival. We didn’t need everybody to follow every single operation in real time (something just as impossible as building lifelong friendships with seven thousand people). We needed to enable a team operating in an interdependent environment to understand the butterfly-effect ramifications of their work and...

The solution we devised was a “team of teams”—an organization within which the relationships between constituent teams resembled those between individuals on a single team: teams that had traditionally resided in separate silos would now have to become fused to one another via trust and purpose.

In situations of unpredictability, organizations need to improvise. And to do that, the players on the field need to understand the broader context. At the team level, this is self-evident. But at the broader institutional level, it is more difficult to engineer structures that are both coherent and improvisatory. The problem, at one level, was obvious: we were failing to create useful bonds between one team and the next. The work done by our operators and analysts was inextricably linked, and yet we had placed the two groups in separate organizational silos—we had given them blinders—in the name of efficiency. Our players could only see the ball once it entered their immediate territory, by which time it would likely be too late to react. With no knowledge of the constantly shifting perspective of their teammates, they would have no idea what to do with the ball once they got it. They were playing Krasnovian soccer.

Our standing guidance was “Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.”

The meeting ran six days a week and was never canceled. We conducted it by video teleconference at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. This made it a convenient start to the workday for the Washington-based departments and agencies we were trying to integrate ever more tightly into our operations. In Iraq, the meeting kicked off at 4:00 p.m., giving operators time to rise in the late morning, train, prepare, participate in the O&I, and then get ready for the raids and fights that would take them from dusk until dawn. That synchronized cycle—what we called our “battle rhythm”—was fueled by the O&I, which pumped information and context throughout our Task Force.

There were real risks in doing this. Opening a top secret video teleconference to a wide community exposed us to potential leaks—after all, the information we were discussing was secret for a reason. Also, broadcasting unfiltered accounts of our successes and failures risked misinterpretation of complex, in-process endeavors or statements being taken out of context. But I had no interest in, and we had no time for, painting a rosy picture of what was in reality a hellish scene. Anyone who wanted to beat us at a game of bureaucratic politics would have all the ammunition they needed, but that wasn’t the fight we were focused on.

Just as our individual teams benefited from a shared sense of purpose that extended from the tactical situation on the ground to larger strategic goals, the elements of Task Force would need to share both an up-to-the-minute awareness of the battlefield and a belief that we were all fighting the same war, based on the same principles and with the same objectives. We hoped to lay the foundations for both, as NASA had done, by pressing holistic awareness and integration throughout the organization as a whole. If everyone had the same playbook, maybe we would get better at the game. The critical first step was to share our own information widely and be generous with our own people and resources. From there, we hoped that the human relationships we built through that generosity would carry the day. Information sharing had to include every part of the force. As soon as our operators completed a raid, we would rush the evidence to the nearest outstation, photograph every scrap, and use our new bandwidth to feed the data to imagery analysts, linguists, and other subject matter experts. It was choppy and unpolished, but instantaneous—no more trash bags and Post-it notes piling up in a closet. Moreover, as with our cc’s and our speakerphone, we distributed our intelligence and analysis widely, without preconditions. This struck many as naïve. But, as the old adage goes, “knowledge is power,” and we were throwing that power to the wind. Our thinking was that the value of this inform...

In time, people came to appreciate the value of systemic understanding. O&I attendance grew as the quality of the information and interaction grew. Eventually we had seven thousand people attending almost daily for up to two hours. To some management theorists, that sounds like a nightmare of inefficiency, but the information that was shared in the O&I was so rich, so timely, and so pertinent to the fight, no one wanted to miss it.

The O&I also became one of the best leadership tools in my arsenal. Our organization was globally dispersed and included thousands of individuals from organizations not directly under the control of the Task Force. The O&I could not replace a hand on a shoulder, but video could convey a lot of meaning and motivation. Our leadership learned, over time, to use this forum not as a stereotypical military briefing where junior personnel give nicely rehearsed updates and hope for no questions. Instead, it was an interactive discussion. If an individual had a four-minute slot, the “update” portion would be covered in the first sixty seconds, and the remainder of the time would be filled with open-ended conversation between the briefer and senior leadership (and potentially anyone else on the network, if they saw a critical point to be made). Instead of black-and-white lines of questioning (“How many x?”), our dialogue became interactive and broad (“Why are you thinking x?”). The responses to this type of interaction created new insights, deepened the group’s understanding of a complex issue, and highlighted the deep levels of understanding of our personnel around the globe. Most important, it allowed all members of the organization to see problems being solved in real time and to understand the perspective of the senior leadership team. This gave them the skills and confidence to solve their own similar problems without the need for further guidance or clarification. By having th...

The fusion of operations and intelligence (O and I) was the essence of the meeting. An imagery analyst could report on recent activity at a location of interest during the meeting (say at 5:00 p.m. Iraqi time), and that house could be raided by Rangers within hours. At the next day’s O&I, another analyst could then discuss the chemical makeup of the explosives found in the house’s car-bomb workshop. The initial imagery analyst would get the visceral satisfaction that her work had saved lives and that her continued effort was impacting operations directly, not just generating a paper storm in D.C. Our organization was not just “getting smarter” or “doing more” in isolation. Instead, it was acting smarter and learning constantly, simultaneously. The best moments in the O&I were when the briefing touched off a debate between different agencies, or teams, or departments. Perhaps two analytical silos had reached drastically different conclusions based on the same evidence, and we needed to reconcile them and understand why. Perhaps a team in Mosul had seen a tactic, or a group of individuals, eerily r...

Massive leaks are not an inevitable consequence of the current level of information sharing, but even if they were, the benefits vastly outweigh the potential costs. The sharing of information within the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11 has saved many lives and done far more good than the damage from incidents like the Manning and Snowden leaks has done harm. We should not let the fact that the benefits are usually invisible—whereas the leaks make front-page news—blind our assessment. Our Task Force never experienced any serious leaks, but we knowingly ran that risk every time we held our O&I. Our experience was that shared information saved lives on an untold scale.

Shared consciousness in an organization is either hindered or helped by physical spaces and established processes. Often, efforts to facilitate Taylor-inspired efficiencies have produced barriers to information sharing and the kind of systemic understanding we needed to pervade our Task Force. Creating transparency and information sharing at the scale we needed required not only a redesign of our physical plant, but also a rethinking of almost every procedure in our organizational culture. The daily O&I briefing lay at the core of our transformation: this pumped information about the entire scope of our operations out to all members of the Task Force and partner agencies, and also offered everyone the chance to contribute.

We were a real-life Prisoner’s Dilemma. Each agency feared that sharing intelligence would work against its own interests. Competition between agencies made them reluctant to provide information; what if a partner agency didn’t reciprocate? If each agency would cooperate, we would have the best possible outcome, but we could achieve that outcome only if we overcame the dilemma.

In order to achieve cross-functionality, our bonds with our partner organizations had to become as strong as those between the individuals on our operational teams. Too often we viewed our partners solely in terms of what we could get and give. We began to make progress when we started looking at these relationships as just that: relationships—parts of a network, not cogs in a machine with outputs and inputs. The kinds of relationships we needed have roots that go deeper than simply bartering. If we could develop that kind of understanding between partners, then one day down the line in a particularly urgent moment, one side might be able to urge the other, “trust me here,” and have it work out.

Perhaps some employees would have tried harder to relay these issues up the chain of command, or perhaps senior leaders would have investigated the mysterious crashes more thoroughly, had the slogan “cost is everything” not dominated decision making. Like the “Faster, Better, Cheaper” approach that encouraged poor decision making at NASA in the 1970s, this drive to cut out fat inhibited systemic understanding. An engineer interviewed said that the emphasis on cost cutting “permeates the fabric of the whole culture,” leading to a privileging of timing over quality, and a resistance to raising issues. No team wanted to be the group that lagged in efficiency or took too long to fix a problem on account of being overly cautious. An avoidance of responsibility had become known as the “GM nod”—a staple of survival and job security at the company.

As Mulally put it, “Working together always works. It always works. Everybody has to be on the team. They have to be interdependent with one another.”

It is necessary, we found, to forcibly dismantle the old system and replace it with an entirely new managerial architecture. Our new architecture was shared consciousness, and it consisted of two elements. The first was extreme, participatory transparency—the “systems management” of NASA that we mimicked with our O&I forums and our open physical space. This allowed all participants to have a holistic awareness equivalent to the contextual awareness of purpose we already knew at a team level. The second was the creation of strong internal connectivity across teams—something we achieved with our embedding and liaison programs. This mirrored the trust that enabled our small teams to function. Shared consciousness is emphatically non-MECE and, at low levels, inefficient. But it is vastly more effective than its predecessor—not just for us, but for the other organizations we have examined. And if it could work in the military (in many ways the archetypal stratified, “need-to-know” domain) and the auto industry (pioneers of assembly lines and silos), it can work almost anywhere. Alfred Sloan described his system as “decentralized operations with coordinated control.” We found that we benefited from the opposite. First, we needed coordinated operations, something that necessitated emergent, adaptive intelligence.

Cooperation across silos would be necessary for success, and while systemic understanding was a valuable first step, we needed to build more trust if we were to achieve the fluid, teamlike cooperation that we needed across our force; we had to overcome the challenge of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. To this end, we used embedding and liaison programs to create strong lateral ties between our units, and with our partner organizations. Where systemic understanding mirrors the sense of “purpose” that bonds small teams, this mirrored the second ingredient to team formation: “trust.” Together, these two elements completed the establishment of shared consciousness, something that was vital to our success. As is evidenced by the failures of GM and successes of Ford, the same innovations are sorely needed by many organizations still using rigid silos in an interdependent world.

I began to reconsider the nature of my role as a leader. The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant. I came to realize that, in normal cases, I did not add tremendous value, so I changed the process. I communicated across the command my thought process on decisions like airstrikes, and told them to make the call. Whoever made the decision, I was always ultimately responsible, and more often than not those below me reached the same conclusion I would have, but this way our team would be empowered to do what was needed. The practice of relaying decisions up and down the chain of command is premised on the assumption that the organization has the time to do so, or, more accurately, that the cost of the delay is less than the cost of the errors produced by removing a supervisor. In 2004 this assumption no longer held. The risks of acting too slowly were higher than the risks of letting competent people make judgment calls. We concluded that we would be better served by accepting the 70 percent solution today, rather than satisfying protocol and getting the 90 percent solution tomorrow (in the military you learn that you will never have time for the 100 percent solution).

Nearly fifty thousand executives from other companies have traveled to the Ritz-Carlton Learning Institute and Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center to learn how they too can achieve such quality of service. One might think that this is a result of careful oversight and exacting requirements drilled into the Ritz’s customer-facing employees—that outstanding service arises from a set of painstakingly detailed protocols. In fact, the company’s approach to HR is famous for the freedom it grants. Employees can spend up to $2,000 to satisfy guests or deal with issues that arise. A Harvard Business School case study detailed this and other extraordinary policies, such as the fact that the Ritz trains all its employees to “break away” from their duties if a guest needs something special, and encourages employees to “use their empowerment.” One of the basics that employees are given is “Instant guest pacification is the responsibility of each employee. Whoever receives a complaint will own it, resolve it to the guest’s satisfaction, and record it.”

As an instinctive perfectionist, it pained me to do it, but I began pushing authority further down the chain of command. Empowerment did not always take the form of an overt delegation; more often, my more self-confident subordinates would make decisions, many far above their pay grade, and simply inform me. My response, often very publicly conveyed during our O&I, typically endorsed their initiative, and created a multiplier effect, whereby more and more people, seeing the success of their peers, would begin taking more matters into their own hands.

Eventually a rule of thumb emerged: “If something supports our effort, as long as it is not immoral or illegal,” you could do it. Soon, I found that the question I most often asked my force was “What do you need?” We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there—on the brink of instability—that we found our sweet spot. There were growing pains. Some subordinate leaders tried to hold authority at their level, and on a number of occasions I had to confirm to partner agencies or units that a decision voiced by someone in the Task Force had my approval. Often, I was hearing about the decision for the first time, but I cannot remember a time when I failed to support it. On the whole, our initiative—which we call “empowered execution”*—met with tremendous success. Decisions came more quickly, critical in a fight where speed was essential to capturing enemies and preventing attacks. More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority further down, the quality of decisions actually went up.

We had decentralized on the belief that the 70 percent solution today would be better than the 90 percent solution tomorrow. But we found our estimates were backward—we were getting the 90 percent solution today instead of the 70 percent solution tomorrow. This took us by surprise and upended a lot of conventional assumptions about the superior wisdom of those at the top. Understanding the underlying causes of this unexpected outcome proved essential to sustaining and enhancing it.

A piece of this is the psychology of decision making. An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome. Another factor was that, for all our technology, our leadership simply did not understand what was happening on the ground as thoroughly as the people who were there. The ability to see video footage and hear gunfire from an operation as it unfolded was a tremendous asset, but a commander on the ground can comprehend the complexity of a situation in ways that defy the visual and audible: everything from temperature and fatigue to personalities. I had been a baseball pitcher in my youth and knew that often the man on the mound knows what he’s best postured to throw. But the key reason for...

Within such complexity, leaders themselves can be a limiting factor. While the human capacity for thought and action is astounding, it is never quite enough. If we simply worked more and tried harder, we reason, we could master the onslaught of information and “urgent” requirements. But of course we can’t.

Considered by many to be the ultimate strategic contest between two players, the game of chess originated in eastern India in the sixth century. Once considered a game for nobility, chess was thought to be an effective tool for teaching strategic thinking to future leaders. The various pieces—king, queen, rook, knight, bishop, and pawn—behave differently. The pawns, the most numerous, are the least maneuverable. The queen is the most maneuverable and thus the most lethal. The king, while relatively weak, is the figure that must be preserved. None can think or act for themselves. None eye the board from their unique vantage point and suggest moves. None cry warnings of danger. The chess player is all by herself to observe, decide, and act. From a distance, the Task Force’s fight in Iraq in 2004 looked like chess, more particularly the rushed bullet version of the game, where players have time constraints for each move. Empowered with an extraordinary ability to view the board, and possessing a set of units with unique capabilities, I was tempted to maneuver my forces like chess pieces against AQI. I could be Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, driving my relentlessly aggressive campaign toward checkmate. But the chess metaphor quickly broke down. Even in its most rapid form, chess is still a rigidly iterative game, alternating moves between opponents. War in 2004 followed no such protocol. The enemy could move multiple pieces simultaneously or pummel us in quick succession, wi...

Communicating priorities and cultural expectations to our team of teams spread across multiple continents was a challenge. Written guidance was essential, but memos competed with the flood of text that engulfed all of us every day. To post brief updates and observations, I used a secure Web-based portal accessible to everyone, carefully composing each memo to ensure that it reflected not only my thoughts, but also my “voice.” I tried to remember “less is more,” and stuck to a few key themes. Experience had taught me that nothing was heard until it had been said several times. Only when I heard my own words echoed or paraphrased back to me by subordinates as essential “truths” did I know they had been fully received. As a leader, however, my most powerful instrument of communication was my own behavior. As a young officer I had been taught that a leader’s example is always on view. Bad examples resonate even more powerfully than good ones. In situations where senior leaders can cloister themselves behind walls or phalanxes of aides, emerging only when their ties are straight, their hair coiffured, and their words carefully chosen, controlling the signal might be possible. But in a world of tweets and 24/7 news coverage, it is not. I didn’t even attempt to hide. Instead, I sought to maintain a consistent example and message. Our daily Operations and Intelligence (O&I) video teleconference became key to my overall communications effort. Although the information exchanged was ...

I would tell my staff about the “dinosaur’s tail”: As a leader grows more senior, his bulk and tail become huge, but like the brontosaurus, his brain remains modestly small. When plans are changed and the huge beast turns, its tail often thoughtlessly knocks over people and things. That the destruction was unintentional doesn’t make it any better.

Creating and leading a truly adaptive organization requires building, leading, and maintaining a culture that is flexible but also durable. The primary responsibility of the new leader is to maintain a holistic, big-picture view, avoiding a reductionist approach, no matter how tempting micromanaging may be. Perhaps an organization sells widgets, and the leader finds that he or she loves everything about widgets—designing, building, and marketing them; that’s still not where the leader is most needed. The leader’s first responsibility is to the whole.

Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage. The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.

This critical caveat to Tocqueville’s predictions of American democratic success cuts to the heart of what makes democracy tick: a political structure in which decision-making authority is—in some ways—decentralized to the voters, rather than concentrated in a monarchic or oligarchic core, requires a high level of political awareness among the public in order to function. If people are not educated enough to make informed decisions at the polls, the feedback system on which democracy is premised will not work. The proliferation of democratic governments across the world over the past two centuries might suggest that the simple act of democratic decentralization itself is a recipe for success. But as Tocqueville points out, one cannot make good choices without proper context: a democracy such as America could remain free only with “a proper kind of education.” In other words, a system requires shared consciousness before it can reap the benefits of empowered execution.

Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous. Similarly, shared consciousness on its own, as we learned, is powerful but ultimately insufficient. Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization. Maintain this system for too long without decentralizing authority, and whatever morale gains were made will be reversed as people become frustrated with their inability to act on their new insights. Just as empowerment without sharing fails, so does sharing without empowerment.