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

by Stanley McChrystal

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...