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
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