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

by Stanley McChrystal

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 the success of empowered execution lay in what had come before it: the foundation of shared consciousness. This relationship—between contextual understanding and authority—is not new.