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

by Stanley McChrystal

“the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself,”

“the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for themselves . . . and the group.”

if you stay silent you’ll be sentenced to one year; if you rat on your partner you’ll go free; but if your

partner rats on you, you’ll serve two years.

From a competitive, personal-interest perspective, both prisoners are...

The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.

However, the story does capture a version of the same phenomenon. In it, mankind of the near future uses a time machine to leap back thousands of years and hunt dinosaurs. Hunters cannot bring their prey back to the twentieth century, or even step foot on the prehistoric ground while on the hunt (they have built levitating pathways) because of the danger that tampering with the past could negatively influence the present. One hunt goes wrong and the hunter slips, stepping briefly off the pathway, and crushing a butterfly, before hopping back on. When he and his guides return to the present day, “there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there.”

Language is used differently; a different man has been elected president. The death of a butterfly, relayed and magnified by eons of ecosystem twists and turns, resulted in a different society.