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October 24 - November 10, 2021
The greatest innovations have not come from a lone inventor or from solving problems in a top-down, command-and-control style. Instead, the great successes—the creation of the computer, transistor, microchip, Internet—come from a “team of teams” working together in pursuit of a common goal.
Organizations must be networked, not siloed, in order to succeed. Their goal must shift from efficiency to sustained organizational adaptability.
an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.
This sounds exactly like the Toyota metaphor
feeling comfortable or dodging criticism should not be our measure of success. There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.
we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”).
Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence:
In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.
instinctive, cooperative adaptability is essential to high-performing teams.
teams whose members know one another deeply perform better.
The team is better off with the cohesive ability to improvise as a unit, relying on both specialization (goalies mostly stay in goal; forwards mostly don’t) and overlapping responsibilities (each can do some of the others’ jobs in a pinch), as well as such familiarity with one another’s habits and responses that they can anticipate instinctively one another’s responses.
Great teams are less like “awesome machines” than awesome organisms.
“The squad is the point at which everyone else sucks.
We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team,
most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.
the root cause lay not in the lack of a specific procedure, but in the inability to correct in real time in response to unexpected inconsistencies.
In situations of unpredictability, organizations need to improvise. And to do that, the players on the field need to understand the broader context.
independent small groups were very effective at exploratory work, but trouble erupted when the projects of the disparate teams had to be integrated into a vehicle going into orbit.
when creating an interactive product, confining specialists to a silo was stupid: high-level success depended on low-level inefficiencies.
in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface failures.”
cognitive “oneness”—the emergent intelligence—that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information.
We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise.
Our standing guidance was “Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.”
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.
Shared consciousness in an organization is either hindered or helped by physical spaces and established processes.
“Working together always works. It always works. Everybody has to be on the team. They have to be interdependent with one another.”
the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members, and much more to do with the connections between them.*
Decisions that senior leaders a few decades prior would have been unable to oversee now required senior approval.
when they can see what’s going on, leaders understandably want to control what’s going on. Empowerment tends to be a tool of last resort.
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.
The term “empowerment” gets thrown around a great deal in the management world, but the truth is that simply taking off constraints is a dangerous move. It should be done only if the recipients of newfound authority have the necessary sense of perspective to act on it wisely.
“Eyes On—Hands Off.”
Effective adaptation to emerging threats and opportunities requires the disciplined practice of empowered execution. Individuals and teams closest to the problem, armed with unprecedented levels of insights from across the network, offer the best ability to decide and act decisively.
The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.
Thinking out loud can be a frightening prospect for a senior leader. Ignorance on a subject is quickly obvious, and efforts to fake expertise are embarrassingly ineffective. I found, however, that asking seemingly stupid questions or admitting openly “I don’t know” was accepted, even appreciated. Asking for opinions and advice showed respect.
Most of these visits had multiple objectives: to increase the leader’s understanding of the situation, to communicate guidance to the force, and to lead and inspire.
If, after hearing their problems or concerns, I couldn’t do anything about them, I found it far better to state that directly than to pretend I could change things. Simple honesty shows, and earns, respect.
Hurried “drive-by” interactions leave subordinates frustrated—if you come to ask questions, leave enough time to listen to the answers.
invariably soldiers who had spent days preparing a briefing or demonstration for the “great man’s” visit were informed at the last minute that all their work had been for naught. It was not a good way to improve morale.
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.
Although people then and now tend to consider the essential tenet of democracy to be the political empowerment of the people, this alone does not produce a successful democracy—the people can be effectively empowered only if they have enough context to make good decisions.
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.
one cannot make good choices without proper context: a democracy such as America could remain free only with “a proper kind of education.”
empowerment without context will lead to havoc.
An organization should empower its people, but only after it has done the heavy lifting of creating shared consciousness.
Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous.
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.
At the core of the Task Force’s journey to adaptability lay a yin-and-yang symmetry of shared consciousness, achieved through strict, centralized forums for communication and extreme transparency, and empowered execution, which involved the decentralization of managerial authority.
