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

by Stanley McChrystal

the constantly changing, entirely unforgiving environment in which we all now operate denies the satisfaction of any permanent fix.

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.

civilian organizations also wrestle with the basic questions of individuality, standardization, and predictability of outcome. Individual companies and entire economies depend on business leaders’ knowing how best to manage for success.

he would not make them work harder—he would show them that it could be done.

effective enterprise is created by commitment to efficiency, and that the role of the manager is to break things apart and plan “the one best way”—remains relatively unchallenged.

The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.

Speed and interdependence together mean that any given action in any given time frame is now linked to vastly more potential outcomes than the same action a century or even a few decades ago: endeavors that were once akin to a two- or three-ball pool problem now involve hundreds of collisions.

Complex systems are fickle and volatile, presenting a broad range of possible outcomes; the type and sheer number of interactions prevent us from making accurate predictions. As a result, treating an ecosystem as though it were a machine with predictable trajectories from input to output is a dangerous folly.

There are too many events occurring simultaneously for any entity—even one equipped with the surveillance capabilities of our Task Force—to monitor; and with the ability of individuals and small groups to communicate with millions of people, there is no way to be sure which of those events will transform into a threat.

Data can determine “average” outcomes with great accuracy: how much time a person in a given age demographic is likely to spend on Facebook every day, or even, based on an individual’s habits, what she is most likely to do on a given day.

Big Data will not save us because the same technological advances that brought us these mountains of information and the digital resources for analyzing them have at the same time created volatile communication webs and media platforms, taking aspects of society that once resembled comets and turning them into cold fronts. We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.

Management practices are unable to help companies cope with volatility. This is evidenced by the increasingly shorter lifespan of firms—fifty

In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.

“the early command and control approach was not working.” Other countries and organizations are now following suit, stepping away from predictability and focusing on increasing resilience instead.

In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them.

Robustness is achieved by strengthening parts of the system (the pyramid); resilience is the result of linking elements that allow them to reconfigure or adapt in response to change or damage (the coral reef).

The key lies in shifting our focus from predicting to reconfiguring. By embracing humility—recognizing the inevitability of surprises and unknowns—and concentrating on systems that can survive and indeed benefit from such surprises, we can triumph over volatility.

Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.” If you have enough foresight to know with certainty what the “right thing” is in advance, then efficiency is an apt proxy for effectiveness.

As you travel down a traditional org chart, motivation and contextual awareness become more limited and specific, and more remote from the organization’s overall strategic aims.

Team members tackling complex environments must all grasp the team’s situation and overarching purpose.

The proliferation of such groups reflects the increasing complexity of the world—or rather, the tactical understanding that responding to such a world requires greater adaptability, and adaptability is more characteristic of small interactive teams than large top-down hierarchies.

Meaningful relationships between teams were nonexistent. And our teams had very provincial definitions of purpose: completing a mission or finishing intel analysis, rather than defeating AQI.

The specialization that allowed for breathtaking efficiency became a liability in the face of the unpredictability of the real world.

There is a catchy acronym in the consulting world, “MECE,” which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.”

There is something very satisfying about the way a MECE framework clicks together. It is a tidy, effective way to organize categories. But it is not always an effective way to organize people.

Where org charts are tidy and MECE, teams are messy.

Trust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy.

Many saw operators as arrogant and ignorant of intelligence analysis: tools for breaking down doors who had no appreciation for the intelligence war.

Drs. Carty and Caterson credited their hospital’s culture of “fostering preparation and teamwork through daily collaborative interactions.” The medical staff had long-standing relationships, built over years in caring for routine patients.

“command of teams”: adaptive small teams operating within an old-fashioned rigid superstructure.

Teams can bring a measure of adaptability to previously rigid organizations. But these performance improvements have a ceiling as long as adaptable traits are limited to the team level.

As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents, like our Task Force. But this is easier said than done.

Small teams are effective in large part because they are small—people know each other intimately and have clocked hundreds of hours with each other. In large organizations most people will inevitably be strangers to one another. In fact, the very traits that make team...

“diminishing marginal returns.” With most goods and services, each additional unit brings less value or gratification than the one before:

For teams, this range is considerably narrower.

Beyond such numbers, teams begin to lose the “oneness” that makes them adaptable.

As the proverbial kitchen fills up, communication and trust break down, egos come into conflict, and the chemistry that fueled innovation and agility becomes destructive. In many cases, this loss of adaptability dooms the enterprise.

the magic of teams is a double-edged sword once organizations get big: some of the same traits that make an adaptable team great can make it incompatible with the structure it serves.

Thousands of fledgling businesses have sunk because of an inability to scale their teamwork.

The issue is not that teams never work, but that team dynamics are powerful but delicate, and

expansion is a surefire way to break them.

It’s a] fallacy that bigger teams are better than smaller ones because they have more resources to draw on,” he explains. “As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among member...

On a single team, every individual needs to know every other individual in order to build trust, and they need to maintain comprehensive awareness at all times in order to maintain common purpose—easy with a group of twenty-five, doable with a group of fifty, tricky above one hundred, and definitely impossible across a task force of seven thousand. But on a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a relationship with every other individual; instead, the relationships between the constituent teams need to resemble those between individuals on a given team:

all to be bound by a sense of common purpose:

We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival.

We needed to enable a team operating in an interdependent environment to understand the butterfly-effect ramifications of their work and make them aware of the other teams with whom they would have to cooperate in order to achieve strategic—not just tactical—success.

We would have to match AQI’s adaptability while preserving our traditional strengths, and this would necessitate an unprecedented transformation—it would require a true team of teams. Accomplishing this would involve a complete reversal of the conventional approach to information sharing, delineation of roles, decision-making authority, and leadership.

focusing on the component parts rather than the overall process, we were missing the fundamental problem. Speeding up the individual elements of the system did nothing to eliminate the blinks between them that most stymied our efforts.

Though we rarely use that phrase in real life, it is an accurate depiction of military and broader organizational sentiments about the value of information: given the overwhelming volume of, and myriad sensitivities around, information, the default is not to share.

Their ability to specialize in their own domains necessitated ignorance of the process at large—for