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November 11 - December 9, 2019
this limited definition of efficiency meant that they passed on information that was often less useful than it should have been, late, or lacking context.
The habit of constraining information derives in part from modern security concerns, but also from the inured preference for clearly defined, mechanistic processes—whether
The economic success of reductionist efficiencies in the twentieth century inspired increasingly fundamentalist adherence to Smith’s doctrine of specialization.
But as technology has grown more sophisticated and processes more dispersed, the way component parts of a process come together has become far less intuitive, and in many cases impossible for a cadre of managers to predict fully.
As technology has grown more sophisticated and processes more dispersed, the way component parts of a process come together has become far less intuitive.
In military, governmental, and corporate sectors, an increased concern for secrecy has caused further sequestering of information.
the systems for keeping information safe have become more and more complicated.
most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.
The problem is that the logic of “need to know” depends on the assumption that somebody—some manager or algorithm or bureaucracy—actually knows who does and does not need to know which material.
The organizational structures we had developed in the name of secrecy and efficiency actively prevented us from talking to each other and assembling a full picture.
Continuing to function under the illusion that we can understand and foresee exactly what will be relevant to whom is hubris. It might feel safe, but it is the opposite. Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.
In situations of unpredictability, organizations need to improvise. And to do that, the players on the field need to understand the broader context.
high-level success depended on low-level inefficiencies.
one cannot understand a part of a system without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the whole.
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.”
the 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.
Education requires fundamental understanding, which can be used to grasp and respond to a nearly infinite variety of threats; training involves singular actions, which are useful only against anticipated challenges. Education is resilient, training is robust.
Like NASA, we needed to promote at the organizational level the kind of knowledge pool that arises within small teams. This was the key to creating a “team of teams.”
fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise.
We dubbed this goal—this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence—shared consciousness, and it became the cornerstone of our transformation.
companies went to greater lengths to preserve stratification.
New technologies enabled the construction of larger, taller buildings to house the increasingly complicated strata of the workplace.
How we organize physical space says a lot about how we think people behave; but how people behave is often a by-product of how we set up physical space.
Bloomberg says, “I’ve always believed that management’s ability to influence work habits through edict is limited. Ordering something gets it done, perhaps. When you turn your back, though, employees tend to regress to the same old ways.
The cultivated chaos of the open office encourages interaction between employees distant from one another on the org chart.
A new layout with an old culture can deliver the worst of both worlds: countless managers, eager to adopt the new trend that promises innovation but reluctant to abandon the org chart, have done away with cubicles only to produce a noisier, more distracting environment that is neither efficient nor effective.
Anyone who has set foot in a corporate office in the past thirty years can attest that the product was indeed successful, but the concept of an organic workplace defined by freedom and intellect was not.
93 percent of those who work in cubicles say that they would prefer a different workspace.
Cultures, however, are more resistant to designed change than bricks and mortar.
We were trying to normalize sharing among people used to the opposite.
When people think of cutting-edge military hardware, they usually picture weaponry, not a bulked-up version of Skype, but that was our main technological hurdle and point of investment for several months.
trying to build a culture of sharing: any member of the Task Force, and any of the partners we invited, could eventually dial in to the O&I securely from their laptops and listen through their headphones.
Anyone who wanted to beat us at a game of bureaucratic politics would have all the ammunition they needed, but that wasn’t the fight we were focused on.
Individual and organizational arrogance manifested itself in subtle ways as people tried to assert or maintain their preeminence.
Ultimately, however, the press of the fight demanded expedience, and expedience demanded a meritocracy. If an individual or unit produced good intelligence, reliable coordination, or accurate and timely warnings, they rose in relevance and respect.
They had to sit with us, to understand exactly what was happening on the ground.
The critical first step was to share our own information widely and be generous with our own people and resources. From there, we hoped that the human relationships we built through that generosity would carry the day.
it allowed all members of the organization to see problems being solved in real time and to understand the perspective of the senior leadership team.
saved an incalculable amount of time that was no longer needed to seek clarification or permission.
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.
The sharing of information within the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11 has saved many lives and done far more good than the damage from incidents like the Manning and Snowden leaks has done harm.
“the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for themselves . . . and the group.”
Everyone hated removing some of our best operators from the battlefield, but we reaped enormous benefits.
It was a perfect and tragic case study of the consequences of information silos and internal mistrust.
Mulally’s belief in the universal utility of rejecting silos and embracing interdependence is backed up by Sandy Pentland, an MIT professor who studies the effects of information flow on organizations and communities. Looking
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.
The key to increasing the “contagion” is trust and connectivity between otherwise separate elements of an establishment.
The teams that had the highest levels of internal engagement and external exploration had much higher levels of creative output
interaction patterns typically account for almost half of all the performance variation between high- and low-performing groups.
Decisions that senior leaders a few decades prior would have been unable to oversee now required senior approval.
