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

by Stanley McChrystal

When managers talk about “alignment,” they usually mean people knowing what the interim goal is at their level (the production of three axles by 5:00 p.m.).

In situations of unpredictability, organizations need to improvise. And to do that, the players on the field need to understand the broader context. At the team level, this is self-evident. But at the broader institutional level, it is more difficult to engineer structures that are both coherent and improvisatory.

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.

When we urge people to think “outside of the box,” we are generally asking them to discard mental models.