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

by Stanley McChrystal

In today’s world, creativity is a collaborative endeavor. Innovation is a team effort.

how organizations need to reinvent themselves. This involves breaking down silos, working across divisions, and mastering the flexible response that comes from true teamwork and collaboration.

High-speed networks and digital communications mean that collaboration can—and must—happen in real time.

Likewise the necessity of real-time innovation and problem-solving requires integrative and transparent leadership that empowers individual team members.

Efficiency is necessary but no longer sufficient to be a successful organization.

Management models based on planning and predicting instead of resilient adaptation to changing circumstances are no longer suited to today’s challenges.

General McChrystal’s experiences leading the Task Force illustrate how this dramatic transformation is possible in all organizations. After identifying the adaptable and networked nature of Al Qaeda, the general and his team explored why traditional organizations aren’t adaptable. One conclusion they reached was that agility and adaptability are normally limited to small teams. They explored the traits that make small teams adaptable, such as trust, common purpose, shared awareness, and the empowerment of individual members to act. They also identified the traditional limits of teams, such as “blinks” in the organization between teams where collaboration begins to break down.

The primary lesson that emerged, and is detailed in this book, is the need to scale the adaptability and cohesiveness of small teams up to the enterprise level. This involves creating a team of teams to foster cross-silo collaboration.

Doing this requires increasing transparency to ensure common understanding and awareness. It also often involves changing the physical space and personal behaviors to establish trust and foster collaboration. This can develop the ability to share context so that the teams can decentralize and empower individuals to act. Decisions are pushed downward, allowing the members to act quickly. This new approach also requires changing the traditional conception of the leader. The role of the leader becomes creating the broader environment instead of command-and-control micromanaging.

Intuition and hard-won experience became the beacons, often dimly visible, that guided us through the fog and friction.

the idea that a problem has different solutions on different days was fundamentally disturbing.

We will argue that the familiar pursuit of efficiency must change course. Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.

Part I: The Proteus Problem

To understand the challenge, we’ll go to factory floors with Frederick Winslow Taylor and look back at the drive for efficiency that has marked the last 150 years,

Part II: From Many, One

We dissect the processes that create the trust and common purpose that bond great small teams,

Part III: Sharing

the reader is introduced to shared consciousness: the way transparency and communication can be used in an organization to produce extraordinary outcomes across even large groups.

Part IV: Letting Go probes the history, advantages, and imperatives of truly empowered execution in an organization—pushing decision making and ownership to the right level for every action.

Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability in structures, processes, and mind-sets that is often uncomfortable.

This was not a war of planning and discipline; it was one of agility and innovation. Their unit had

Specifically, 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”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient.

industrial revolution and, simply put, the world has changed. The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment.

But ideas are cheap; plenty of armchair generals have proposals for winning wars, some of them quite clever, but only those who can actually shape and manage a force capable of doing the job ultimately succeed.

Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence: the garage band, the dorm-room start-up, the viral blogger, and the terrorist cell.

If we couldn’t change the environment to suit us better, we would have to change to suit it.

Good insight

MANAGING CHAOS

was fascinated by Adam Nicolson’s Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar, which chronicles British admiral Horatio Nelson’s daring face-off with a superior Franco-Spanish fleet.

his unique innovation lay in his managerial style and the culture he had cultivated among his forces.

an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands.

At the heart of his success was patient, yet relentless, nurturing of competence and adaptability within his crews.

our limfac lay in the mundane art of management.

the twenty-first century is more connected, faster paced, and less predictable than previous eras.

QOTD

To win we had to change. Surprisingly, that change was less about tactics or new technology than it was about the internal architecture and culture of our force—in other words, our approach to management.

However, we were learning in 2004 that efficiency was no longer enough. A look into the origins of this doctrine reveals why it was effective at confronting the threats of the 1900s, but has proved increasingly inadequate at battling the networked mayhem of the twenty-first century.

the notion of top-down, rigidly predetermined, “scientific” management of behavior in the civilian sector is largely the legacy of the nineteenth-century Quaker Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Because he could study and predict, he could control.

managers did the thinking and planning, while workers executed.

he reduced management to five elements: planning, organizing, command, coordination, and control.

Important

Social scientists Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick determined that the responsibilities of government leadership were to plan, to organize, to direct staff, to coordinate, to report, and to budget.

Nevertheless, Taylor’s foundational belief—the notion that an 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.

Understanding specifically what had changed, why it reduced predictability, and how that impacted management would prove critical to solving our problem.

at MIT in 1961. Edward Lorenz had been using then-cutting-edge computers to try to crack weather for about a year. Weather

Stewart’s comment on obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Things that are complex—living organisms, ecosystems, national economies—have a diverse array of connected elements that interact frequently.

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

The global aid system, for instance, which once depended on connecting individual donor governments to individual recipient governments, has in recent decades transitioned from “few to few” to a “many to many” market, in which thousands of

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.

In other words, some systems are essentially complex (like the human brain, or society), whereas other systems (like a big machine, or a factory) might appear complex because they have a lot of moving parts, but are essentially complicated.

He argued that national economies, unlike industrial production, could never be transformed into mechanical systems with reductionist solutions: their behavior results from the decision making of millions of people, and all these decisions influence one another, making it impossible to forecast how markets will move—as in a game of chess, there are just too many possibilities for a prescriptive instruction card. Butterfly effects in the economy, triggered by tiny initial disturbances, are common.

By focusing on the component parts rather than the overall process, we were missing the fundamental problem.