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

by Stanley McChrystal

a problem has different solutions on different days

Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.

To our way of thinking, an organization without a predictable methodology or clear chain of command wasn’t really an organization at all—from

the one element in a situation that holds you back—a limfac (limiting factor).

VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).

Living organisms, for instance, “are more likely to present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways.” Such traits, he noted, are found in ecosystems, economies, and political systems. In other words, the real world is full of the knotted interdependencies of complexity, and science was not equipped to deal with this—indeed, science actively avoided these unpleasant truths, preferring to simplify things to fit the clockwork universe.

you cannot force the complex to conform to rules meant for the merely complicated.

We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.

Henry Mintzberg, author of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: “Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an iceberg.”

Scientist Brian Walker and writer David Salt, in their book on the subject, describe resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.” In a complex world, disturbances are inevitable, making such a capacity to absorb shocks increasingly important.

Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again. Investor and writer Nassim Taleb captures a similar concept with the term “antifragile systems.” Fragile systems, he argues, are those that are damaged by shocks; robust systems weather shocks; and antifragile systems, like immune systems, can benefit from shocks.

The focus of management for a century has been on efficiency: getting the most of a desired output (we can call this variable y) with the least of the available input (x).

the pursuit of efficiency is grounded in prediction.

Taylor despised workers’ free association—their attempts to establish horizontal bonds—because it created too many potential divergences from the plan. He had reason to worry about his workers messing around when not told exactly what to do: they usually had little awareness of what the company needed and no incentive to provide it. His system resolved the problem by parsing the needs of the company into smaller interim goals, overseen by leadership who understood how subcomponents assembled into a whole. 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.

As long as they can do their part and get paid their wages, it is not important that they care deeply about the factory as a whole or understand its position within the broader corporate strategy. This does not hold in team settings.

Johnson describes emergence as producing “unpredictable creativity,” and identifies the ingredients necessary to unleash such creativity as “connectedness and organization.” In other words, order can emerge from the bottom up, as opposed to being directed, with a plan, from the top down.

“Previously, we had a historical pattern of disruption followed by stabilization—‘punctuated equilibrium’—but now that pattern itself has been disrupted. Today, we find ourselves in a new equilibrium defined by constant disruption.

There is a catchy acronym in the consulting world, “MECE,” which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.” A MECE breakdown takes something—say, customers—and segments it into a series of categories that do not overlap, but together cover everything. Customers might be divided into “paying customers” and “nonpaying customers.” Every customer will fall into one of these categories, and no customer will be in more than one place. 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. Connections crisscross all over the place, and there is lots of overlap: team members track and travel through not only their own specialized territory but often the entire playing field. 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. But this overlap and redundancy—these inefficiencies—are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers).

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.

In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working . . . than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each . . . adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

Somehow we would have to scale trust and purpose without creating chaos.

Team of Teams We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team,

We needed to bind everybody into a single enterprise, but we had no explicit authority to do so.

One individual, properly empowered, became a conduit to a larger network that could contribute back into our process.

Most important, it was not a zero-sum game; the more you put into the system, the more it could serve you.

Submitted by University of Toronto professor Anatol Rapoport, the program was called Tit for Tat. The strategy always began with cooperating, and then simply did what the other player did on the previous move, cooperating if the other cooperated, defecting if the other defected. It did not hold a grudge: if its opponent began to cooperate again after defecting, Tit for Tat would also return to cooperation.

these two cornerstones—systemic understanding and strong lateral connectivity—grounded shared consciousness.

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 best ideas,” he writes, “come from careful and continuous social exploration . . . it is the idea flow within a community that builds the intelligence that makes it successful.” “Idea flow” is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group. Pentland likens it to the spread of the flu: a function of susceptibility and frequency of interaction. The key to increasing the “contagion” is trust and connectivity between otherwise separate elements of an establishment. The two major determinants of idea flow, Pentland has found, are “engagement” within a small group like a team, a department, or a neighborhood, and “exploration”—frequent contact with other units. In other words: a team of teams.

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 degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate.”

AQI had empowered its operatives, not only with technology, but with decision-making authority, while our operators struggled to respond under codes designed to align with the Perry Principle. This is just what we wanted in the Task Force: we accepted that divergences from plan were inevitable—we wanted to improve our ability to respond to them. We needed to empower our teams to take action on their own.

An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome. Another factor was that, for all our technology, our leadership simply did not understand what was happening on the ground as thoroughly as the people who were there.

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.

we still retain high, often unrealistic, expectations of leaders. We publicly demand high-level strategic vision and an unerring ability to anticipate broad market trends, but we simultaneously celebrate CEOs for encyclopedic mastery of every aspect of their business. We routinely ask government leaders if they knew the smallest details of an issue, and if not, why they didn’t. We expect our leaders to know everything, knowing full well that the limits of technology and the human brain won’t allow it.

we found that, alongside our new approach to management, we had to develop a new paradigm of personal leadership. The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.

The gardener cannot actually “grow” tomatoes, squash, or beans—she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.

only the senior leader could drive the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation we needed. I could shape the culture and demand the ongoing conversation that shared consciousness required.

the decentralization of authority that AQI had engineered—and that we, in our own way, had adopted—meant that “decapitation” was no silver bullet. Our main strategy was to hollow out the middle ranks of the organization, which tended to be the most connected.

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/02/20/autonomous_intersec