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

by Stanley McChrystal

Many great thinkers—most notably the nineteenth-century polymath Henri Poincaré—have observed aspects of the phenomenon that we now call “complexity,” but the concept’s coming-out party was thrown in a 1948 paper in American Science. “Science and Complexity” by Warren Weaver clocked in at a mere eight pages and involved no original research—it was an essay on the nature and aims of scientific thought—but it has left an enduring mark. Weaver argued that science up through the 1800s had concerned itself with questions of “organized simplicity”: problems involving one or two variables, like the attraction between two magnets or the rotation of the Earth around the sun.* But, Weaver observed, this was not the way much of the real world worked. 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. Such efforts, Weaver maintained, are futile. You cannot force a square peg into a round hole, and you cannot force the complex to conform to rules meant for the merely complicated.