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

by Stanley McChrystal

In 2003, we were also coming to terms with the reality that technological progress had overwhelmed our management doctrine. We were using the reductionist paradigm that had worked so well since Taylor, but we were faced with a new wave of technologies defined by connectivity—the Internet, the spread of cell phones, and the growth of social media—networks whose power lies in their emergent, nonlinear behaviors, not in the sum of their nodes. This technology produced complex problems—the kind of challenges that, as Warren Weaver observed seventy years ago, refuse to yield to reductionist analysis. Like Taylor, we found that the same technologies that created these challenges brought solutions. For Taylor, the spread of mechanization offered the opportunity for replicable procedure at scale; for us, the free flow of data unlocked new worlds of teamwork and permutational collaboration. In 2003, our organizational norms regarding information—and, thus, decision-making authority—derived from technological realities of the past: for most of human history, copying and transmitting information was costly. In the past twenty years, the costs of copying, sharing, transmitting, and manipulating data have dropped practically to zero. This enabled us to share in new ways and, consequently, to empower people with new levels of authority.