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

by Stanley McChrystal

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market—the notion that order best arises not from centralized design but through the decentralized interactivity of buyers and sellers—is an example of “emergence” avant la lettre. It stands in direct contrast to what Alfred Chandler dubbed the “visible hand” of management—the reductive planning that has dominated most organizations for the past century. Smith’s invisible hand, like the leaderless ant colony, illustrates the core insight of emergence as it relates to our study of teams: in situations defined by high levels of interaction, ingenious solutions can emerge in the absence of any single designer; prices can settle without a central planner; complex operations can be executed without a detailed plan. 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.