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

by Stanley McChrystal

Firms that value innovation and creativity have spent a lot of time searching for ways to inject interactivity into work environments. In 1941 Bell Labs famously broke with tradition, hiring Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design a campus whose spaces promoted interaction: to move from an office to a lab, for example, employees had to walk through the cafeteria where they would bump into people. The hope was that such casual interactions with peers, managers, and even custodial staff might prompt unexpected insights. In the 1970s even staid IBM experimented with early “nonterritorial” offices where engineers could come in, grab their materials, and sit anywhere in the open plan space arranged to facilitate “serendipitous encounters” with team members. As with NASA, these changes were not initially welcomed, but grew in popularity. “I was skeptical before, but I’d hate to go back to a closed office now,” said one engineer. Another was more succinct: “Don’t fence me in again.” In Silicon Valley, Google, Facebook, and other titans, as well as countless start-ups, use open plans that put different teams and different rungs of management in the same space.