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

by Stanley McChrystal

Within the Task Force, thanks to radical information sharing, we had come a long way with regard to Drucker’s exhortation to “do the right thing” rather than “do things right”: people at every level of the organization had the information and connectivity to determine what the right thing was, in real time. But, held back by our internal processes, they lacked the ability to act on that determination. We had gotten halfway to transcending Krasnovian soccer and then stopped: we had built an outstanding team bound together by the oneness of trust and purpose and capable of devising, in real time, brilliant, emergent solutions to complex problems, but we still required every player to get written permission from the coach before passing the ball. Meanwhile, senior leaders from Iraq to Washington had in-boxes overflowing with requests to do things that they knew less about than the people on the ground and about which they were often unable to judge effectively.