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

by Stanley McChrystal

Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous. Similarly, shared consciousness on its own, as we learned, is powerful but ultimately insufficient.

As with team members, complex system components, and other dynamics we have discussed in the book, the union of shared consciousness and empowered execution is greater than the sum of their parts.

The relationship between context and authority is as ancient as it is intuitive, but it has usually been directed by improving the information given to senior leaders, thereby enhancing their decision-making purview (Tocqueville’s application of this to the distributed governance of democracy is a historic exception). We reversed this direction. We used shared consciousness to pump information out, empowering people at all levels, and we redefined the role of leadership (“gardeners”). What we did would not have been possible twenty, ten, maybe even five years prior—so essential to our approach were the information technologies we harnessed—nor would it have been necessary. Today it is.

Psychologists and organizational theorists call these heuristics for how the world works “mental models.” Mental models can be very helpful—they can provide shortcuts and keep us from reinventing the wheel. As The Onion put it tastefully, “Stereotypes are a real timesaver.” Problems arise when these models no longer reflect reality and when they inhibit creative thinking. We have to recognize that a mental model is not reality, it is just a representation of reality, and there are a near-infinite number of equally valid representations, almost all of which also leave something out in the interests of simplification.

In the words of Albert Einstein, “Our theories determine what we measure.” When we urge people to think “outside of the box,” we are generally asking them to discard mental models.

Anne Murray Allen, former head of IT and strategy for one of Hewlett-Packard’s most profitable divisions, and University of Oregon social network researcher Dennis Sandow teamed up for a series of studies on social network analysis. Reflecting on their research, they wrote, “As the philosophy of the physical sciences dominated the Industrial Age, the philosophy of the biological sciences is beginning to dominate the Knowledge Age. This philosophy views knowledge, people and organizations as living systems . . . [which represents a shift from] (1) focusing on parts to focusing on the whole, (2) focusing on categorization to focusing on integration.”

Taylor, in the 1880s, gazed into a new era of technology brimming with opportunity and saw that the organization of human behavior would be a limfac. The potential gains in productivity promised by industrialization were being constrained by inconsistent, localized practices. He threw out the apprenticeship model that had worked so well for centuries and put in its place his doctrine of reductionist, replicable efficiency whose legacy remains threaded through organizations to this day.

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.

RECAP As our Task Force transformed itself, both our speed and precision improved dramatically. This was not a triumph of fine-tuning it into a hyperefficient machine. It had become a more transparent, more organic entity. Technology had been both a cause of our challenge and a tool for our success. But it was the culture change in the organization that allowed the Task Force to use it properly. At the core of the Task Force’s journey to adaptability lay a yin-and-yang symmetry of shared consciousness, achieved through strict, centralized forums for communication and extreme transparency, and empowered execution, which involved the decentralization of managerial authority. Together, these powered our Task Force; neither would suffice alone. Our transformation is reflective of the new generation of mental models we must adopt in order to make sense of the twenty-first century. If we do manage to embrace this change, we can unlock tremendous potential for human progress.

The Navy is the only service that uses the acronym UNODIR (UNless Otherwise DIRected), by which a commanding officer informs the boss of a proposed course of action, and only if the boss overrides it will it not be taken. The subordinate is informing the boss, not asking permission.

See Turn this Ship Around