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

by Stanley McChrystal

Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability in structures, processes, and mind-sets that is often uncomfortable.

The question “Had our success against Al Qaeda been a cruel illusion?” came immediately to mind. But we knew it hadn’t been. What we’d done had been real. Instead, this latest development reinforced some of the very lessons we had drawn. The first was that the constantly changing, entirely unforgiving environment in which we all now operate denies the satisfaction of any permanent fix. The second was that the organization we crafted, the processes we refined, and the relationships we forged and nurtured are no more enduring than the physical conditioning that kept our soldiers fit: an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.

Our struggle in Iraq in 2004 is not an exception—it is the new norm. The models of organizational success that dominated the twentieth century have their roots in the industrial revolution and, simply put, the world has changed. The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.

AQI displayed a shape-shifting quality. It wasn’t the biggest or the strongest, but, like Proteus, AQI was a daunting foe because it could transform itself at will.

back. As network theorist and military analyst John Arquilla put it: We killed “about 20 of Al Qaeda’s ‘number threes’ over the past decade, but everyone in a network is number three.” To our way of thinking, an organization without a predictable methodology or clear chain of command wasn’t really an organization at all—from our vantage, AQI should have devolved into internal anarchy. But it didn’t. It continued to function as persistently and implacably as ever, demonstrating a coherence of purpose and strategy.

In some ways, we had more in common with the plight of a Fortune 500 company trying to fight off a swarm of start-ups than we did with the Allied command battling Nazi Germany in World War II.

loyal to a centrally designed process. Taylor told workers, “I have you for your strength and mechanical ability. We have other men paid for thinking.” In the book that became the bible of his movement, The Principles of Scientific Management, he portrayed laborers as idiots, mocking their syntax and describing them as “mentally sluggish.” In one passage he wrote, [A laborer] shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type . . . the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word “percentage” has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful. Taylor’s statement is offensive and inaccurate, but he was right in pointing out that many people do things in inefficient ways, and that small inefficiencies multiplied at industrial scale reduce productivity. The world had become vastly more complicated since the time of apprenticeships and small, family-run enterprises. The level of complication had passed a threshold whereby localized improvisation and intuition could not support the magnitude of industrial endeavors. The scope and intricacy of production processes had expanded to the point that they required planners and coordinators to ensure that all the pieces came tog...

Journalist Ida Tarbell went so far as to argue, “No man in the history of American industry has made a larger contribution to genuine cooperation and juster human relations than did Frederick Winslow Taylor. He is one of the few creative geniuses of our time.”

In the decades since, Taylor’s star has dimmed. His treatment of workers has been widely decried, as has his conception of individuals as mechanistic entities to be manipulated.

Peter Drucker argued that Taylor, more than Karl Marx, deserves a place in the pantheon of modern intellectual thought alongside Darwin and Freud. Taylor changed not only the way our world is organized, but the way we think about solving problems. Historian Jeremy Rifkin believes, “[Taylor] has probably had a greater effect on the private and public lives of the men and women of the twentieth century than any other single individual.”

Our efficient systems provided us with a solid foundation, but they could not bring us victory. This new world required a fundamental rewriting of the rules of the game. In order to win, we would have to set aside many of the lessons that millennia of military procedure and a century of optimized efficiencies had taught us.

They blazed through the Lowlands and struck France from the north in a flanking maneuver around the impenetrable (but immovable) Maginot Line. The Luftwaffe simply flew over it. Outflanked and stunned, France surrendered in less than two months.

In popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with “leverage”—the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.

For decades we had been able to execute our linear approach faster than the external environment could change, and as a result we believed we were doing something different from other organizations. In fact, we were as bureaucratic as anyone else; we were just more efficient in our execution.

In Iraq, cutting-edge technology had provided us with the holy grail of military operations: near-perfect “situational awareness” or COP (“common operational picture”). This was the first war in which we could see all of our operations unfolding in real time. Video feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) gave us live footage of missions, while microphones carried by our operators provided audio.

firms—fifty years ago, a Fortune 500 firm was expected to last around seventy-five years. Today this life expectancy is less than fifteen years and is constantly declining. The Fortune 500 list of 2011 featured only sixty-seven companies that appeared on the list of 1955, meaning that just 13.4 percent of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955 were still on the list fifty-six years later. Eighty-seven percent of the companies simply couldn’t keep up; they had either gone bankrupt, merged with other companies, been forced to go private, or fallen off the list completely. The churn has been so incredible that the companies on the list in 1955 would be unrecognizable to readers today.

Peter Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.”

The chains of command that once guaranteed reliability now constrained our pace; the departmental dividers and security clearances that had kept our data safe now inhibited the exchanges we needed to fight an agile enemy; the competitive internal culture that used to keep us vigilant now made us dysfunctional; the rules and limitations that once prevented accidents now prevented creativity.

Since the pursuit of efficiency can limit flexibility and resilience, the Task Force would have to pivot away from seeing efficiency as the managerial holy grail. To confront a constantly shifting threat in a complex setting, we would have to pursue adaptability.

The human body is a complex and interdependent system, and surgeries can diverge from a plan. “Every patient is different. Nobody has an identical fracture,” Carty observes. “Operations are unpredictable. You always have to adapt.”

Meaningful relationships between teams were nonexistent. And our teams had very provincial definitions of purpose: completing a mission or finishing intel analysis, rather than defeating AQI. To each unit, the piece of the war that really mattered was the piece inside their box on the org chart; they were fighting their own fights in their own silos. The specialization that allowed for breathtaking efficiency became a liability in the face of the unpredictability of the real world.

We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival.

Since The 9/11 Commission Report famously concluded that the U.S. intelligence community had all the pieces of the puzzle but had failed to put them together and protect the country, the national security community has seen a gradual but undeniable paradigm shift toward greater information sharing.

When their turns came and their faces suddenly filled the screen I made it a point to greet them by their first name, which often caused them to smile in evident surprise. They were eight levels down the chain of command and many miles away—how did the commanding general know their name? Simple: I had my team prepare a “cheat sheet” of the day’s planned briefers so I could make one small gesture to put them at ease.

A curious incident reinforced my confidence. Through some adept technical work, we captured the raw digital footage of a propaganda film AQI was making. It showed Zarqawi, clad in his signature black, shooting weapons amid some nondescript dirt berms. The video reflected a catch-me-if-you-can cockiness crafted to enhance his warrior-leader image. But, before AQI could release its edited version, we released the outtakes: Zarqawi fumbling amateurishly with an automatic weapon, one of his henchmen grabbing a white-hot barrel with predictable results. More important, through some stunningly impressive work, analysts in D.C. were able to pinpoint the location where the scenes had been filmed. Our team of teams was now able to network its expertise quickly and effectively.

By 2007, the Task Force was winning the fight against AQI.* Our thinking had become smarter, and our execution more nimble. We were learning and adapting quicker than the enemy and—finally—hitting them faster than they could regenerate. We hit targets every night, but also started striking during the day—something we never could have done without the superior intelligence capabilities and trust between our operators and analysts that had been bred by our network.

Similarly, shared consciousness on its own, as we learned, is powerful but ultimately insufficient. Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization. Maintain this system for too long without decentralizing authority, and whatever morale gains were made will be reversed as people become frustrated with their inability to act on their new insights.