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

by Stanley McChrystal

great deal has been written about how the world has become “flatter” and faster. People are more connected, more mobile, and move faster than ever before. By lowering what economists call the “barriers to entry”—prohibitive costs associated with entering a market—these changes have ushered in a universe of new possibilities for players operating outside the conventional systems:

Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence: the garage band, the dorm-room start-up, the viral blogger, and the terrorist cell.

How do you train a leviathan to improvise?

Adam Nicolson’s Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar,

“had patiently instilled the idea in his own commanders during many tactical discussions in the days before the battle. He allowed and, indeed, expected his subordinates to use their own initiative, at the same time reducing the fleet’s dependence on uncertain methods of communication” such as signaling.

At its heart, Nelson crafted an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands.

At the heart of his success was patient, yet relentless, nurturing of competence and adaptability within his crews. Here, for organizations, lies the critical nexus between theorized strategy and realized victory—the ground where doctrinaire theorists and armchair admirals fall short is the decisive terrain from which true leaders emerge. Nelson’s real genius lay not in the clever maneuver for which he is remembered, but in the years of innovative management and leadership that preceded it.

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.

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.”

After years of training, we were ready for another Iranian—or Krasnovian—hostage crisis. But by 2004, the type of threat that Krasnovia posed was as fictional as the state itself. We were pitted against an enemy and a broader environment defined by interdependence, speed, and unpredictability. And we had lured ourselves into a sense of false efficacy. Every time we ran exercises, we confirmed that the SEALs were outstanding at seaborne operations, that Army Special Forces were unparalleled at hostage rescue, and that the Rangers excelled at airfield seizure. We assumed that it followed that we, as a force, were unbeatable. We should have known better.

There is a catchy acronym in the consulting world, “MECE,” which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.”

Great teams are less like “awesome machines” than awesome organisms.

The choke point existed not because of insufficient guidance from above, but because of a dearth of integration.