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

by Stanley McChrystal

Management models based on planning and predicting instead of resilient adaptation to changing circumstances are no longer suited to today’s challenges. Organizations must be networked, not siloed, in order to succeed. Their goal must shift from efficiency to sustained organizational adaptability.

We may have had the best equipment and the best special operations units in the world, but we were not—as an organization—the best suited for that time and place.

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

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.

win we had to change. Surprisingly, that change was less about tactics or new technology than it was about the internal architecture and culture of our force—in other words, our approach to management.

The pursuit of predictability—carefully delineated instructions, easily replicable procedures, fastidious standardization, and a tireless focus on efficiency—is foundational to the military’s struggle against the chaos always threatening to engulf combat operations.

To achieve efficiency and predictability, armies have long dressed, drilled, and disciplined men into becoming interchangeable parts of a military machine.

the notion of top-down, rigidly predetermined, “scientific” management of behavior in the civilian sector is largely the legacy of the nineteenth-century Quaker Frederick Winslow Taylor. His influence on the way we think about doing things—from running corporations to positioning kitchen appliances—is profound and pervasive.

To the fin de siècle exposition audience, the rate at which his system did this was nothing short of miraculous: the norm was nine feet of steel per minute; Taylor’s system could cut fifty.

Determined to be as “scientific” as possible in his optimizing, he followed the reductionist impulses of classical mechanics, breaking every job down to its most granular elements, analyzing factory labor with similar intellectual tools to those used by Isaac Newton to deconstruct and make sense of the forces of the physical world.

“complexity,” but the concept’s coming-out party was thrown in a 1948 paper in American Science. “Science and Complexity” by Warren Weaver clocked in at a mere eight pages and involved no original research—it was an essay on the nature and aims of scientific thought—but

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.

The specialization that allowed for breathtaking efficiency became a liability in the face of the unpredictability of the real world.

Those horizontal anti-MECE bonds of trust and overlapping definitions of purpose enable them to “do the right thing.”

But this overlap and redundancy—these inefficiencies—are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy. 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.

each tribe had its own brand of standoffish superiority complex.

what we might call a “command of teams”: adaptive small teams operating within an old-fashioned rigid superstructure. In a response to rising tactical complexity, many organizations in many domains have replaced small commands with teams.

we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents,

In other words, the magic of teams is a double-edged sword once organizations get big: some of the same traits that make an adaptable team great can make it incompatible with the structure it serves.

Somehow we would have to scale trust and purpose without creating chaos.

would require a true team of teams. Accomplishing this would involve a complete reversal of the conventional approach to information sharing, delineation of roles, decision-making authority, and leadership.

At its heart, F3EA was a rational, reductionist process. It took a complex set of tasks, broke them down, and distributed them to the specialized individuals or teams best suited to accomplish them.

The problem is that the logic of “need to know” depends on the assumption that somebody—some manager or algorithm or bureaucracy—actually knows who does and does not need to know which material.

Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.

“The Apollo project … is generally considered as one of the greatest technological endeavors in the history of mankind. But in order to achieve this, a managerial effort, no less prodigious than the technological one, was required.”

high-level success depended on low-level inefficiencies.

This approach, contrary to reductionism, believes that one cannot understand a part of a system without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the whole. It was the organizational manifestation of this insight that imbued NASA with the adaptive, emergent intelligence it needed to put a man on the moon.

Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key;

the subsequent, efficiency-focused program ushered in during the 1990s, called “Faster, Better, Cheaper” (FBC), took NASA further down the path of carelessness, reducing the “inefficient” ties that had defined the Apollo approach.

As we’ve discussed, top-down coordination of siloed efforts works only if those on top actually understand how everything will interact.

Like NASA before it, GM was running up against the constraints of reductionist management.

He attributed the project’s success to a management approach called “working together” that involved forcing interaction between previously separate groups and cutting-edge technological platforms for ensuring constant, systemic transparency.

But Mulally’s “working together” system created the old-school, teamlike oneness across an enterprise of ten thousand. This was a man who saw the imperative of beating the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Mulally’s goal at Ford, like ours in Iraq, was to wire all his forces together to produce an emergent intelligence and create shared consciousness.

As Mulally put it, “Working together always works. It always works. Everybody has to be on the team. They have to be interdependent with one another.”

Looking at very large data sets, Pentland has found that sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities.

Where shared consciousness upended our assumptions about information and responsibilities, this next step—which we called “empowered execution”—would transform the way we thought about power and leadership.

But interdependence was only half of the equation—the other half was speed, and that was still an issue.

Army operations took place on land, and thanks to the postal service, Ulysses S. Grant could receive regular detailed updates and send actionable replies. He could give directions, so he did—transparency and communication together bred control.

It is César Ritz who is credited with the line, now a universal law in the hospitality industry, that “the customer is always right.”

It is one thing to look at a situation and make a recommendation to a senior leader about whether or not to authorize a strike. Psychologically, it is an entirely different experience to be charged with making that decision.

We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there—on the brink of instability—that we found our sweet spot.

But the key reason for the success of empowered execution lay in what had come before it: the foundation of shared consciousness. This relationship—between contextual understanding and authority—is not new.

In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.

It was counterintuitive, but it reflected exactly the approach to decision making that we needed to pervade our force: “Eyes On—Hands Off.”

The organization as a rigidly reductionist mechanical beast is an endangered species. The speed and interconnected nature of the new world in which we function have rendered it too stupid and slow to survive the onslaught of predators.

The doctrine of empowered execution may at first glance seem to suggest that leaders are no longer needed. That is certainly the connection made by many who have described networks such as AQI as “leaderless.” But this is wrong.

The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.

We felt responsible, and harbored a corresponding need to be in control, but as we were learning, we actually needed to let go.