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

by Stanley McChrystal

This new environment gave Al Qaeda a distinct advantage, allowing the networked organization to strike rapidly, reconfigure in real time, and integrate its globally dispersed actions. At first, this overwhelmed the Task Force led by General McChrystal, a traditional, secretive, siloed military hierarchy that was configured to solve the problems of an earlier era. The solution was, surprisingly, found in changing management structures. The

A 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: Mark Zuckerberg, without family connections, starting capital, or an undergraduate degree, changed the world before hitting his mid-twenties; Justin Bieber posted a self-made video online in 2007 and has since sold 15 million albums, accruing close to $200 million in personal wealth; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, buoyed by online bomb-making instructions and the power to recruit and disseminate propaganda worldwide, incited a war. 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. The twenty-first century is a fundamentally different operating environment from the twentieth, and Zarqawi had arrived at just the right time. It was more than just chat rooms and YouTube: AQI’s very structure—networked and nonhierarchical—embodied this new world. 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.

Taylor’s ideas spread from company to company, from industry to industry, and from blue collars to white (there was one best way to insert paper into a typewriter, to sit at a desk, to clip pages together). They seeped into the halls of government. His philosophy of replacing the intuition of the person doing the job with reductionist efficiencies designed by a separate group of people marked a new means of organizing human endeavors. It was the behavioral soul mate for the technical advances of industrial engineering.

Historians attribute to Taylorism the advent of modern time consciousness, the transformation of leisure from unstructured free time to organized recreation, and the approach to managing the federal bureaucracy championed by the Reagan administration.

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.”

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.

Weaver argued that science up through the 1800s had concerned itself with questions of “organized simplicity”: problems involving one or two variables, like the attraction between two magnets or the rotation of the Earth around the sun.* But, Weaver observed, this was not the way much of the real world worked. Living organisms, for instance, “are more likely to present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways.” Such traits, he noted, are found in ecosystems, economies, and political systems. In other words, the real world is full of the knotted interdependencies of complexity, and science was not equipped to deal with this—indeed, science actively avoided these unpleasant truths, preferring to simplify things to fit the clockwork universe. Such efforts, Weaver maintained, are futile. You cannot force a square peg into a round hole, and you cannot force the complex to conform to rules meant for the merely complicated.

In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.

“Resilience thinking” is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of complexity. In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again. Investor and writer Nassim Taleb captures a similar concept with the term “antifragile systems.” Fragile systems, he argues, are those that are damaged by shocks; robust systems weather shocks; and antifragile systems, like immune systems, can benefit from shocks.

Humans are great optimizers. We look at everything around us, whether a cow, a house, or a share portfolio, and ask ourselves how we can manage it to get the best return. Our modus operandi is to break the things we’re managing down into its component parts and understand how each part functions and what inputs will yield the greatest outputs … [but] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience. A drive for efficient optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances.

Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.

In reality, no individual ant has the brain power to design a colony; ants have 250,000 brain cells, humans have around 100 billion. The colony’s structure emerges from the aggregation of individual instinctive behaviors—digging, foraging for food, collecting trash—triggered by primitive communications—ants recognize patterns in the pheromone trails left by other ants. The field of “emergence” examines how complex patterns and forms can arise from a multiplicity of simple, low-level interactions

ELDO’s first launch failed because it used the wrong kind of bolts to connect the French and German stages. The next collapsed because of differences between connecting rings used by the Germans and Italians. The next attempt, in August 1967, made headway when the second stage successfully separated, but once free of the booster, it did not fire. An electrical ground fault had de-energized a relay in the first stage when the rocket was sitting on the launch pad, and this led to a failure of the second-stage sequencer. Four months later, another electrical interface issue brought down the next launch. In July 1969—a few weeks prior to the American moon launch—an interface error ignited a rocket’s self-destruct system while it sat on the launch pad. ELDO’s final launch attempt, in November 1971, blew up ninety seconds into flight. The organization was dissolved three years later. Internal and external analyses later concluded that all these problems stemmed from shortfalls of organizational communication—devastating “interface failures,” or blinks. In his 1964 book The American Challenge, French journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber argued that Europe’s lag behind the United States in the Space Race was not a question of money but of “methods of organization above all … this is not a matter of ‘brain power’ in the traditional sense of the term, but of organization, education, and training.” On the other side of the pond, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concurred that...

NASA’s success illustrated a number of profound organizational insights. Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface failures.” It also proved that the cognitive “oneness”—the emergent intelligence—that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information. This runs counter to the standard “need-to-know” mind-set.

We also expanded and refined our system of sending liaison officers to our partner organizations. Liaisons are institutionalized ambassadors who serve to connect organizations—our Task Force would send a liaison to, say, the CIA, and they would send a liaison to us. Traditionally, this was a duty assigned to someone on their final tour before retirement or as a way to shuffle someone away from a squadron where they were not fitting in. Their duties were unenvied, and they were generally seen as a spy by the gaining organization—someone who was there simply to sit through meetings and report back to their home organization. They brought very little to the plate, and were rarely trusted. However, as interfaces became increasingly important, we realized the potential for bolstering our relationships with our partner agencies by way of a strong linchpin liaison officer (LNO). As it turned out, some of our best LNOs were also some of our best leaders on the battlefield. We started taking world-class commandos—men who could snipe, fast-rope, and skydive—and we placed them, attired in civilian suits, in embassies thousands of miles from the fight, because we knew we needed a great relationship with the ambassador and the other interagency leadership posted there. Everyone hated removing some of our best operators from the battlefield, but we reaped enormous benefits. Our goal was twofold. First, we wanted to get a better sense of how the war looked from our partners’ perspectives...

When asking for LNO nominations to fill critical positions, we used two criteria: (1) if it doesn’t pain you to give the person up, pick someone else; (2) if it’s not someone whose voice you’ll recognize when they call you at home at 2:00 a.m., pick someone else. Previously, we might have made these decisions based on rank, position, or where people wanted to go in their careers. But to get this right, personal qualities trumped everything else. These were people who needed to enter an unknown, and sometimes hostile, bureaucratic environment, then build trust-based relationships with the leadership there—a very difficult proposition.

We found that it was essential that we make our LNOs key players at their host agencies. To some degree, like Conway, our men and women could accomplish much through force of personality and talent, but they also needed institutional support from the Task Force. I thought of my LNOs as old-school deep-sea divers, connected to the surface by an oxygen hose. Their effectiveness depended on our ability to pump resources and information to them, making them effective and desirable to their hosts. Nothing was more highly valued by many of our partners than insights into the shadowy counterterrorist fight we were waging. So we armed our LNOs with a constant stream of intelligence, and empowered them to share it as they felt appropriate.