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

by Stanley McChrystal

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...