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

by Stanley McChrystal

The greatest innovations have not come from a lone inventor or from solving problems in a top-down, command-and-control style. Instead, the great successes—the creation of the computer, transistor, microchip, Internet—come from a “team of teams” working together in pursuit of a common goal.

organizations everywhere are now facing dizzying challenges, from global terrorism to health epidemics to supply chain disruption to game-changing technologies.

Efficiency is necessary but no longer sufficient to be a successful organization. It worked in the twentieth century, but it is now quickly overwhelmed by the speed and exaggerated impact of small players, such as terrorists, start-ups, and viral trends.

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 o...

Their goal must shift from efficiency to sustained organizat...

This requires dramatic shifts in mental and organizational models, as well as sustained efforts on the part of leadership to crea...

After identifying the adaptable and networked nature of Al Qaeda, the general and his team explored why traditional organizations aren’t adaptable. One conclusion they reached was that agility and adaptability are normally limited to small teams. They explored the traits that make small teams adaptable, such as trust, common purpose, shared awareness, and the empowerment of individual members to act. They also identified the traditional limits of teams, such as “blinks” in the organization between teams where collaboration begins to break down.

The primary lesson that emerged, and is detailed in this book, is the need to scale the adaptability and cohesiveness of small teams up to the enterprise level.

Doing this requires increasing transparency to ensure common understanding and awareness. It also often involves changing the physical space and personal behaviors to establish trust and foster collaboration. This can develop the ability to share context so that the teams can decentralize and empower individuals to act.

Decisions are pushed downward, allowing the members to act quickly. This new approach also requires changing the traditional conception of the leader. The role of the leader becomes creating the broader environment instead of command-and-control micromanaging.

Although lavishly resourced and exquisitely trained, we found ourselves losing to an enemy that, by traditional calculus, we should have dominated. Over time we came to realize that more than our foe, we were actually struggling to cope with an environment that was fundamentally different from anything we’d planned or trained for. The speed and interdependence of events had produced new dynamics that threatened to overwhelm the time-honored processes and culture we’d built.

For a soldier trained at West Point as an engineer, the idea that a problem has different solutions on different days was fundamentally disturbing. Yet that was the case.

Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.

shared consciousness: the way transparency and communication can be used in an organization to produce extraordinary outcomes across even large groups.

trust, common purpose, shared consciousness, and empowered execution

There is also comfort in “doubling down” on proven processes, regardless of their efficacy. Few of us are criticized if we faithfully do what has worked many times before. But feeling comfortable or dodging criticism should not be our measure of success. There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.

a mesh of synchronization and real-time adaptability

principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”).

We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents.

We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility n...

We abandoned many of the precepts that had helped establish our efficacy in the twentieth century, because the twenty-first century is a different game with different rules.

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,...

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 e...

Today, the challenges faced by our Task Force are shared by contemporary organizations, which, like us, developed tremendous competencies for dea...

only those who can actually shape and manage a force capable of doing the job ultimately succeed.

The exponential growth of global interconnectedness meant we weren’t just looking at the same roads with faster traffic; we were looking at an entirely different and constantly shifting landscape.

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

We saw no evidence that this inexplicable structure was the product of deliberate design; it seemed instead to have evolved through ongoing adaptation.

The environmental factors that weaken the host indirectly strengthen and empower attackers.

began to realize that an organization’s fitness—like that of an organism—cannot be assessed in a vacuum; it is a product of compatibility with the surrounding environment.

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.

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

Nicolson concludes that “the British had a cultural and not a technical advantage; reliant on the notion of the ‘band of brothers.’ ”

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.

We had everything in place: men, guns, planes, ammunition, medical supplies. But the system that bound these elements together and channeled them toward our enemy required the equivalent of ships in a row and an admiral who could see everything in order to be effective.

we came to realize that our firepower and legacy were failing us not because of a lack of effort or a shortage of clever tactics, but because of something in our Task Force’s organizational DNA.

We realized that of all the unexpected and blindingly obvious things, our limfac lay in the mundane art of management.

To 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.

Standardization and uniformity have enabled military leaders and planners to bring a semblance of predictability and order to the otherwise crazy environment that is war. Such standards become all the more important as a force grows in size. At the scale of the U.S. armed forces, standardization is a necessity.

While fighting forces have been developing such protocols since Sparta, 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.

For our Task Force and for other twenty-first-century organizational endeavors, the legacy of Taylor’s ideas is both part of the solution and part of the problem.

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.

Although the industrial revolution had ushered in a new era of technology, the management structures that held everything in place had not changed since the days of artisans, small shops, and guilds: knowledge was largely rule of thumb, acquired through tips and tricks that would trickle down to aspiring craftsmen over the course of long apprenticeships.

He came to believe that their protectionism over trade knowledge prevented industry from achieving its potential for scaled efficiency. Technology had leapt forward and now management was the limfac.

Everywhere he looked, he saw slack that could be tightened, fat that could be trimmed, seconds that could be shaved off flawed processes.

He would rigorously study practices that had, for centuries, been left to rules of thumb; he would find “the one best way” to cut steel, prove that method’s supremacy, and then have everyone do exactly that. Thus began a set of experiments that would change the working world for generations.

management guru. At a paper mill in Wisconsin, he was told that the art of pulping and drying could not be reduced to a science. He instituted his system and material costs dropped from $75 to $35 per ton, while labor costs dropped from $30 a ton to $8. At a ball bearing factory, he experimented with everything from lighting levels to rest break durations, and oversaw an increase in quantity and quality of production while reducing the number of employees from 120 to 35; at a pig iron plant, he raised worker output from 12.5 to 47 tons of steel per day, and decreased the number of workers from 600 to 140.

Previously, managerial roles were rewards for years of service in the form of higher pay and less strenuous labor. The manager’s main function was to keep things in working order and maintain morale. Under Taylor’s formulation, managers were both research scientists and architects of efficiency.