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

by Stanley McChrystal

Our Task Force’s rigid top-to-bottom structure was a product of military history and military culture, and finding ways to reverse the information flow—to ensure that when the bottom spoke the top listened—was one of the challenges we would eventually have to overcome.

To beat AQI, we would have to change into a type of force that the United States had never fielded. There was no manual for this transformation, and we had to conduct it in the middle of a war. We often said we were “redesigning the plane in midflight.”

“It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network.”

instinctive, cooperative adaptability is essential to high-performing teams.

The purpose of BUD/S is not to produce supersoldiers. It is to build superteams.

The first step of this is constructing a strong lattice of trusting relationships.

The formation of SEAL teams is less about preparing people to follow precise orders than it is about developing trust and the ability to adapt within a small group.

Ruiz sees his main job as “taking the idea of individual performance out of the lexicon on day one.”

This is about more than the feel-good effects of “bonding.” It is done because teams whose members know one another deeply perform better.

Any coach knows that these sorts of relationships are vital for success.

a team fused by trust and purpose is much more potent. Such a group can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.

Groups like SEAL teams and flight crews operate in truly complex environments, where adaptive precision is key. Such situations outpace a single leader’s ability to predict, monitor, and control.

As a result, team members cannot simply depend on orders; teamwork is a process of reevaluation, negotiation, and adjustment; players are constantly sending messages to, and taking cues from, their teammates, and those playe...

“Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.”

While building trust gives teams the ability to reconfigure and “do the right thing,” it is also necessary to make sure that team members know what the right thing is. Team members must all work toward the same goal, and in volatile, complex environments that goal is changeable.

As you travel down a traditional org chart, motivation and contextual awareness become more limited and specific, and more remote from the organization’s overall strategic aims.

Team members tackling complex environments must all grasp the team’s situation and overarching purpose.

Only if each of them understands the goal of a mission and the strategic context in which it fits can the team members evaluate risks on the fly and know how to behave in relation to their teammates.

The Navy needs to know that operators can make the right call in dangerous, high-risk settings where plans are changing constantly. As a result, BUD/S invests deeply in ensuring that every SEAL is holistically aligned in purpose with the strategic function of his unit and with the objective of any given mission and his specific role.

Testing for a sense of purpose at its broadest and most visceral is simple: make the experience unpleasant enough and only the truly committed will persevere.

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

SEAL teams offer a particularly dramatic example of how adaptability can be built through trust and a shared sense of purpose,

Everything the surgical teams did that day was “a complete deviation from normal practices.”

unit functioning as a command, with members waiting for instruction from authority, would have been too hidebound to respond effectively.

One can make contingency plans, but these can account for only a modest number of possibilities.

Our operators’ most useful preparation lay in the trust they had built, shared hardship by shared hardship, over years of service. It is often said that trust is learned on the battlefield. But for groups like the SEALs, the oneness imbued by trust and purpose is a prerequisite to deployment.

Their structure—not their plan—was their strategy.

the core insight of emergence as it relates to our study of teams: in situations defined by high levels of interaction, ingenious solutions can emerge in the absence of any single designer; prices can settle without a central planner; complex operations can be executed without a detailed plan.

emergence as producing “unpredictable creativity,” and identifies the ingredients necessary to unleash such creativity as “connectedness and organization.” In other words, order can emerge from the bottom up, as opposed to being directed, with a plan, from the top down.

The creation and maintenance of a team requires both the visible hand of management and the invisible hand of emergence, the former weaving the elements together and the latter guiding their work.

technology had changed in such a way that management had become a limfac.

The crew’s attachment to procedure instead of purpose offers a clear example of the dangers of prizing efficiency over adaptability.

It trained juniors to speak more assertively and captains to be less forceful, turning vertical command-and-control relationships into flexible, multidirectional, communicative bonds.

In medicine as in aviation, technology had outpaced the capacity of any individual practitioner to be on top of it all; once this was recognized, there was a movement toward “cross-functional trauma teams,” with more even distribution of authority and leadership.

The proliferation of such groups reflects the increasing complexity of the world—or rather, the tactical understanding that responding to such a world requires greater adaptability, and adaptability is more characteristic of small interactive teams than large top-down hierarchies.

“Previously, we had a historical pattern of disruption followed by stabilization—‘punctuated equilibrium’—but now that pattern itself has been disrupted.

We had honed the traits of trust and purpose at the team level, but our organization at large was the complete opposite—it was a classic command.

None of AQI’s individual elements was better than ours, but that did not matter; a team, unlike a conventional command, is not the sum of its parts. Even if their nodes were weak, their network was strong.

Fundamental structural differences separate commands from teams. The former is rooted in reductionist prediction, and very good at executing planned procedures efficiently. The latter is less efficient, but much more adaptable.

The connectivity of trust and purpose imbues teams with an ability to solve problems that could never be foreseen by a single manager—their solutions often emerge as the bottom-up result of interactions, rather than from top-down orders.

In recent decades, teams have proliferated across domains previously dominated by commands in response ...

We were pitted against an enemy and a broader environment defined by interdependence, speed, and unpredictability.

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

There is a catchy acronym in the consulting world, “MECE,” which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.” A MECE breakdown takes something—say, customers—and segments it into a series of categories that do not overlap, but together cover everything. Customers might be divided into “paying customers” and “nonpaying customers.” Every customer will fall into one of these categories, and no customer will be in more than one place.

Trust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy. 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.

they trusted one another and within their units they had a clear and shared sense of purpose.

They were adept at responding instantaneously and creatively to unexpected events. But all that behavior stopped where the edge o...

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

To fix the choke point, we needed to fix the management system and organizational culture that created it.

As soon as we looked at our organization through the lens of the team structure—searching for weaknesses in horizontal connectivity rather than new possibilities for top-down planning—similar choke p...