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January 19 - February 14, 2020
Stratification and silos were hardwired throughou...
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each tribe had its own brand of standoffish superiority complex.
Our forces lived a proximate but largely parallel existence.
Built in the name of security, these physical walls prevented routine interaction and produced misinformation and mistrust.
We had to find a way for the organization as a whole to build at scale the same messy connectivity our small teams had mastered so effectively.
Problems existed on the fault lines—in the spaces between elite teams.
“command of teams”: adaptive small teams operating within an old-fashioned rigid superstructure.
teams might achieve tactical adaptability, but will never be able to exhibit those traits at a strategic level.
Teams, like many of the topics studied in this book (trust, purpose, the need for adaptability, etc.), can easily devolve into a “bumper sticker solution”—rhetoric parading as real transformation.
Teams can bring a measure of adaptability to previously rigid organizations. But these performance improvements have a ceiling as long as adaptable traits are limited to the team level.
“THE POINT AT WHICH EVERYONE ELSE SUCKS”
Athletic teams, for instance, usually consist of fifteen to thirty people. Army Ranger platoons are composed of forty-two soldiers. SEAL squads contain between sixteen and twenty people. Beyond such numbers, teams begin to lose the “oneness” that makes them adaptable.
As the proverbial kitchen fills up, communication and trust break down, egos come into conflict, and the chemistry that fueled innovation and agility becomes destructive.
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.
team dynamics are powerful but delicate, and expansion is a surefire way to break them.
At the same time, we couldn’t simply remove the reductionist superstructure and leave each team to its own devices; we needed coordination across the enterprise. Somehow we would have to scale trust and purpose without creating chaos.
On a single team, every individual needs to know every other individual in order to build trust, and they need to maintain comprehensive awareness at all times in order to maintain common purpose—easy with a group of twenty-five, doable with a group of fifty, tricky above one hundred, and definitely impossible across a task force of seven thousand.
Accomplishing this would involve a complete reversal of the conventional approach to information sharing, delineation of roles, decision-making authority, and leadership.
The solution we devised was a “team of teams”—an organization within which the relationships between constituent teams resembled those between individuals on a single team: teams that had traditionally resided in separate silos would now have to become fused to one another via trust and purpose.
January 2000, Khalid al-Mihdhar obtained a visa to enter the United States. Two days earlier, he had been the subject of a joint CIA-FBI meeting. A CIA analyst present knew that Mihdhar had connections to suspected terrorists, but “as a CIA analyst, he was not authorized to answer FBI questions regarding CIA information.” When, later that summer, the FBI grew suspicious of Mihdhar, internal divisions at the Bureau hampered efforts to locate him, and an interested “criminal” FBI agent assigned to the case of the USS Cole bombing was erroneously told that since he was not an “intelligence” FBI
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In July 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to FBI headquarters suggesting the “possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Laden” to send terrorists to flight school in the United States, and noting the “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” who were enrolled in flight schools in Arizona. Though they were addressed on the memo, members of the FBI’s Usama Bin Laden unit did not read the memo until after September 11.
Our operation was a success at the level of each individual team, but it was also rife with opportunities left unrealized for our Task Force at large. This was the frustration of operating a command of teams where information wasn’t clearly shared.
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.
When we started falling behind in the fight against AQI, we tried to do what we had always done, only better: meticulously construct schedules, increase our intelligence structure, add interrogators, analysts, and technicians by the score, and sharpen our focus. If we each did...
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By August 2004 we were running eighteen raids a month—a higher pace than we had thought possible. But it wasn’t enough. By focusing on the component parts rather than the overall process, we were missing the fundamental problem. Speeding up the individual elements of the system did nothing to eliminate the blinks between them that most stymied our efforts.
Cultural differences between the Task Force’s different tribes got in the way of communicating. Overcoming this would require completely rethinking the conventional organizational approach to distributing information.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know,”
broader organizational sentiments about the value of information: given the overwhelming volume of, and myriad sensitivities around, information, the default is not to share.
this limited definition of efficiency meant that they passed on information that was often less useful than it should have been, late, or lacking context.
They took pride in their own team’s performance, like the prima donna slugger who touts his high batting average as his team consistently loses. Instinctively, the silos of our organization looked inward, where they could see metrics of success and failure.
most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.
The organizational structures we had developed in the name of secrecy and efficiency actively prevented us from talking to each other and assembling a full picture.
The work done by our operators and analysts was inextricably linked, and yet we had placed the two groups in separate organizational silos—we had given them blinders—in the name of efficiency.
find a way to exploit the innovative abilities of a small team at the scale of a large organization.
His vision for NASA was that of a single interconnected mind—an emergent intelligence like the “joint cognition” that defines extraordinary teams.
What Mueller instituted was known as “systems engineering” or “systems management,” an approach built on the foundation of “systems thinking.”
Like Taylor’s world’s fair exhibition in Paris, the success of Apollo 11 and the concurrent shambles of Europa I shone a spotlight on the role of management in large-scale endeavors.
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.
Systems thinking has been used to understand everything from the functioning of a city to the internal dynamics of a skin cell, and plays a key role in deciphering interdependence.
We would never call the rigors of medical school “easy,” but it is more feasible to spend seven years learning about the complex cause-and-effect relationships in the human body than to attempt to record and memorize every possible event that can befall bodies.
This is the difference between “education” and “training.” Medical school is education, first aid is training. Education requires fundamental understanding, which can be used to grasp and respond to a nearly infinite variety of threats; training involves singular actions, which are useful only against anticipated challenges. Education is resilient, training is robust.
This emphasis on group success spurs cooperation, and fosters trust and purpose.
Diverse specialized abilities are essential. We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise.
We dubbed this goal—this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence—shared consciousness, and it became the cornerstone of our transformation.
Everyone needed to be intimately familiar with every branch of the organization, and personally invested in the outcome.
In the private sector also, physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization.
How we organize physical space says a lot about how we think people behave; but how people behave is often a by-product of how we set up physical space.
we needed a space that facilitated not the orderly, machinelike flow of paperwork, but the erratic, networked flow of ideas—an architecture designed not for separation, but for the merging of worlds.
The appreciation for serendipitous encounters embodied by Bloomberg’s bullpen and Silicon Valley’s open plans is a way of saying, “We don’t know what connections and conversations will prove valuable.”
