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

by Stanley McChrystal

A new layout with an old culture can deliver the worst of both worlds: countless managers, eager to adopt the new trend that promises innovation but reluctant to abandon the org chart, have done away with cubicles only to produce a noisier, more distracting environment that is neither efficient nor effective.

Cultures, however, are more resistant to designed change than bricks and mortar.

Shared consciousness demanded the adoption of extreme transparency throughout our force and with our partner forces. This was not “transparency” in the sense that it is usually used in the business world, a synonym for personal candidness. We needed transparency that provided every team with an unobstructed, constantly up-to-date view of the rest of the organization.

It is the type of transparency that those of us raised in the comfort of bureaucratic silos find uncomfortable. But it would be absolutely critical to our abilit...

Our standing guidance was “Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.”

but we had no explicit authority to do so.

Eventually we had seven thousand people attending almost daily for up to two hours.

Our organization was not just “getting smarter” or “doing more” in isolation. Instead, it was acting smarter and learning constantly, simultaneously.

shared consciousness

Shared consciousness in an organization is either hindered or helped by physical spaces and established processes.

The daily O&I briefing lay at the core of our transformation: this pumped information about the entire scope of our operations out to all members of the Task Force and partner agencies, and also offered everyone the chance to contribute.

We needed true, not theoretical, collaboration, transparency, and trust.

nurturing shared consciousness,

When these operators returned to their home unit, their positive comments on the rival unit would spread, deepening the ties between teams. Slowly, we grew the bonds of trust needed for us to overcome our Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The Task Force’s relationship with that country grew tighter nearly instantaneously. A new node in our network came online and began to thrive.

a track record of productive collaborations led to reflexive, system 1 cooperation—in other words, real trust. Furthermore, this trust had a viral effect: once it passed a certain threshold, it became the norm.

No single supervisor had planned or even dictated in the operation in real time; the solution emerged from a dense knot of interactions at the ground level.

Only with deep, empathetic familiarity could these different units function so seamlessly together—put

What on the surface seemed like an inefficient use of time in fact laid the foundation for our adaptability.

Together, these two cornerstones—systemic understanding and strong lateral connectivity—gro...

The two strains of shared consciousness also paralleled the ingredients that, at a lower level, had ensured the success of our small teams for decades: “seeing the system” is essentially a macro version of the “purpose” that gives our operators the context and commitment to persevere in volatile situations, and the interteam bonds we used to beat the Prisoner’s Dilemma are akin to the trust between team members.

DECENTRALIZED OPERATIONS WITH COORDINATED CONTROL

This was inextricably linked with the general culture of efficiency and internal competitiveness.

Like the “Faster, Better, Cheaper” approach that encouraged poor decision making at NASA in the 1970s, this drive to cut out fat inhibited systemic understanding.

An engineer interviewed said that the emphasis on cost cutting “permeates the fabric of the whole culture,” leading to a privileging of timing over quality, and a resistance to raising issues. No team wanted to be the group that lagged in efficiency or took too long to fix a problem on account of being overly cautious.

coordination of siloed efforts works only if those on top actually understand how everything will interact. At GM they no longer did. The products, markets, and supply chains they dealt with had crossed the threshold from complicated to complex. Like NASA before it, GM was running up against the constraints of reductionist management.

stiff competition from foreign automakers compounded by a dysfunctional internal culture of need to know and competitiveness.

Engineers and designers were rivals; executives and labor hated each other; C-suite leaders felt that their success could come only at the cost of their peers. It was rife with “the other guy sucks” sentiment.

“We can continue to cut costs and improve our efficiency, but we cannot win the hearts and minds of a new gen...

He attributed the project’s success to a management approach called “working together” that involved forcing interaction between previously separate groups and cutting-edge technological platforms for ensuring constant, systemic transparency.

This was a man who saw the imperative of beating the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Mulally’s goal at Ford, like ours in Iraq, was to wire all his forces together to produce an emergent intelligence and create shared consciousness.

Pentland has found that sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities. His research suggests that the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members, and much more to do with the connections between them.

“come from careful and continuous social exploration … it is the idea flow within a community that builds the intelligence that makes it successful.” “Idea flow” is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group.

The two major determinants of idea flow, Pentland has found, are “engagement” within a small group like a team, a department, or a neighborhood, and “exploration”—frequent contact with other units. In other words: a team of teams.

Pentland found that collective intelligence stems from unsiloed dissonance: “when the flow of ideas incorporates a constant stream of outside ideas as well, then the individuals in the community make better decisions than they could on their own.”

But fostering such engagement is more easily said than done. Almost every company has posters and slogans urging employees to “work together,” but simply telling people to “communicate” is the equivalent of Taylor’s telling his workers to “do things faster,” and stopping there. GM, in addition to the “cost is everything” slogan, had posters everywhere reading “QUALITY ABOVE ALL”—but it was the former, not the latter, that was practiced.

It is necessary, we found, to forcibly dismantle the old system and replace it with an entirely new managerial architecture. Our new architecture was shared consciousness, and it consisted of two elements.

The first was extreme, participatory tr...

holistic awareness equivalent to the contextual awareness of purpose we already knew at a team level.

The second was the creation of strong internal connectivity across teams—something

This mirrored the trust that enabled our small te...

bound together by the oneness of trust and purpose and capable of devising, in real time, brilliant, emergent solutions to complex problems,

In short, when they can see what’s going on, leaders understandably want to control what’s going on. Empowerment tends to be a tool of last resort. We can call this tethering of visibility to control the “Perry Principle.”

The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.

The practice of relaying decisions up and down the chain of command is premised on the assumption that the organization has the time to do so, or, more accurately, that the cost of the delay is less than the cost of the errors produced by removing a supervisor.

Our One Rule: Use good judgment in all situations.

Since the 1980s, when companies began experimenting with “empowerment”—the

had had

Empowerment did not always take the form of an overt delegation; more often, my more self-confident subordinates would make decisions, many far above their pay grade, and simply inform me. My response, often very publicly conveyed during our O&I, typically endorsed their initiative, and created a multiplier effect, whereby more and more people, seeing the success of their peers, would begin taking more matters into their own hands.