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

by Stanley McChrystal

We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there—on the brink of instability—that we found our sweet spot.

piece of this is the psychology of decision making. An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome. Another factor was that, for all our technology, our leadership simply did not understand what was happening on the ground as thoroughly as the people who were there.

But the key reason for the success of empowered execution lay in what had come before it: the foundation of shared consciousness. This relationship—between contextual understanding and authority—is not new.

audiobook of Adam Nicolson’s Seize the Fire about Admiral Nelson.

In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions. Shared consciousness meant that people at every level on our org chart now enjoyed access to the kind of perspective once limited to senior leaders.

The term “empowerment” gets thrown around a great deal in the management world, but the truth is that simply taking off constraints is a dangerous move. It should be done only if the recipients of newfound authority have the necessary sense of perspective to act on it wisely.

told subordinates that if they provided me with sufficient, clear information about their operations, I would be content to watch from a distance. If they did not, I would describe in graphic terms the “exploratory surgery” necessary to gain the situational awareness I needed. They were free to make all the decisions they wanted—as long as they provided the visibility that, under shared consciousness, had become the standard.

“Eyes On—Hands Off”

Leading Like a Gardener

The organization as a rigidly reductionist mechanical beast is an endangered species.

in our new environment, we still retain high, often unrealistic, expectations of leaders.

Armed with unprecedented amounts of data, CEOs, politicians, and bureaucrats can peer into what is happening almost as it occurs. As we discussed, this information can seduce leaders into thinking that they understand and can predict complex situations—that they can see what will happen. But the speed and interdependence of our current environment means that what we cannot know has grown even faster than what we can.

senior leaders are now more important than ever, but the role is very different from that of the traditional heroic decision maker.

In the Task Force, we found that, alongside our new approach to management, we had to develop a new paradigm of personal leadership. The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.

Attention studies have shown that most people can thoughtfully consider only one thing at a time, and that multitasking dramatically degrades our ability to accomplish tasks requiring cognitive concentration.

The move-by-move control that seemed natural to military operations proved less effective than nurturing the organization—its structure, processes, and culture—to enable the subordinate components to function with “smart autonomy.”

Within our Task Force, as in a garden, the outcome was less dependent on the initial planting than on consistent maintenance. Watering, weeding, and protecting plants from rabbits and disease are essential for success. The gardener cannot actually “grow” tomatoes, squash, or beans—she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.

Although I recognized its necessity, the mental transition from heroic leader to humble gardener was not a comfortable one.

But what did gardening actually entail? First I needed to shift my focus from moving pieces on the board to shaping the ecosystem. Paradoxically, at exactly the time when I had the capability to make more decisions, my intuition told me I had to make fewer. At first it felt awkward to delegate decisions to subordinates that were technically possible for me to make. If I could make a decision, shouldn’t I? Wasn’t that my job? It could look and feel like I was shirking my responsibilities, a damning indictment for any leader. My role had changed, but leadership was still critical—perhaps more than ever.

Without my constantly pruning and shaping our network, the delicate balance of information and empowerment that sustained our operations would atrophy, and our success would wither. I found that only the senior leader could drive the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation we needed. I could shape the culture and demand the ongoing conversation that shared consciousness required.

It was impossible to separate my words and my actions, because the force naturally listened to what I said, but measured the importance of my message by observing what I actually did. If the two were incongruent, my words would be seen as meaningless pontifications.

As a leader, however, my most powerful instrument of communication was my own behavior.

The primary responsibility of the new leader is to maintain a holistic, big-picture view, avoiding a reductionist approach, no matter how tempting micromanaging may be.

The leader’s first responsibility is to the whole.

More than directing, leaders must exhibit personal transparency. This is the new ideal.

Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date.

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.

A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.

Driven by the necessity to keep pace with an agile enemy and a complex environment, we had become adaptable. We had fused a radical sharing of information with extreme decentralization of decision-making authority.

In doing so, we had a structure unlike any force the U.S. military had ever fielded. Gone were the tidy straight lines and right angles of a traditional MECE org chart; we were now amorphous and organic, supported by crisscrossing bonds of trust and communication that decades of managers might have labeled as inefficient, redundant, or chaotic.

Our thinking had become smarter, and our execution more nimble. We were learning and adapting quicker than the enemy and—finally—hitting them faster than they could regenerate.

Our performance flowed naturally from the interconnected neural network that our force had become.

We had become not a well-oiled machine, but an adaptable, complex organism, constantly twisting, turning, and learning to overwhelm our protean adversary.

If people are not educated enough to make informed decisions at the polls, the feedback system on which democracy is premised will not work.

In other words, a system requires shared consciousness before it can reap the benefits of empowered execution.

Tocqueville recognized that empowerment without context will lead to havoc.

This is the risk run if traditional, hierarchical organizations just...

An organization should empower its people, but only after it has done the heavy lifting of creating shared consciousness.

Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous.

Similarly, shared consciousness on its own, as we learned, is powerful but ultimately insufficient.

Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization. Maintain this system for too long without decentralizing authority, and whatever morale gains were made will be reversed as people become frustrated with their inability to act on their n...

Shared consciousness is a carefully maintained set of centralized forums for bringing people together. Empowered execution is a radically decentralized system for pushing authority out to the edges of the organization. Together, with these as the beating heart of our transformation, w...

neither of these can be instituted alone; only when fused can they power an organization. As with team members, complex system components, and other dynamics we have discussed in the book, the union of shared consciousness an...

We reversed this direction. We used shared consciousness to pump information out, empowering people at all levels, and we redefined the role of leadership (“gardeners”).

What we did would not have been possible twenty, ten, maybe even five years prior—so essential to our approach were the information technologies we harnessed—nor would it have been necessary. Today it is.

Mental models can be very helpful—they can provide shortcuts and keep us from reinventing the wheel.

When we urge people to think “outside of the box,” we are generally asking them to discard mental models.

This is effective; this is efficient. Things should not look like a chaotic, self-organizing mess. And for the past century, those models served us well.

We are likely to see more and more “chaotic mess” solutions in the coming decades. We will need to confront complex problems in ways that are discerning, real-time, responsive, and adaptive. We will need systems capable of doing things that no single designer, however masterful, could envision—things far beyond an individual planner’s capacity to comprehend and control, just as the intricate structure of ant colonies is beyond the single ant’s 250,000-neuron brain.