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

by Stanley McChrystal

“As the philosophy of the physical sciences dominated the Industrial Age, the philosophy of the biological sciences is beginning to dominate the Knowledge Age. This philosophy views knowledge, people and organizations as living systems … [which represents a shift from] (1) focusing on parts to focusing on the whole, (2) focusing on categorization to focusing on integration.”

Insofar as organizations—armies, schools, governments, corporations—are essential to solving the biggest problems we face, and the running of those organizations enables or disables their effectiveness, management determines the quality of the world we live in. Management has tapped the power of industry, sent men to the moon, saved the lives of the wounded and the sick, and won and lost wars. And now we need systems that can solve the complex, systemic threats of climate change, brittle development aid flow, and networked terrorism. This makes management one of the fundamental limfacs to the quest for human progress, and as we look to solve bigger and bigger problems, we will need management systems that, like the UT traffic system, can adjust and adapt in real time; that are not constrained by the expired mental models of yesteryear.

As complexity envelops more and more of our world, even the most mundane endeavors are now s...

Out of necessity, AQI invented a new solution to being effective in this new environment, as did we, and as, sooner or later, will everyone else.

Eventually, we all have to take a leap of faith and dive into the swirl. Our destination is a future whose form we may not find comforting, but which has just as much beauty and potential as the straight lines and right angles of the past century of reductionism: this future will take the form of organic networks, resilience engineering, controlled flooding—a world without stop signs.

The Task Force still had ranks and each member was still assigned a particular team and sub-sub-command, but we all understood that we were now part of a network; when we visualized our own force on the whiteboards, it now took the form of webs and nodes, not tiers and silos.