Team of Teams Quotes

“Data-rich records can be wonderful for explaining how complex phenomena happened and how they might happen, but they can’t tell us when and where they will happen.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“First I needed to shift my focus from moving pieces on the board to shaping the ecosystem.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“At its heart, Nelson crafted an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands. As Nicolson explains it, “Nelson created the market, but once it was created he would depend on their enterprise. His captains were to see themselves as the entrepreneurs of battle.” The development of these “entrepreneurs” took years of training and experience, but as a result of that investment, Nelson knew his force could emerge victorious from a situation of chaos. Nicolson concludes that “the British had a cultural and not a technical advantage; reliant on the notion of the ‘band of brothers.’” The maneuver Nelson pulled that day was clever, but it was just the tip of the iceberg, and the real magic lay beneath the waterline.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The speed and interdependence of the modern environment create complexity. Coupling shared consciousness and empowered execution creates an adaptable organization able to react to complex problems.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“An organization should empower its people, but only after it has done the heavy lifting of creating shared consciousness.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Few of us are criticized if we faithfully do what has worked many times before.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Within such complexity, leaders themselves can be a limiting factor. While the human capacity for thought and action is astounding, it is never quite enough. If we simply worked more and tried harder, we reason, we could master the onslaught of information and “urgent” requirements.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Eyes On—Hands Off” represented a complete reverse of the Perry Principle: if we could see it, we would not need to try to control it.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“To any other Nation the loss of a Nelson would have been irreparable,” said French vice-admiral Villeneuve, after the battle, “but in the British Fleet off Cadiz, every Captain was a Nelson.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“A 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. The ability to see video footage and hear gunfire from an operation as it unfolded was a tremendous asset, but a commander on the ground can comprehend the complexity of a situation in ways that defy the visual and audible: everything from temperature and fatigue to personalities.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority further down, the quality of decisions actually went up. We had decentralized on the belief that the 70 percent solution today would be better than the 90 percent solution tomorrow. But we found our estimates were backward—we were getting the 90 percent solution today instead of the 70 percent solution tomorrow.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there—on the brink of instability—that we found our sweet spot.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Kanter foresaw that increased disruption and unpredictability would necessitate increased agility and adaptability which could be achieved only by loosening control.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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. In 2004 this assumption no longer held. The risks of acting too slowly were higher than the risks of letting competent people make judgment calls. We concluded that we would be better served by accepting the 70 percent solution today, rather than satisfying protocol and getting the 90 percent solution tomorrow (in the military you learn that you will never have time for the 100 percent solution).”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Like other staples of managerial thinking, the Perry Principle made sense in a world that no longer exists, but offers little help when the velocity and volume of decisions needing to be made so exceed the capabilities of even the most gifted leaders that empowerment of those on lower rungs is simply a necessity.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“At a Chicago-area IT consultancy, he collected a billion measurements in one month—1,900 hours of data—and found that engagement was the central predictor of productivity, exceeding individual intelligence, personality, and skill.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Bonds of trust began to form. People from different tribes began to see increasingly familiar faces. Even strangers were now, by extension, part of a familiar and trusted unit entity, and received the benefit of the doubt.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Our goal was twofold. First, we wanted to get a better sense of how the war looked from our partners’ perspectives to enhance our understanding of the fight.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The critical first step was to share our own information widely and be generous with our own people and resources. From there, we hoped that the human relationships we built through that generosity would carry the day.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise. Our entire force needed to share a fundamental, holistic understanding of the operating environment and of our own organization, and we also needed to preserve each team’s distinct skill sets.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“This is the difference between “education” and “training.” Medical school is education, first aid is training.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World