Team of Teams Quotes

“some things cannot be fitted into a reductionist straitjacket. Attempts to control complex systems by using the kind of mechanical, reductionist thinking championed by thinkers from Newton to Taylor—breaking everything down into component parts, or optimizing individual elements—tend to be pointless at best or destructive at worst.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“AQI was adaptable. But Zarqawi’s death was a major victory in morale. At long last, we were better. We had become not a well-oiled machine, but an adaptable, complex organism, constantly twisting, turning, and learning to overwhelm our protean adversary.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“When we stopped holding them back—when we gave them the order simply to place their ship alongside that of the enemy—they thrived.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Nelson had told his commanders, “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy,” but that broad authority could have gone terribly wrong if he had not spent decades cultivating their individual qualities as decision makers, and if they had lacked an overall understanding of the force and the battle as a whole. This was Nelson’s equivalent of shared consciousness, and it was only because of it that his captains could thrive as empowered agents in a chaotic mêlée.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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

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

“They must be collectively responsible for the team’s success and understand everything that responsibility entails.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“the recently minted military acronym VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). They”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability,”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We knew that forging the neural network that would facilitate our emergent analysis of complex problems was vital for our long-term success, so we designed prepackaged communication bundles that our teams could take into the field, wherever they were in the world.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization. Along with factory assembly lines, the architectural frames of white-collar work have evolved to maximize efficiency.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“It is now a building in which individuals toil independently in accordance with top-down, need-to-know reductionist planning. They might as well be spread around the globe.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Everyone knew the boat kept flipping, but without a clear view of what everyone else was doing, nobody could see why or how to change it.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“emphasis on group success spurs cooperation, and fosters trust and purpose. But people cooperate only if they can see the interdependent reality of their environment.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

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

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

“Given these failures, in 1962 NASA leadership had doubts about the feasibility of Kennedy’s goal. “Most of us in the Space Task Group thought [Kennedy] was daft,” recalled a NASA executive. “I mean, we didn’t think we could do it. We didn’t refuse to accept the challenge, but God, we didn’t know how to do [Earth] orbit determination, much less project orbits to the Moon.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Humans are great optimizers. We look at everything around us, whether a cow, a house, or a share portfolio, and ask ourselves how we can manage it to get the best return. Our modus operandi is to break the things we’re managing down into its component parts and understand how each part functions and what inputs will yield the greatest outputs . . . [but] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience. A drive for efficient optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The Fortune 500 list of 2011 featured only sixty-seven companies that appeared on the list of 1955, meaning that just 13.4 percent of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955 were still on the list fifty-six years later. Eighty-seven percent of the companies simply couldn’t keep up; they had either gone bankrupt, merged with other companies, been forced to go private, or fallen off the list completely.”
― General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability in structures, processes, and mind-sets that is often uncomfortable.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“To understand the challenge, we’ll go to factory floors with Frederick Winslow Taylor and look back at the drive for efficiency that has marked the last 150 years, and how it has shaped our organizations and the men and women who lead and manage them.”
― General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“the key lies not in the number of elements but in the nature of their integration—the wiring of trust and purpose.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“catchy acronym in the consulting world, “MECE,” which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“opening speaker began his remarks by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the plane is no longer the problem.”*”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“They were doing things right, just not doing the right thing.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The creation and maintenance of a team requires both the visible hand of management and the invisible hand of emergence, the former weaving the elements together and the latter guiding their work. Programs like BUD/S are designed to foster emergent intelligence that can thrive in the absence of a plan.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“a tree that branches at every variable outcome (if they fire when we arrive, choose path A, if not, choose path B). But when dozens of saplings shoot out from those branches every second, the possibilities become so overwhelmingly complex as to render complete contingency planning futile.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“the sheer tactical complexity of special operations almost guarantees that at least one critical variable will come loose between planning and execution.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World