Team of Teams Quotes

“BUD/S builds trust between members, beginning with the seemingly arbitrary demands to walk to meals together and ending (for those who complete training) with SEALs willing to place their lives in one another’s hands.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The truth is that the queen is a larva factory. Her sole job is to produce new ants—a critical role, but not a managerial one. The myth survives because of our assumption that order is always directed from the top down.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“an above-knee amputation means up to a 70 percent increase in energy expenditure to walk for the rest of one’s life, leading to cardiovascular and pulmonary issues.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Taylor despised workers’ free association—their attempts to establish horizontal bonds—because it created too many”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Our Task Force’s rigid top-to-bottom structure was a product of military history and military culture, and finding ways to reverse the information flow—to ensure that when the bottom spoke the top listened—was”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In battle, refusal or hesitation to follow orders can spell disaster. But at the same time, the rigid hierarchy and absolute power of officers slows down execution and stifles rapid adaptation by the soldiers closest to the fight.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The heroic “hands-on” leader whose personal competence and force of will dominated battlefields and boardrooms for generations has been overwhelmed by accelerating speed, swelling complexity, and interdependence. Even the most successful of today’s heroic leaders appear uneasy in the saddle, all too aware that their ability to understand and control is a chimera.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Years later as Task Force commander, I began to view effective leadership in the new environment as more akin to gardening than chess. 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.” It”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Idea flow” is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group. Pentland likens it to the spread of the flu: a function of susceptibility and frequency of interaction. The key to increasing the “contagion” is trust and connectivity between otherwise separate elements of an establishment. 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.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“NASA’s success illustrated a number of profound organizational insights. Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface failures.” It also proved that the cognitive “oneness”—the emergent intelligence—that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information. This runs counter to the standard “need-to-know” mind-set.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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

“Fast-forward to March 17, 2014, when the Los Angeles Times was the first news company to break a story about a nearby earthquake. Their edge? The article was written entirely by a robot—a computer program that scans streams of data, like that from the U.S. Geological Survey, and puts together short pieces faster than any newsroom chain of command could. This program earned the paper a few minutes of lead time at most, but today, those minutes are critical.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Where once an educated person might have assumed she was at least conversant with the relevant knowledge on a particular field of study, the explosion of information has rendered that assumption laughable. One solution to information overload is to increase a leader’s access to information, fitting him with two smartphones, multiple computer screens, and weekend updates. But the leader’s access to information is not the problem. We can work harder, but how much can we actually take in? 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. Given these limitations, the idea that a “heroic leader” enabled with an über-network of connectivity can simultaneously control a thousand marionettes on as many stages is unrealistic.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Recent technology might appear to have closed the gap between leaders and subordinates. 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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The Task Force had built systems that were very good at doing things right, but too inflexible to do the right thing.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”).”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We’re not lazier or less intelligent than our parents or grandparents, but what worked for them simply won’t do the trick for us now. Understanding and adapting to these factors isn’t optional; it will be what differentiates success from failure in the years ahead.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Our players could only see the ball once it entered their immediate territory, by which time it would likely be too late to react. With no knowledge of the constantly shifting perspective of their teammates, they would have no idea what to do with the ball once they got it. They were playing Krasnovian soccer.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Today, we find ourselves in a new equilibrium defined by constant disruption.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In the past twenty years, the costs of copying, sharing, transmitting, and manipulating data have dropped practically to zero.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

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

“Effective adaptation to emerging threats and opportunities requires the disciplined practice of empowered execution.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The first was extreme, participatory transparency—the “systems management” of NASA that we mimicked with our O&I forums and our open physical space. This allowed all participants to have a 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 we achieved with our embedding and liaison programs. This mirrored the trust that enabled our small teams to function.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

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

“most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We didn’t need everybody to follow every single operation in real time (something just as impossible as building lifelong friendships with seven thousand people). We needed to enable a team operating in an interdependent environment to understand the butterfly-effect ramifications of their work and make them aware of the other teams with whom they would have to cooperate in order to achieve strategic—not just tactical—success.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“A contingency plan is like 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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Technically it was complex, financially it was expensive, but we were trying to build a culture of sharing:”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World