By: Stanley McChrystal

  LISTEN

  READ

In 2003 the United States entered Iraq. Using tactics that had previously worked against traditional enemies, it found itself in a bitter fight that left the top brass in the military confounded.

Against a smaller, less sophisticated, and under-resourced enemy, they were losing.

As the head of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, General Stanley McCrystal knew he would need to transform his massive and highly efficient military machine into something completely different. Something that looked a lot more like the enemy they were facing: Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

But this isn't a war story, this is a story about organisational transformation to meet the demands of the day.

As this summary is being written, we are in the middle of the COVID 19 crisis, which is forcing every single organisation on the planet to rethink how work gets done, all at the same time.

It's a time where silos need to be torn down, helping you find best practices from all corners of your company, and making sure you can continuously adapt at scale.

The solution is to build teams of teams.

If you need a proof point about whether or not this works before you read on, here it is.

One of the key measures of effectiveness in the war was the number of raids they would run each month. When McCrystal got there, they were running 10.

By trying to squeeze every last ounce of efficiency and effectiveness out of their resources under the old method, they were able to increase that number to 18. An impressive increase.

But when they transformed into a team of teams, the were able to increase that number to three hundred. They were running seventeen times faster, with no decrease in effectiveness.

In an environment where speed and adaptability is a key to your success, that's the kind of transformation that's required.

Let's get started.

Part I: The Proteus Problem

In 2004, the world's most elite counterterrorist force is struggling against what appears to be a ragtag band of radicals.

What McCrystal and his team realised was that their biggest challenges were not with the sophistication and size of the enemy, but in the new environment they were operating in.

The Landscape Has Shifted

AQI had an unorthodox structure that allowed it become more connected, faster, and less predictable than any other enemy the United States had ever faced.

The military loves abbreviations, and called the defining element that holds you back in a situation a LIMFAC (limiting factor).

McCrystal quickly realised that the LIMFAC in this situation wasn't tactics or technology, but in the Task Force's organisational DNA. Only a complete cultural and organisational structure overhaul would do.

Or, to put it more simply - it was about the mundane art of management.

Efficiency Is No Longer Enough

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, most industries (including the military) subscribed to management techniques that had their roots in Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management."

The systems spawned from it were excellent at achieving efficient execution of known, repeatable processes at scale.

For instance, if you need to produce a million of something and already know exactly how to do it, Scientific Management is a great way to go about it.

During the twentieth century, this approach was incredibly successful. But as we move into an era where the pace of change increases with every single day (a cliche, but also true), we are moving into territory where a new approach is needed.

From Complicated to Complex

The technology we've developed over the past few decades allow us to track almost anything and everything with greater and greater amounts of precision.

At first blush, you'd think that this would create even more predictability in a complicated world, and thus, more efficiency.

However, the opposite has actually occurred. The world is now less predictable because of the advance of technology, not in spite of it.

Here it's helpful to understand the difference between complicated and complex.

Complicated things - like machines - have a lot of parts that are joined to each other in relatively simple ways. For instance, an internal combustion engine might be confusing to most people, but it can ultimately be understood as a series of relationships that can be quantified and understood. You can understand what happens when you alter or activate one part of the engine.

Complex things - like living organisms, ecosystems, and national economies - have an enormous and diverse collection of connected elements that interact frequently. Because of how densely those things are connected, systems like these fluctuate in extreme ways and are highly unpredictable.

Doing The Right Thing

What McCrystal quickly realised was that what was previously a complicated situation was now a complex one, and so predicting in advance what the enemy might do and trying to maximise efficiency was a strategy doomed to fail.

The only way to deal with a rapidly evolving situation is to become more adaptable. Which is exactly what the Task Force did next.

Part II: From Many, One

The only way you can create an organisation that's able to respond in real time to an always changing situation is to build, you guessed it, a team of teams.

From Command To Team

The first thing that needed to change in the Task Force was the long-standing military practice of commanding from the top down.

In its place would need to be a front-line that was able to respond to dynamic, real-time developments with a improvised and coordinated response.

This requires two things: trust, and common purpose.

In a command structure, you don't really need to trust your teammates, because everybody is just doing what they are told to do by somebody higher up on the food chain.

However, when decisions need to be made on the fly, trusting the people around you becomes critical to getting anything done. Without it, teams disintegrate into chaos.

This is one of the main purposes of BUD/S, the training that includes the infamous "Hell Week" that Navy Seals need to make it through in order to graduate. The purpose of the training isn't to make super soldiers, it's to make super teams.

Almost all training tasks are done in teams, all the way down to walking together to the dining hall. What they are being trained to do is to trust and rely upon each other.

Team of Teams

It's easy to understand how you can build trust in small teams - it happens over time as the individuals on the team get to know one another.

This is easy with a group of twenty-five, difficult with any group larger than one hundred, and impossible with a group of seven thousand - the size of the Task Force McCrystal was leading.

Most of the traits that make teams so powerful also made it very difficult to scale them across an entire organisation.

The solution they came up with was to create a team of teams - an organisation where the relationships between teams resembled the relationships between individuals on a single team.

To accomplish this, they didn't need every member of the Task Force to know everybody else, the just needed everyone to know someone on every team.

This meant that when they had to work with another team, they could envision a friendly face instead of a rival.

How exactly did they do that? That's what we'll dive into next.

Part III: Sharing (Shared Consciousness)

What McCrystal did next was to create what he calls a shared consciousness.

Seeing The System

The first thing the Task Force needed to do was to upend the "need to know" fallacy.

The problem with this approach is that it depends on the assumption that somebody - either a person or algorithm - understands who does and doesn't need to know which material. In a fast moving environment, this is an impossibility.

In order to function effectively, every team needs to have a holistic understanding of the interaction between all of the moving parts. In other words, everyone needs to see the system in its entirety in order for a "team of teams" approach to work.

Brains Out Of The Footlocker

The critical piece to the transformation McCrystal envisioned for the Task Force was their Operations and Intelligence brief (O&I).

It is a standard military practice where a regular meeting is held by the leadership to integrate everything it is doing and knows.

The traditional way of running this meeting was to get prepared reports from junior personnel, with no time given for questions and discussion - whether or not the update was understood by everybody beside the point.

The way McCrystal ran it was to turn that idea on its head - the majority of time would be spent on open-ended conversation between the briefer and the leadership.

Not only that, but they invited members from all branches of the military to attend, turning it from a relatively small affair into a session attended by thousands of people (yes, thousands!), six days of week, without fail.

Running it this way created new insights and allowed the group to understand complex issues in deeper ways.

The most important outcome was that it allowed all members of the organisation to see problems being solved in real time and understand the perspective of the senior leadership team.

That allowed them to learn, over time, to trust their own judgment in situations that arose outside the meeting and make critical decisions in real time.

From this comes a strong sense of purpose shared by everybody in the organisation.

Share Information Everywhere

Going back to the idea of creating the same level of trust between teams that exists within teams, McCrystal started using embedding and liaison programs to create strong ties.

An example of embedding would be requiring an Army Special Forces operator become embedded in a SEAL team, and vice versa. At first, neither team would welcome the intrusion. But over time they began to understand each other better, and even start to adopt the better qualities of each others culture.

An example of a liaison would be sending an ambassador like figure between organisations - like the Task Force and the CIA for instance. This practice wasn't new, but how McCrystal approached it was.

The accepted practice for a liaison program would be to assign these roles to people who were about to retire or who were being "put out to pasture." Instead, McCrystal started sending some of his best people in these roles.

Eventually, the partner organisations returned the favour, and ties between all the stakeholders in the war were being strengthened, and everybody was working together towards a common goal - fighting the enemy, instead of protecting their own turf.

Part IV: Letting Go (Empowered Execution)

All of this work is meaningless unless you actually start letting important decisions be made on the front lines, which is exactly what McCrystal and the Task Force started doing.

Hands Off

It was a regular occurrence for McCrystal to be woken up in the middle of the night in order to make the final call on a mission.

While it made him feel important and needed, he quickly started to question his value in the process. He would usually trust the recommendations of his team, meaning his involvement was basically a rubber stamp, only serving to slow down the process.

Eventually the Task Force concluded that putting the decision making power into the hands of the front lines would create a situation where a 70 percent solution executed today would be better than a 90% solution executed tomorrow.

They might not always make the right decision, but it was a tradeoff they were willing to make in the effort to create a fast moving, agile organisation.

The assumption, of course, was that leaders possessed superior wisdom and decision making ability.

However, what they found was the exact opposite - the were getting a 90 percent solution today instead of a 70 percent solution tomorrow.

That's because instead of brining recommendations to their leaders for approval, they were now the ones making the final call, and were more invested in the outcome. It's also because the leadership could never understand what was happening on the ground as well as the people who were there.

What you end up with is a team armed with insights from across a network, able to decide and act decisively in moments where speed is of the essence.

It's the combination of what McCrystal calls shared consciousness and empowered execution.

Leading Like a Gardener

Just like a complex situation requires a new culture and norms, it also requires a different leadership metaphor.

Under a command structure, a leader is like a chess master, manoeuvring pieces around a board trying to outwit their opponent.

Under a decentralised structure, a leader is like a gardener, focused on shaping an ecosystem. While gardeners plant and harvest, they spend most of their time tending to the garden as it grows.
They water plants, make sure the beds are fertilised, and that weeds are removed. They spend long days doing these things, and they are not simply gestures - their actions leave the crop stronger.

Make sure you don't make the mistake that some leaders make in thinking that acting like a gardener is a passive process. To do this effectively, you need to adopt an "Eyes-On, Hands-Off" approach, creating and maintaining the ecosystem.

It requires constant attention, and corrective action when you find things that need fixing. It requires you to make that "fixing" visible to the organisation, so that it can mimic your behaviour when they encounter it for themselves.

The paradox is that the better you are as a gardener, the more you'll be tempted to become a chess master again. In order for this change to become permanent, you'll need to guard against it, especially when problems arise.

Conclusion

Now more than ever, we need to adopt new mental models to make sense of the twenty-first century.

Combining shared consciousness with empowered execution creates an adaptable organisation that will be able to respond to any situation that it finds itself in.

It's the only way forward from here.