Lessons on Leading in a Complex World
TLDR:
Today’s world operates at high speed, and is incredibly complex, due respectively to instantaneous communication technology, and a high level of interconnectedness.
Traditional management models, which are based on efficiency and hierarchy, are no longer suited for this speed and complexity.
Instead, the ‘Team of Teams’ approach optimises for resilience over efficiency, creating the ability to rapidly reconfigure to meet new threats by mimicking the characteristics of a small, multi-disciplinary team, at scale.
Deep mutual trust, and a common purpose, are the foundation for creating a ‘team of teams’.
Building a ‘shared consciousness’ - radical transparency - allows a ‘team of teams’ to respond to the challenges of complexity.
Cultivating ‘empowered execution’ - where those closest to a given problem are given the insights and authority to act - then enables a ‘team of teams’ to respond to the challenges of speed. The leader moves from ‘giving orders’ to ‘tending the network’.
About the author
Stanley McChrystal is a retired U.S. Army general, who had a notable career in special operations and counterterrorism. He was the commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008, where he led the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal was also the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. He now lectures on international relations at Yale, and runs the McChrystal Group consulting firm. For a discussion of Risk, a User's Guide - McChrystal's book on how to think about weighing threats and vulnerabilities - listen to this Farnham Street podcast.
Key concepts
Today’s world operates at high speed, and is incredibly complex, due respectively to instantaneous communication technology, and a high level of interconnectedness. This state of constant, rapid, non-linear, unpredictable change is sometimes described as VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. While it characterises many societal and business contexts today, McChrystal operated in an environment like this while fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a decentralised, networked and adaptable enemy.
Traditional management models, which are based on efficiency and hierarchy, are no longer suited for this speed and complexity. ‘Command and control’ cannot cope with these environments. It relies on linear planning and prediction, on highly reliable execution of repeatable processes at scale, and, as such, is redundant in a VUCA context. Management (and by extension, structure) has become a ‘limfac’ (limiting factor) in the success of modern organisations.
Instead, the ‘Team of Teams’ approach optimises the organisation for adaptability over efficiency, creating the ability to rapidly reconfigure to meet new threats by mimicking the characteristics of a small, multi-disciplinary team. Successful small teams are highly technically skilled, but operate on four key principles: shared consciousness, empowered execution, trust, and a common purpose. However, you can’t scale a single small team. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar goes as far as to suggest the ceiling for such a team remaining effective is four people, citing examples from surgical and special forces contexts. Even those who lead multiple small teams, often lead these via hierarchical, planning-driven ‘commands of teams’. Instead, a ‘team of teams’ is a network of small, cohesive, and highly skilled teams, operating on the same four key principles, mimicking what makes small teams successful, at scale. This change in culture, internal architecture and management approach creates not just a collection of teams, but a system which allows solutions to emerge ‘bottom-up’ rather than relying on ‘top-down’ orders. It aims to use network effects to deliver “the ultimate competitive advantage: resilience”. Resilience has been described as "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure." In a complex world, disturbances are inevitable, making such a capacity to absorb shocks increasingly important.
Deep mutual trust, and a common purpose, are the foundation for creating a ‘team of teams’. Table stakes for a ‘team of teams’, is that all its individual parts need to be united in their ultimate goal, and have confidence in one another. Without this, the desired network effect cannot be achieved. Mark Sayers, in his book ‘A Non-Anxious Presence’ which interacts with Team of Teams, explains the four key elements of a network:
“Nodes - The individual elements on the network could be a person, a computer or a salmon with the ecosystem of a river.
Connections - These are the relationships that link nodes in the network. A connection could be a friendship, a trade route across an ocean, or a computer cable.
Hubs - These are highly connected nodes in the network, through which multiple connections in the network pass. A hub could be a port city like Venice during the mediaeval period, a social media platform like Facebook, or a university like Oxford.
Protocols - The rules and values upon which the network operates. Liberal democracy is a protocol upon which many nations operate. The World Wide Web works as computers communicate with Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. One of the protocols of international relations is that negotiations between nations are often conducted in French."
In effect, McChrystal’s ‘network’ was the disparate elements of the US security forces: nodes with various formal and informal connections, deeply ingrained military protocols, and hubs like McChrystal himself. This network already had a common purpose - defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq - and a level of mutual trust due to shared service in the same national military. McChrystal bolstered this trust by embedding liaison programmes to create lateral, relational ties across the disciplines, units, partner organisations and other ‘siloes’ that existed within the network, resembling the relationships that all members would have with each other in a small team. In other words, every team member does not need to know everyone else; instead, every team needs to know one person on every other team. Then they envision a friendly face when the team comes to mind as a potential collaboration partner.
Building a ‘shared consciousness’ - radical transparency - allows a ‘team of teams’ to respond to the challenges of complexity. Because of the interdependence of the operating environment, team members all need to understand the entire interconnected system. They need to understand the ramifications of their own work, and the other teams with whom they should cooperate in order to achieve strategic—not just tactical—success. To achieve a shared view of the ‘big picture’, information sharing processes need to be configured for radical transparency, such as the organisation-wide daily briefing where McChrysal would ‘think out loud’, summarising what he’d heard, describe how he’d processed the information, and outline his initial thoughts on how to respond, encouraging others to provide corrective feedback. But ‘shared consciousness’ goes beyond mere procedure - Sandy Pentland of MIT found that interaction patterns typically account for almost half of all the performance variation between high and low performing groups. He found the collective intelligence of groups was driven by idea flow - how quickly new ideas can achieve ‘contagion’ - which in turn was powered by level of susceptibility i.e. trust, and frequency of interaction.
Cultivating ‘empowered execution’ - where those closest to a given problem are given the insights and authority to act - then enables a ‘team of teams’ to respond to the challenges of speed.The leader moves from ‘giving orders’ to ‘tending the network’. Shared consciousness helps respond to the interdependency / complexity issues, but it doesn’t help address speed. In a fast-moving world, there isn’t time to wait for a hierarchical leader to provide tactical instruction. Instead authority and decision-making power is delegated to the frontline teams, giving them more autonomy and responsibility. Leaders meanwhile become focused on team coaching, supervising network health to maintain agility rather than taking individual operational decisions. They move from directing to enabling, from ‘chess master’ to ‘gardener’.
Final observations:
To make this work, some inherent tensions have to be managed.
On one hand, ‘shared consciousness’ requires strict centralisation to drive extreme transparency; a carefully cultivated set of forums are created to bring people together. On the other hand, empowered execution radically decentralises management authority. The former must come first, as without the bedrock of ‘shared consciousness’, anarchy will prevail as various teams execute in conflicting and incoherent ways.
When the stakes are high, these nuances matter - your country might even be at stake. It appears that one of the reasons for the Ukrainian military’s better-than-expected performance against Russia was its adoption of a ‘Team of Teams’ philosophy. According to this article in the Financial Times:
"Ukraine’s defence has been aided by a complete overhaul of its military culture since 2014, from a Soviet-style top-down command to one where junior leaders are empowered to take decisions in the field, according to Liam Collins, a former US colonel. “After eight years of fighting in the Donbas, their junior leaders figured out, ‘We can't wait for the general to tell us everything, we have to go out and just do it on our own’,” said Collins, who was part of an international task force sent to help Ukraine’s military after the loss of Crimea. “In the speed of war, you have to do that.” Russia’s military, by contrast, is characterised by top-down decision-making, emanating from Putin himself… “This is very much the Russian style: they have a plan . . . and in the absence of orders being changed from above, they're going to execute no matter what.”
Whether you’re repelling troops from a foreign country, or just working in any organisation which is larger than a ‘small team’, this concept will likely be a helpful way in which to think about how to organise and operate more effectively.
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