Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
· By General Stanley McChrystal U.S. Army, Retired
· Penguin Publishing Group, New York, 2015
· HB, 290 pages, US $29.95
· 978-1-59184-748-9
Reviewed by Gustavo Coronel | October 19, 2015
As
commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, the Task Force
that undertook the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), General Stanley
McChrystal saw his forces in 2006 increase the number of raids against
the enemy from ten to three hundred per month, with only minor
increments in personnel or funding. The raids were not only more
numerous but more successful. This activity led to locating and
eliminating the top Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, AbuMusab al-Zarqawi. The
story of this accomplishment and transformation of the Task Force from a
superb organization for the 20th Century into a superb organization for
the 21st Century is told by the author in this brilliantly written
book.
The
main components of this radical change in the organization were both
anatomical, how the Task Force came to be structured, and physiological,
the way the organization changed its culture and behavior. The leader
of the organization went, in McChrystal’s words, from “puppet master to
empathetic crafter of culture.”
This
is a book on ‘Strategic Management,’ the art of creating and
maintaining a competitive advantage over the adversary in war, in the
corporate world or just in day to day life. Throughout the years many
books have been written on strategy and many different names assigned to
the manner in which each author definestheir method of creating
competitive advantage. In describing the progression from failure to
success in his fight against AQI, General McChrystal exhibits the
quality that underlies all those methods: common sense.
The attitude of the leader
The
author uses abundant cases, as well as examples, derived from his own
life experience to define the path he followed as a leader of the team.
What he learned about leadership, he says, owed more to watching his
mother tend her garden than to West Point. She organized and maintained
her patch and created an environment in which the vegetables could grow.
As Task Force commander, he says, he began to view effective leadership
as akin to gardening. Rather than following the heroic model of
leadership, he saw his role as creating and maintaining the conditions
in the Task Force for efficient work to flourish. He tended the garden.
He went from moving pieces on a board, as in “rule bound” chess, to
shaping the ecosystem – a complex network or interconnected system – in
which the team would operate and thrive. He sought to maintain a
constant example and message by means of very transparent behavior.
“Thank you” became his most important phrase, making a point of
addressing every member of the team by his first name.
Tending
the garden is what the military call “battlefield circulation,” the
constant presence of the leader in all locations and units. This was
obtained by McChrystal by means of a daily Operational and Intelligence
Brief, O&I. When he assumed command in 2003 the O&I was a
“relatively small video teleconference,” involving a few participants.
McChrystal opened it up to full participation, not only within the Task
Force but also involving sister offices such as FBI and CIA, relevant
embassies and key Washington-based departments. This made possible for
the organization to attain what he terms a shared consciousness.
Such an opening increased the risks of leaks and of misinterpretation
of complex processes. He says, “anyone who wanted to beat us at
bureaucratic politics would have all the ammunition they needed but this
was not the fight we were focused on.”
“Shared Consciousness” was one of the major attitudinal changes the Task Force commander instituted. The other one was “Empowered Execution,”
a “radically decentralized system to push authority out to the edges of
the organization.” McChrystal soon realized that he was not the best
person to take all decisions but that decisions should be more properly
taken by those closest to the situation at hand. Discussing this new
manner of leading, the author makes use of military and aviation
history. He describes how Admiral Horatio Nelson empowered his captains
to act on their own initiative and how he cultivated the individual
qualities of his subordinates as decision makers. His unorthodox battle
strategy battle at Trafalgar evidenced his trust in his captains’
individual abilities, when he decided to attack the greater forces of
the enemy in a line perpendicular to their ships, rather than parallel
to them, as dictated by the traditional military strategy of the time.
Such unorthodox maneuver created confusion among the adversaries,
rendered their visual communications much more difficult and allowed his
captains to act as individual strategic units during the fight.
Although, he was mortally wounded at Trafalgar and much of the fight
went on without his leadership, the French Vice-Admiral Villeneuve said
after the battle: “In the British Fleet off Cadiz every captain was a
Nelson.”
Anatomical transformations
In
Iraq, the task of removing Saddam Hussein from power was a relatively
easy one. However, by the fall of 2003 the fight had mutated into a
confrontation against Sunnis led by a Jordanian extremist called Abu
Musab al Zarqawi. This presented the Task Force with a new type of foe,
not stronger than the Task Force, in military terms, but operating in a
totally different environment, one that could be described as going from
complicated to complex. It was, McChrystal says, not “a war of planning
and discipline but one of agility and innovation.” The units of the
enemy were self-contained and each operation was the brainchild of the
men who owned the mission.
McChrystal
says that the Task Force was the “best of the best” – a well-trained,
superbly equipped, well-communicated and disciplined, but they were
losing the war against the enemy. They were the best organization of the
20th Century facing an organization designed for the 21st Century. AQI
was a modern version of Proteus, incessantly changing shape and faces
with a speed the Task Force could not match.
For
this to change, the Task Force went from an organizational closed
configuration of silos to open relationships across units that had been
traditionally proud of their uniqueness and had felt no need to share it
with others. The Force had to swap their “sturdy architecture for
organic fluidity.” The author says they had to “dissolve the barriers –
the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies – to become a
“team of teams.” Adaptability, more so than efficiency, became the
overriding priority. In explaining and justifying his approach
McChrystal uses several cases from other sectors, including the medical
world. He cites Dr. Kristina Talbert-Slagle saying that infections in
the human body, such as AIDS and insurgencies such as Al Qaeda’s, had
similar effects of weakening the host, be it the person or a society. He
describes at length the success of Roman legions, based on discipline
and adherence to strict rules and standardization, to conclude that this
behavior no longer worked in the current environment. The reductionist
times of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management,” he says,
were largely over. Taylor had introduced the concept of efficiency in
the manufacturing world but a new dimension was now required: speed. By
2004, the Task Force realized Iraq presented a different challenge where
tactical flexibility was essential. Millenary lessons about
organizational structures and military procedure had to be set aside.
Physiological changes
A
fascinating section of McChrystal’s book deals with the increasing
complexity of the environment, where the Task Force had to act. Things
were no longer complicated but became complex. While an internal
combustion engine is complicated, its function remains predictable, if a
component is changed. It works in a straightforward manner and its
changes are linear and do not spread to other machines. Complex systems
can experience non-linear change, even exponential in character.
McChrystal illustrates complexity with the so-called butterfly effect,
described by Edward Lorenz in his paper: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s
wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” A complex system, such as
weather patterns or national economies, is an interconnected array of
components which interact incessantly in a largely unpredictable manner.
While
the success of the planning system of the Task Force had been based on
its ability to predict outcomes, Iraq’s battlefield in 2004 looked more
like a cold front than
the trajectory of a celestial body. Actions taken by AQI could lead to
country-wide civilian reactions that were difficult to anticipate. The
strength of the Task Force remained important but adaptability became
even more so. It was no longer enough, to use Peter Drucker’s maxim, to
do things right but to do the right thing.
McChrystal
resorted to networking. Rather than keeping the hierarchical top down
rigid command structure with walls separating the different divisions of
the organization, the Task Force went into a radical change from
Command to Team. Using several cases, such as the safe landing on the
Hudson River of U.S. Airways flight 1549, the author explains why
“instinctive, cooperative adaptability is essential to high performing
teams.” The actions taken by the crew of the aircraft during this flight
were typical of a team, not of a top down command by Captain Chesley
Sullenberger.
The
Task Force transformed from one single bureaucratic organization into
multiple teams, which trusted and communicated freely with each other.
An organization can plan but cannot possibly cover all the
possibilities. They have to be able to adjust to the unexpected with
creative solutions. In a rapidly changing environment, the plan is no
longer the dominant factor, the team’s behavior is. Once members of the
team trust each member a superior synergy results, what the author calls
an “emergent intelligence,” which can perform without the plan.
The best strategy: candor
A
change from a bureaucratic organization into a flexible, agile “team of
teams” was not the product of more manpower or more money but the
result of integration among the units of the organization, an
integration that was generated by the example of the leader and by his
extreme candor. By the force of his example everyone started to talk to
each other: operators, analysts, sister agencies. Up to then, the units
had been operating independently from each other while trying to keep
pace with a complex environment. There were horror stories about the
indifference and jealousy of agencies such as the FBI or the CIA. In the
name of security they did not talk to each other. In the new
environment, every member of a team had to know every other individual
in order to build trust. Furthermore, the relationships between teams
had to resemble the relationship between individual members of each
team. SEALS had to trust the CIA and vice versa. What had to prevail was
not a spirit of competition but a spirit of cooperation. This had not
been the case before. The author affirms that up to the change “more
than once in Iraq we were close to mounting capture/kill operations
only to learn at the last hour that the targets were working undercover
for another coalition entity.”
A textbook on ‘Strategic Management’
This
elegantly written book is not only a brilliant memoir of General
Stanley McChristal’s war against Al Qaeda in Iraq but it also serves as a
textbook on strategic management and human relations. It can equally
apply to our business world and to our life in society. Its main theme
is simple but powerful: share information freely and empower those who
are close to the problem to allow them to decide. If, as they say,
information is power, don’t keep it in the foot locker, share it freely
and see how this magnifies your own power, not through raw authority but
through gravitas.
I
have always felt that, at the root of successful management science,
which is usually adorned with high sounding and sophisticated
terminology, are two rather simple but powerful human qualities: candor
and moral courage. I am glad to see these two ingredients present in
Team of Teams.
Gustavo
Coronel, who served on the board of directors of Petróleos de
Venezuela (PdVSA), has had a long and distinguished career in the
international petroleum industry, including in the USA, Europe,
Venezuela and Indonesia. Mr. Coronel was also the Venezuelan
Representative of Transparency International, a Berlin-based
organization fighting corruption. He is an author, public policy expert
and contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis.
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