Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
This is one of those books that was published in 2015 but is extremely relevant to the workforce today.
We look to the next six to twenty-four months to see the impact of AI and more specifically, generative AI on how users approach their work, their bosses, and their task lists. In the evolving landscape of organizational change, the principles outlined in General Stanley McChrystal’s "Team of Teams" and L. David Marquet’s "Turn the Ship Around" offers timely insights for navigating the complexities of modern workforce dynamics, especially in light of the emergence of generative AI. Both books emphasize the imperative of decentralizing decision-making authority to foster agility, adaptability, and resilience within organizations. McChrystal's experience in transforming military operations underscores the significance of cultivating a shared consciousness and empowering small teams to navigate uncertainty and complexity.
Similarly, Marquet's Leader-Leader model propounds the redistribution of control, underscoring the value of developing leaders at every level of the organization. As generative AI continues to permeate the workforce, the principles from these seminal works serve as a beacon, guiding organizations in reshaping their structures and cultures. Embracing a decentralized, leader-rich model enables organizations to harness the full potential of both human and artificial intelligence, ensuring the seamless integration of advanced technologies and the enhancement of innovation, collaboration, and overall organizational effectiveness.
💡 Max Planck darkly confessed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The technological developments of recent decades are of a fundamentally different variety from those of Taylor’s era. While we might think that our increased ability to track, measure, and communicate with people like Tarek would improve our precise “clockwork universe” management, the reality is the opposite: these changes produce a radically different climate—one of unpredictable complexity—that stymies organizations based on Taylorist efficiency.
Human minds feel at home with linear functions. Nonlinear functions, on the other hand, make us uncomfortable. They come in many forms, including exponential functions like Y=5x, and they quickly defy our intuitive understandings of growth and scale. Initial differences in the base or slight increases or decreases in x have massive consequences.
Jonathan Schaeffer has calculated that there are 197,742 different ways for the players’ first two turns to transpire. By the third move, the number of possibilities has risen to 121 million. Within twenty moves, it is more than likely that you are playing a game that has never been played before.
The average forecasting error in the U.S. analyst community between 2001 and 2006 was 47 percent over twelve months and 93 percent over twenty-four months. As writer and investor James Montier puts it, “The evidence on the folly of forecasting is overwhelming . . . frankly the three blind mice have more credibility than any macro-forecaster at seeing what is coming.” In November 2007, economists in the Survey of Professional Forecasters—examining some forty-five thousand economic-data series—foresaw less than a one-in-five-hundred chance of an economic meltdown as severe as the one that would begin one month later.
Gaining understanding is not always the same as predicting. We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.
Henry Mintzberg, author of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: “Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an iceberg.”
We were stronger, more efficient, more robust. But AQI was agile and resilient. In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.
In effect, we needed a system that, without knowing in advance what would be required, could adapt to the challenges at hand; a system that, instead of converting a known x to a known y, would be able to create an unknown output from an unpredictable input.
the competitive internal culture that used to keep us vigilant now made us dysfunctional; the rules and limitations that once prevented accidents now prevented creativity. Interdependence meant that silos were no longer an accurate reflection of the environment: events happening all over were now relevant to everyone. Cordoning off separate institutional entities works only if their operating theaters are not inextricably linked
Team members tackling complex environments must all grasp the team’s situation and overarching purpose. Only if each of them understands the goal of a mission and the strategic context in which it fits can the team members evaluate risks on the fly and know how to behave in relation to their teammates. Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.
Emergence, Steven Johnson debunks “the myth of the ant queen.” The myth is that the sophisticated structure of ant colonies is the result of the architectural and managerial brilliance of the colony’s queen. Fundamental structural differences separate commands from teams. The former is rooted in reductionist prediction, and very good at executing planned procedures efficiently. The latter is less efficient, but much more adaptable. rust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy. But this overlap and redundancy—these inefficiencies—are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy. Great teams are less like “awesome machines” than awesome organisms.
Continuing to function under the illusion that we can understand and foresee exactly what will be relevant to whom is hubris. It might feel safe, but it is the opposite.
As Propst put it two years before his death, reflecting on his greatest legacy, “The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places . . . I never had any illusions that this is a perfect world.”
We took almost all phone calls on speakerphone—that included me, the commander in charge of our nation’s most sensitive forces. This could make people uncomfortable, sometimes intensely so. But never once in Iraq did I see it hurt us nearly as much as it helped. We were trying to normalize sharing among people used to the opposite. Our standing guidance was “Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.”
When people think of cutting-edge military hardware, they usually picture weaponry, not a bulked-up version of Skype, but that was our main technological hurdle and point of investment for several months. Like NASA, we invested in bandwidth to enable us to reach every component of our force and our partners, from austere bases near the Syrian border to CIA headquarters at Langley. Secure video teleconferences, chat rooms, a Web portal, and e-mail became key arteries of our circulatory system. Technically it was complex, financially it was expensive, but we were trying to build a culture of sharing: any member of the Task Force, and any of the partners we invited, could eventually dial in to the O&I securely from their laptops and listen through their headphones.
Ultimately, however, the press of the fight demanded expedience, and expedience demanded a meritocracy. If an individual or unit produced good intelligence, reliable coordination, or accurate and timely warnings, they rose in relevance and respect. Legacy accomplishments or bluster might work for a while, but eventually people either produced or faded in importance. No one wanted to hear what you’d done in the last war.
We needed true, not theoretical, collaboration, transparency, and trust. Putting everyone in the same room was a start.* But if we wanted instinctive, second-nature, teamlike trust, we would have to go much deeper. The stronger the ties between our teams—as with the prisoners—the higher the likelihood we would achieve the level of cooperation we needed. Together, these two cornerstones—systemic understanding and strong lateral connectivity—grounded shared consciousness. Both diverged wildly from the MECE, reductionist doctrines we had spent most of our lives upholding, but, in this new setting, against this new threat, they worked. No team wanted to be the group that lagged in efficiency or took too long to fix a problem on account of being overly cautious. An avoidance of responsibility had become known as the “GM nod”—a staple of survival and job security at the company.
“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 teams that had the highest levels of internal engagement and external exploration had much higher levels of creative output—something that was reinforced by an internal study of his labs at MIT. When Pentland surveyed a number of R&D labs, he found that he could predict the labs’ creative output with an extraordinary 87.5 percent accuracy by measuring idea flow. Almost every company has posters and slogans urging employees to “work together,” but simply telling people to “communicate” is the equivalent of Taylor’s telling his workers to “do things faster,” and stopping there. GM, in addition to the “cost is everything” slogan, had posters everywhere reading “QUALITY ABOVE ALL”—but it was the former, not the latter, that was practiced. It is necessary, we found, to forcibly dismantle the old system and replace it with an entirely new managerial architecture.
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. The gardener cannot actually “grow” tomatoes, squash, or beans—she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so. It was impossible to separate my words and my actions, because the force naturally listened to what I said, but measured the importance of my message by observing what I actually did. If the two were incongruent, my words would be seen as meaningless pontifications. Gardeners plant and harvest, but more than anything, they tend. Plants are watered, beds are fertilized, and weeds are removed.
“dinosaur’s tail”: As a leader grows more senior, his bulk and tail become huge, but like the brontosaurus, his brain remains modestly small. When plans are changed and the huge beast turns, its tail often thoughtlessly knocks over people and things. That the destruction was unintentional doesn’t make it any better.
Nonetheless, we have to avoid the temptation to confuse the map for the terrain—to believe that subway lines are the only true representation of a city, or that lights and stop signs are the only way to manage traffic. In the words of Albert Einstein, “Our theories determine what we measure.” When we urge people to think “outside of the box,” we are generally asking them to discard mental models.
Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book
