Team of teams
Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell
This book describes the kind of organization required to cope with a complex environment. The lead authors uses his experience leads the US Special Operation Group (USSOG) in the Iraq during the early-to-mid 2000s. Modern business and modern business both organized around reductionist specification of work combined with delivery of explicit directions for its completion. This works very well in highly predictable environments where initiative and innovation create no value. An increasing portion of business life does not belong to that predictable world and requires new ways of working. Though the specific context of this book is military, the application is not just military.
The book observes that economics began with a focus on efficiency – getting the most output from the least inputs. Efficiency became nearly the only thing that was considered. The military was really no different – efficiency involved how to achieve the objective with the least losses. At the beginning of the 20th century, Frederick Taylor began his objective studies of efficiency in factories which made factories into the transformative organization of the Industrial Age and initiated “management” as a profession. Taylorism is characterized by intense division of labor between labor and management, and between different kinds of labor. Management did the thinking and integrating of the entire business. Labor did what it was told and work was broken down into simple tasks for which there was one right way. Manufacturing was predictable and stable, so there was rarely any need to reconsider any decision. Organizations had a clear hierarchy expressed in an organizational chart with clear roles and responsibilities. Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) describes this approach – nothing is overlapping, ambiguous, or incomplete.
This organizational structure is quite effective for dealing with complicated activities. It is not effective in dealing with complex activities or decisions. The problem in dealing with complicated situations is “doing things right”, which is aided by detailed instruction and discovering the “best practices”. The problems we increasingly face are complex and the problem has become how to “do the right things”. Complex situations maybe unclear, disproportionate or highly linked. The situation can be unique or one-off, so unsuitable for a “best practice”. It can be impossible to provide detailed instructions to cope with this circumstance.
A large portion of the book is devoted to describing the difference between complicated and complex; this is well done. It may be useful to think of a mechanical clock as an example of a complicated device. There are a lot of parts that must work together to accurately measure time. The relationship between cause and effect is clear and regular. Weather is an example of a complex system. The location, intensity and timing of a weather event depend on many, many forces creating weak nudges to an air mass. There is cause and effect between these forces and these effects, but there are so many and they interact in such subtle ways that weather prediction in almost impractical (pause to consider the difference in quality of prediction between a clock and weather. You can be fairly confident that the clock can measure 10 minutes (99+ percent confident). How confident are you in a precipitation prediction for exactly 12 hours form now by comparison. We accept a low quality prediction for weather because we know high quality prediction is impossible).
It was the discovery that weather models were inordinately sensitive to input conditions that gave rise to the concept of the butterfly effect. The authors point to the example of Tarek el-Tayeb Mohammed Bouazizi, a fruit seller in Tunisia. Angry about local corruption, he sets himself on fire and video is uploaded to YouTube. Word spreads and the Arab Spring is underway. Over the next few months multiple governments will fall and at least one civil war will break out. In retrospect, it may have been possible to identify Bouazizi as a troublemaker, but what was not predictable was the aftermath. Other people have self-immolated without any wider effect. In an internet connected world, ideas spread very fast and their spread has nothing to do with truth or fiction. The spread is complex. Organizations can’t effectively respond to this sort of complex phenomena through a set of instructions. There used to be gate keepers on information, but they are apparently gone. Any of us can broadcast now.
A key feature of complex systems is that they contain interdependent elements. Things depend on other things is way that keep you from isolating them. Anything that you change changes other things. The insurgent groups faced by US forces were loosely networked and interdependent. Removing a leader made a difference, but not a big difference to the effectiveness of the insurgents. VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is now used to think about disruption and emergent phenomena. From our perspective and our bias that things change slowly or not at all, VUCA events can paralyze us.
Science started by trying to understand complicated phenomena. Developments in mechanics, electricity, fluid mechanics, and chemistry dominated science up until the early 1900s. Then physics began to cope with complexity (quantum mechanics), biology switched from taxonomy to physiology, genomes, and ecology. The scientific method developed to deal with the complication of science must now evolve to deal with the complexity of systems that are beyond our concepts of “control”. Human interactions have always been complex, but one of the conceits of Taylor’s work was that they could be treated like they were simple.
Organizations also started by coping with complicated arrangements. Large organizations were structured to give clear roles and responsibilities to individuals. These efforts created one-to-many cascades of information. The evolution of organizations into functions covering multiple business operations has given rise to a structure where many-to-many interactions are common. Your organization may have 100 contacts with a customer’s organization, and your organization may have interactions with hundreds of customers. The one-way cascade of information and decisions deals poorly with this complexity.
Many organizations (including the military in Iraq) hoped to use technology to gain control of this complexity. The authors point out that they had a massive amount of information available to them all the time. What they learned was that large data sets were great for understanding what had happened, but almost useless for understanding what would happen in the near future. In fact, the presence of more data opened up more possibilities making the number of potential decisions larger and more uncertain. Adding more data to a conventional organizational structure did not improve performance.
The authors point out that there was another structure in the US government that had coped with complex phenomena in its history – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA). The early days of NASA were failure rich. Some early rockets exploded without even lifting off and some made it 4-inches before exploding. People were divided into separate divisions with separate components of the rockets to build. There was a failure of integration. At the start of the Apollo program, NASA had no justification to believe they could send men safely to the moon and back. George Mueller was hired to revamp NASA management and his first action was to discard the organizational chart. People working of different components were required to have daily communication with their colleagues across the system. This was a big change from monthly reviews. To enable this, NASA built a communication system that would resemble the internet some 30 years later. The system was expanded to include the contractors working on components too. Contractors were often specialists but they were now made aware of the overall plans so that they could act accordingly. This communication made NASA somewhat less efficient. More time was spent in meetings and communication. More time was spent coordinating with others. But the effort was more effective and eventually accomplished the mission of a lunar landing. NASA created a management system that integrated complex work across multiple organizational and technological boundaries.
One of the overall principles guiding the NASA and USSOG was development of a “joint cognition” or “group consciousness”. This common perspective was built by frequent, open communication between people nominally in different groups. In Iraq, they realized that there was far too much information being restricted. Different agencies kept their information from others, and people identified with their agencies rather than the larger effort. One of the early steps to develop group consciousness was to appoint liaisons to work with other groups and gain their trust. One big way to gain trust was to share information. Eventually, they declared all information within the group to be secret but permitted everyone working on the effort to see all of the information. What they decided was that everybody needed to know in order to get their work done and to react to the complexity they were facing. Keeping secrets from colleagues eroded trust, slowed decision making, and decreased the quality of decisions. In contrast, developing knowledge pools enables teams of teams.
A second big step in developing more functional teams require delegating authority to them. During the early months of the USSOG operations, all operations had to be approved by the commander. With 2-hour operations, he was being awakened frequently to approve recommendations – slowing operations. Eventually, they established a set of ground rules that allowed individuals to initiate action without seeking approval. The book describes an incident where an enlisted person noticed some strange behavior and initiated action that eventually led to capture of some wanted insurgents. From first observation to final action required less than 1 hour with coordination between multiple units – all directed without command interference.
When they began to decentralize decision making, they had the idea that a 70% solution today was better than a 90% solution tomorrow. But we found we were getting it backward – we were getting a 90% solution today instead of the 70% solution tomorrow.* At least one reason was that people making a decision invest in making it work. The people confronting the problem probably know more about the problem and its solutions too. In an environment with a shared consciousness, empowered execution became possible.
A third action was to increase the amount of “idea flow” in the team. One goal of increasing idea flow is to increase the collective intelligence of the team. Academic studies have shown that the intelligence of teams has little to do with the intelligence of its members and much to do with the horizontal connections between them. When ideas move easily within a group, they group gains choices and information. When information is stuck or people resist new ideas, the group is only as good as the “best” person. One interesting example came from a call center. The work is highly standardized and the basic productivity metric is something called “average call handle time”. When the break time for call center workers was shifted so that they all went on break together, AHT dropped enough that this was applied across call centers and created $15MM savings.
People may not have the leadership skills to work in this environment instantly. The book makes a point of talking about the Battle of Trafalgar between the English and Napoleonic navies. Without going into detail, the English admiral Nelson set up a battle plan that was unorthodox with the further instruction that after the first move, each ship was to act independently. In contrast, the French forces were commanded from the admiral’s ship by a series of flags. In the noise and smoke of battle, French communication was disrupted, captains did not know what to do, and were easy pickings for the independently acting English ships. Nelson had spent years teaching his captains how to react and anticipate the opponent. Part way through the battle Nelson was fatally wounded. The French admiral later commented, “To any other nation the loss of a Nelson would have been irreparable, but in the British Fleet off Cadiz, every captain was a Nelson.”
We now process enormous quantities of information every day, and we do not understand or retain all of it. In the past, with less information to consider, a leader could be the person to process, understand and use the information. This gave rise to the relatively modern concept of the heroic leader who made the decisions alone. Leadership looked a lot like chess. One mind guiding the pieces and setting the strategy. In our current complex world, this does not work. Instead of teaching leaders how to play chess better, the authors suggest that leadership is now much more like gardening. The leader can’t grow the fruit (the plant grows the fruit), but the leader can create the conditions for the fruit to grow well. In the organization context, this meant the leader must maintain the open communication, clarity of purpose, and empowerment the teams needed to operate. For example, McChrystal always hosted the daily briefing, introducing the speakers, asking a question of two and thanking the speakers for their help. By appearing in forward areas, he showed that he was in contact with the team (he could have bene in Washington just as easily), and he was visible the whole time. If he was visibly bored or distracted, this would be obvious to everyone. McChrystal insured that he was paying attention, which encouraged others to pay attention. He required senior officer participation, so more junior officers knew this was important too. Often, he would give an initial reaction and ask to have his logic tested. This taught that debate was useful and necessary. Through this one meeting, the desire behaviors of the evolving culture were demonstrated to everyone. He would go out in the field to visit smaller units. Although he would get briefings, these were not very important compared to less formal meetings with people with questions and answer sessions. One of the things that was learned was that it was important to have a simple schedule; overloaded schedules would mean that someone would be cancelled and their preparation work would be wasted.
We think that organizations need direction, but systems analysis is showing that simple rules can be used to generate high quality, fast decisions. The book cites the example of a traffic simulation of an intersection with 10 lanes each way (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A ). Traffic never really stops and yet single human could manage this. In some ways, this simulation is a metaphor of the world that we live it. Hundreds of things are moving and constantly adjusting to their environment based on simple rules. There is very little seeking the input of a “higher” authority. For organizations seeking greater agility, responsiveness, or adaptability, the hierarchal organization and mindsets from the early industrial era must be replaced by approaches that better match the complexity of the world we interact with.
Observations and commentary:
- I once read a description about the difference between the internet and the worldwide web. The internet was designed as a backup telephone network for the United States in the event of a nuclear war (or similar technological disaster). The telephone system of the time was a hub-and-spoke network; the majority of calls passed through a few major cities. The internet was designed so that data/calls would be broken into packets and routed around any missing nodes in the system. In fact, the system could work with close to 90% of the nodes missing. The World Wide Web was built on top of the internet and it is structured like the phone system. There are some major servers that are key to the system. If these servers fail, whole sections of the web also fail- and the internet will continue undisturbed.
- If NASA in the 1960s achieved some amazing feats, the implementation of other management systems in the 1990s led to some avoidable disasters. In particular, a program called “Faster Better, Cheaper” emphasized efficiency over integration. One outcome was the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter due to some groups using metric and others using Imperial units. The orbiter shot past Mars and was lost in space.
- The book has an aside about the difference between education and training. The metaphor used is that you must educate a doctor, but you can train a first aid person. The doctor must learn about the system of the human body. You don’t want to be treated by someone who does not know how it all works together. First aid can be run from a series of checklists, but medicine can’t really. The book indirectly made the point that dealing with a system requires education – not training. Complex system require systems thinking processes and this requires education – which takes more time and effort than training.
- The book discusses General Motors in a number of circumstances – mostly unfavorably. But one comment was interesting. Alfred Sloan described GM as “decentralized operations with coordinated control”. McChrystal describes the organization he created as the opposite. First, we needed coordinated operation, something that necessitated emergent, adaptive intelligence. Shared consciousness achieved this….As we would soon find, keeping pace with the speed of our environment and enemy would require something else as well: decentralized control….Where shared consciousness upended our assumptions about information and responsibilities, this next step – which we called “empowered execution” – would transform the way we thought about power and leadership. I started my career as the concept of “empowerment” and watched it fade away along with flat organizations. Like everyone else, I really want to be in control. I am sure that people who rise in the ranks in the Army or any other organization also want to be in control. It is one of the hardest things to learn that control is an illusion. But once you accept the fruitlessness of trying to have control, you can contemplate the potential for coordinated operations with decentralized control.
- It was hard to fit in how the authors linked their organizational description to the idea of “team of teams”. The training of people in the Special Forces places great emphasis on group success. Contrary to one common perception, the training is much more devoted to increasing interdependence than independence. Overly individually-oriented people tend to fail, while other-oriented people tend to succeed. They learn how to be good team mates. This team-orientation gives teams great adaptability and resilience. But this sort of team cohesion usually can’t extend beyond about 20 people. The challenge is how to create a large organization that has the adaptability and fluidity of a team. The concept of team-of-teams flows from the idea that teams can be a unit like a person, and therefore that teams of team can be adaptable at larger scale. The book emphasizes that many of the practices that were adopted to achieve this effectiveness decreased their efficiency. For example, they made a huge investment in bandwidth so that they could have a daily meeting involving hundreds of sites scatter around the world. They created roles to increase engagement and communication and devoted some of their best people to these roles. A more traditional approach would have decreased meetings and autonomy with resulting efficiency gains. Teams of team are hard to use well and require determination to make and keep effective.
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