Team of teams – Stanley McChrystal

Books · Management

(Read this in November 2019, adding to Notion in Feb 2021)

URL:

Team of Teams

Summary

  1. Robust != Resilient. Decentralized organizations have fewer resources, but are really hard to kill (anti fragile). Centralised organizations are very robust and have tons of resources, but can be destroyed when put under a lot of pressure that they weren’t designed for
  2. Complex systems and environments—like weather systems, ecosystems and global financial systems—are fundamentally unpredictable. We may have more data and advanced technology today, but our environment has also become much more complex and uncertain. The key is to stop trying to predict or control complex systems. Instead, focus on making yourself more adaptable and resilient, so you can respond effectively to unexpected events
  3. Since the pursuit of efficiency can limit flexibility and resilience, the task force has to stop seeing efficiency as the managerial holy grail. Instead, they must pursue adaptability

Highlights

Seal teams have amazing individuals, but have even better teamwork.

Success of a team depends on both the visible hand of management and the invisible hand of emergence

Stratification and silos (command) are efficient and MECE. But a more inefficient and messy cross organisational structure (team) ensures greater adaptability. It has more redundancies, which are jntegral for adaptability

But, teams are hard to scale up beyond Dunbar’s number. Law of diminishing marginal utility sets jn after the first member. But law of diminishing total utility sets in soon — if org structures are not fixed. The same traits that make teams great (in-group camaraderie, knowing everyone else, shared goals) make them hard to scale

BUT, a team of teams structure, where some members of a team have relationships with other members of other teams (at the same working level) can scale better while still having many of the benefits of a team structure

Al Qaeda and ISIS are examples of a Team of Teams. Information sharing, delineation of roles, decision making authority and leadership need to be rethought in team of teams

A CIA knew that the guy who crashed the flight into Pentagon, but couldn’t let the FBI know as he wasn’t authorised

You can try for a 100% success rate, or you can try to build a flexible system to address the inevitable failures

Fundamental structural differences separate commands from teams. The former is rooted in reductionist prediction — very good at executing planned procedures efficiently. The latter is less efficient, but much more adaptable.

Communications are now instantaneous, but decisions never are. Decentralise the decision making process by empowering field generals