Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

fallacy that it takes Supermen to forge super teams.

It looks unnatural because we have a strongly ingrained idea of how traffic should look, and it is governed by a mechanical rhythm of stops, starts, and turns. In contrast to these satisfying, machinelike motions, the fluid mess in the simulation seems like dangerous disorder. Psychologists and organizational theorists call these heuristics for how

Mike Flynn, taught me a great technique. We were visiting a unit that boasted of having more than 250 intelligence sources (Iraqi civilians recruited to pass information to U.S. forces). I was deeply impressed. Mike then asked a simple question: “Can you describe your very best source? I’ll assume that all the others are less valuable.” The unit ad

Eventually a rule of thumb emerged: “If something supports our effort, as long as it is not immoral or illegal,” you could do it. Soon, I found that the question I most often asked my force was “What do you need?” We decentralized until it made us uncomfortable, and it was right there—on the brink of instability—that we found our sweet spot.

the traditional heroic decision maker. In the Task Force, we found that, alongside our new approach to management, we had to develop a new paradigm of personal leadership. The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.

I later used a specific question when talking to junior officers and sergeants in small bases in Afghanistan: “If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win—what would you do differently?” At first they would chuckle, assuming I was joking, but soon realized I wasn’t. At that point most became very thoughtful. If they were forced to operat

Perhaps an organization sells widgets, and the leader finds that he or she loves everything about widgets—designing, building, and marketing them; that’s still not where the leader is most needed. The leader’s first responsibility is to the whole.

The Task Force still had ranks and each member was still assigned a particular team and sub-sub-command, but we all understood that we were now part of a network; when we visualized our own force on the whiteboards, it now took the form of webs and nodes, not tiers and silos. The structure that had, years earlier, taunted us from our whiteboards as

Our organization was not just “getting smarter” or “doing more” in isolation. Instead, it was acting smarter and learning constantly, simultaneously.

First, we needed coordinated operations, something that necessitated emergent, adaptive intelligence. Shared consciousness achieved this, but it was only the first half. As we would soon find, keeping pace with the speed of our environment and enemy would require something else as well: decentralized control. Creating it would be just as taxing, ra