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

Our standing guidance was “Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.”

The best teams—like the three snipers on the deck of the Bainbridge—know their coach (or commander or boss) trusts them to trust each other. Those horizontal anti-MECE bonds of trust and overlapping definitions of purpose enable them to “do the right thing.”

Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.

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

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.

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

“You could tune into North American 2, and you’d be listening to the guys working the engine. If there was a problem there, you could hear how they were handling the problem.” At launch time, every team was put on the same loop. “You got instantaneous communication up and down,” the official marveled. “[It was] probably one of the biggest loops eve

In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them.

We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival.