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

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

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

Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability in structures, processes, and mind-sets that is often uncomfortable.

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.

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.

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.

We needed to create a team of teams. It may sound like a kitschy semantic distinction, but it actually marked a critical structural difference that turned the aspiration of scaling the magic of the team into a realizable goal.

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

fallacy that it takes Supermen to forge super teams.

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