“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

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

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.”

fallacy that it takes Supermen to forge super teams.

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.

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.

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

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