Live Chat!

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This is Bob Safian, the editor of Fast Company, and I'm delighted to be joined by a terrific team of experts on the topic of ...teams: General Stanley McChrystal and his colleagues Chris Fussell and David Silverman. They have recently published a compelling book called "Team of Teams: Rules of Engagement for a Complex World." Great to have you all here.

Thanks for having us, Bob - great to spend time with your team!

First off, though, a general question. Team work is often talked about and extolled. We all know it is a goal. But talk is one thing and execution is something else. Why is teamwork so hard?

That's my experience as well. We also found that in the increasingly complex and far faster environment (see how quickly ISIS has arisen and matured) that connecting even dispersed individuals and small teams into a larger Team of Teams was essential.

Traditional command and control structures were developed to provide order and predictability at scale. They produced repeatable actions (and reactions) that required a fairly known response. Unfortunately, order comes at the cost of both speed and decentralized decisionmaking. Decisions tend to be made at higher levels (further from the point of action) - and often are too slow for the situation.

So this isn't just in the military, right, but in business structures as well.

I agree. Competition faced by most companies is no longer only from established firms - it comes fast and furious from startups and from far-flung locations around the world. Accelerated by technology, media, and markets, the deliberate pace once effective is now often overwhelmed.

How important is leadership in building effective teams?

It's a great question - and critical to recall that these ideas started by recognizing the ineffectiveness of the military system in the information age. The Defense Department is prone to all of the "traditional bureaucratic rules" - which is the same thing you'll find in most traditional government systems. It's critical that leaders recognize that the system no longer works - and we can't remain beholden to SOPs, the old way of business, etc. For us, the key part was having a leadership team that was willing to admit that the system itself was flawed. That gave everyone a clean white board to redesign ourselves and become as adaptable as the networks we faced.

That sounds a bit terrifying.

You don't do it as a single "heroic" leader - or Chess Master. You need to use your position to create an environment where your chess pieces are informed, in constant dialogue with each other, and are not only empowered - but are expected - to act.

Staying focused is hard. We used what was called a battle rhythm to disciplined how we operated on a daily basis. This allowed us to create a sustainable and adaptive culture.

It can sound a bit chaotic, compared with command-and-control, if decisions are made in multiple places at multiple levels. Is there a system to all this, or is it more of an ethos? You use this phrase "shared consciousness." What does that mean?

Shared Consciousness is the emergent intelligence that is created across a networked organization when you have a lot of transparent interactions on a consistent basis. What it does is create the critical feedback that is necessary to allow an organization and individuals to consistently and accurately correct their respective actions and decisions so they can be the right thing at the right time constantly.

Shared consciousness was the ultimate goal of the organization. How do we ensure that thousands of people around the world have access to the right information and an interconnected view of the problem. We did this by creating robust communication forums (on our Operating Rhythm) that included, literally, thousands of people on live video teleconference every day. That became the heartbeat of creating shared consciousness, and driving effective actions.

There's much talk of Silicon Valley successes, but so far there really hasn't been much progress. Its important that we understand the cultural, legal, and process-driven inertia that paralyzes much of what the US Government tries to do. We don't want DC to try to become Silicon Valley, but theres' much that needs to be learned from what the tech industry has found so effective.

I can't speak to individual's impact on Washington, but what I will say is that the Team of Teams approach is a scaled version of Scrum for Leadership and Management, which came out of product development in the technology sector. It allows for the best parts of efficiency based models while creating the feedback loops necessary to maintain effectiveness in environments where the outcome or path to get there is not fully understood or known.

We looked hard at thought leaders like Fredrick Winslow Taylor from last century and Eric Reis today and how they used lean, agile and scrum. We realized that the Team of Team approach, we call in CrossLead, was the next evolution in how leaders and organizations have to behave to create sustained and organic adaptability.

The biggest challenge for us at the ground level was the recognition that simply being a great team was no longer going to be enough. When the world was more static, you could put one team against one problem - especially in the Special Operations world. The recognition that "excellence" at the team level was insufficient was very hard to come to grips with - but once accepted, it drove us to connect across boundaries in a completely new way. This same logic applies in the businesses we work with.