Live Chat!
[Photo: Reinhard Hunger for Fast Company]
Goodbye Org Chart: A Q&A With Gen. Stanley McChrystal, David Silverman, And Chris Fussell
Join Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian on May 27 at 11 a.m. ET for a live Q&A with the authors of "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World."
Our guests will be discussing their new book, Team of Teams: New Rules Of Engagement For A Complex World -- and answering your questions about effectively transforming organizations.
Submit your questions now using the "Make a comment" box below, and read an adapted excerpt of the book here!
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Before the chat, read an excerpt from "Team of Teams":
Let General Stanley McChrystal Explain Why Adaptability Trumps Hierarchy
Fast CompanyForget everything you ever knew about your company's org chartand that's an order. -
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.
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Thanks Bob. We really appreciate the opportunity.
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Thanks for having us, Bob - great to spend time with your team!
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I'm sure this is going to be fun. I know you all are eager for questions from our readers too. We'll get to those shortly
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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?
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I'll offer some thoughts from the ground level in the Special Operations community. What we had were a group of incredibly effective small teams, but we were tribal and silo'd - so when the world shifted and we needed to function as a network, there were years of organizational learnings that needed to be overcome.
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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.
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What doesn't work about a traditional command-and-control operation, in today's world?
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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.
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From the ground level - the problems in Iraq that we'd faced in the past were simply too fast for a silo'd approach of small teams. We needed to become a "Team of Teams" to be truly effective. The old systems we relied on were designed for efficiency - which is true in all bureaucracies. What we needed to become was a system that mirrored the speed and interconnectedness of the distributed networks we were facing in things like Al Qaeda. Networks are designed for adaptability - and will always outpace the speed of bureaucracies.
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So this isn't just in the military, right, but in business structures as well.
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Absolutely. We believe that today, everyone and every organization is dealing with an exponential increase in the pace of change. Businesses must become more agile and adaptive if they are going to be successful or even relevant.
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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.
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Leadership is probably the most important component. Today's leader must foster an environment that allows people to be successful. No longer can they be the decision maker exclusively, they must be the master communicator and facilitator.
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How important is leadership in building effective teams?
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How would this translate to state or federal government bureaucracies, where union rules, political influence, and old SOP's inhibit flexibility?
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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.
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On leadership, traditional models often viewed the leader much as we might a chessmaster who controls 16 chess pieces against an opponent who does the same. But what if your opponent is not a single chess master, but instead are 16 chess pieces that each think for themselves and communicate between themselves constantly - with the freedom to act. Suddenly the Chess Master will find themselves utterly incapable of dealing with a networked foe.
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How do you compete against 16 masters at the same time?
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How do you stay focused under the environment you're describing?
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Gen. Stanley McChrystal, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell during our Live Chat with Fast Company Editor Bob Safian, alongside your moderator Rose Pastore.
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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.
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At the ground level, it was very empowering to see senior leadership that were willing to fundamentally question the design of the institution. On the battlefield - we started to see our senior leaders as real partners in the effort, not some closed door C-suite that we had no access to.
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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.
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Dave's right on discipline. The word sometimes gets a negative connotation, but its really about doing what a leader should do - when they should do it. That's easier said than done though - it takes focused effort to maintain communication, be available to your team(s), and avoid the temptation to drift back into centralized decision making that gives the illusion of decisiveness, but which often paralyzes the larger team as they feel you want to micromanage action.
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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?
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The battle rhythm, what we call "Operating Rhythm" in the business environment, is a critical component for every industry. Our goal was to understand the pace of the threat we were facing, then position ourselves to communicate and drive action one step faster than that. For us, that meant communicating on a 24-hour cycle, 7 days a week...for years on end. Every leader needs to understand the pace of their industry - and ensure they're positioned to move faster!
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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.
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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.
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Do you see the influx of Silicon Valley topdogs in Washington having some of the organization effects you describe in the book?
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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.
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Does any of the team have experience implementing more adaptable organisations in cultures such as Latin America and Asia where society is extremely hierarchical and status driven? Are different strategies required? What has been their experience?
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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.
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@simon:
We've done work in many different business cultures around the globe. Just like in the military, there are nuances to every culture's approach to leadership. Some cultures are more aggressive about leveraging the network model, others less so. But even in the most traditional hierarchies, everyone will respond to the fact that the organization is suffering from an inability to move as quickly as the environment requires. If that is the starting point of common understanding - the way that we move forward can be tailored to meet the specific cultural nuances. -
i'd really love to hear more about how product development influenced you in team of teams' approach.
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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.
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What's the most difficult part of creating a team-of-teams structure for organizations to grasp when you engage with them?
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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.
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Above the small team level, we find that some organizations struggle with the concept of Shared Consciousness - which implies levels of communication and transparency that aren't currently in their culture. The idea that they not only can, but or expected, to aggressively cross-level information can be a bit frightening.
