- 04.07.14
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[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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Nothing about CrossLead, how you create a Team of Teams, is overly complicated. But it is difficult to do on a daily basis. It's similar to staying in shape. It requires relentless focus and a commitment to trying to improve yourself and your team on a daily and even minute by minute basis.
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If you want to learn more about Holacracy:
Holawhat? Meet The Alt-Management System Invented By A Programmer And Used By Zappos
Fast CompanyZappos, Medium, and David Allen have all embraced the non-hierarchical management system. Should your company adopt it too? -
I haven't visited Zappos to see Holacracy up close, but I believe a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of structure (a bit like lines on a highway), with the radical transparency of Shared Consciousness and the decentralized "Empowered Execution" that it facilitates offers the right balance. It clearly varies by type and culture of organization though - no one size fits all.
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It was critical in our system that we were able to create very decentralized execution while maintaining centralized controls around strategy, key resources, etc. We needed to be able to move very fast at the small team level, but do so within established boundaries (what we call Decision Space) to ensure we didn't create more problems than we solved.
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Tell us a little about "empowered execution". How does that feed into your team of teams philosophy?
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On the ground - Empowered Execution felt like a massively heightened sense of accountability to the larger organization. Suddenly (through Shared Consciousness) - we all were expected to understand the overarching strategy, the resource constraints, etc. Inside of that understanding, and with the Decision Space give to you by senior leadership
, you were empowered (that is, EXPECTED) to move quickly and accurately without relying on the system to approve every decision you made. This allowed us to increase both speed and accuracy exponentially. -
Empowered Execution is the product that Shared Consciousness allows. It is more than simply "decentralizing decision making." If you push authority (and responsibility) for decisions down to lower levels but don't accompany that with all the contextual understanding (based on information flow), you've set your teams and junior leaders unfairly up for failure. You can't expect people to make the right decisions unless given the tools. But when you do pass both the contextual understanding down, and accompany that with the freedom to decide and act, you find the decisions made closer to the action (or closer to the customer) can be faster, more precise, and nuanced where necessary. In combat I found that given the tools, junior leaders made extraordinary judgments under great pressure - but only when I created an environment that sets them up for success.
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To add onto Chris' points at the tactical level - empowerment was not touchy-feely, it was in-your-face. Because of the transparency that Shared Consciousness naturally creates, everyone could see everything, to include the General, at multiple layers up. So if you weren't moving out and being productive, everyone knew it in real time. You usually got a call pretty quickly that went something like, "you have all of the information you need, you have the decision making authority to act, what are you waiting for?"
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In your book, you write that "we are likely to see more and more 'chaotic mess' solutions." What do you say to those who don't like chaos?
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@Mike - the emergent intelligence of the ant colony is definitely something to learn from. The queen ant makes no decisions! We talk about this in "Team of Teams"...
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For those who are uncomfortable with chaos and uncertainty, life is going to get really hard. You can create an insulated world in which the inputs are limited and processes predictable, but just don't expect to grow a firm, dominate a market, successfully help kids navigate to the education they need, or govern effectively. The world has changed and it isn't going to slow down or simplify.
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To those who don't like chaos, I say... it's no longer up to you. It's a guiding principle of the information age - as the external world is so much faster and interconnected than it's ever been. If you're more comfortable in the traditional, predictable bureaucratic system - you can fight the change, but you're doing so at your own peril.
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In your experience, what is an example of where the personal character of a leader (perhaps exemplifying resiliency, humility, courage, etc.) was a force multiplier for the kind trust and agility among teams you write about.
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Most people don't like Chaos but we found that our vote was not the deciding factor in the new reality that is today's unpredictable environment. So you can bitch about it or you can decide to do something about it. For us and our comrades it was life and death and we absolutely hated losing more than anything else so we made a collective decision to try and become more adaptive and win.
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@Louis - for many of us in the Special Operations world, it was seeing the first step being taken by our senior leadership that was critical. In large (thousands large) communication forums, we saw a willingness for them to be honest about what they did and didn't know, then also support a system where junior folks could present the realities as they were...not a polished version. There was a lot of empathy in the system - which many find counterintuitive. This started with Stan McChrystal - but spread quickly throughout the organization. Once this becomes the organizational norm of any enterprise, it begins to grow organically - but senior leaders must take the first step.
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You write in the book about busy traffic intersections with no traffic lights -- where cars somehow move through without injury. It seems almost like magic. What's your point with this example?
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When we think of traffic intersections, we have been taught to expect the orderly flow of traffic stopping and starting based on timed signals. What we'll see in the future won't be any less safe or orderly, but the "order" we see will be far different. Technology will allow cars to drive at high speed into the intersection without stopping and collisions will be prevented by car to car coordination execution automatically by their on-board technology. Its really an analogy for what we'll see in most walks of life. Complexity will produces processes and solutions that appear chaotic (but are far more efficient) - because we now can. What is frightening in many ways in liberating in others.
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This has been fascinating, and unfortunately we're out of time. My thanks to all three of you -- and to those who submitted questions. Team of Teams is a compelling theme for our era. It's an aspiration and a destination. As you write, "we all have to take a leap of faith and dive into the swirl." Thanks again for diving in with us.
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Thanks for a great, and fascinating, session. And thanks for all Fast Company does to make people think.
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Thanks for the time, Bob! And thanks to those that joined. Any follow up questions welcome: @FussellChris, @McChrystalGroup
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Thanks Bob, Fast Company and everyone out there today for the opportunity to spend time with you all today.
