First published 1 Nov 2015.
Last week the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum hosted its second agora in the UK. The exceptional Tantum Collins shared his thoughts on Team of Teams, the book he co-wrote with retired general Stanley McChrystal. Team of Teams recounts how McChrystal reshaped JSOC into a more adaptable and agile organisation to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQ-I). A brief summary of the evening’s discussion follows.
When McChrystal assumed command of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), it was losing its fight with AQ-I. Through trial and error, AQ-I had become a highly effective, non-hierarchical network based on complex social, familial, tribal, and marital ties. This network was engaging in terrorism on an industrial scale, and the Coalition was struggling to counteract it.
In response, McChrystal and JSOC sought increases in efficiency — they did more of the same but “turned it up to eleven”. They perfected their drills, slept less and worked harder. This allowed them to double the number of raids they undertook — but they quickly hit twin constraints:
- Hierarchical decision-making. Approvals were needed for every op, slowing down JSOC’s reaction time.
- Siloed thinking. The operators were maintaining a high tempo of ops in which intelligence analysts barely figured. The int analysts were getting very little information from the operators to analyse. Bags of evidence were literally piling up in cupboards, unprocessed, because the two sides were not working together.
In order to dramatically increase tempo (and “turn the hammer into a nailgun”), McChrystal had to restructure the way JSOC worked: his insight was that only a network could defeat a network. The basic teams were already outstanding, but the challenge was scaling adaptability beyond individual teams to the entire organisation. This actually required making JSOC less efficient (which is extremely counter-intuitive). Some of the innovations that underpinned this were:
- The daily call. There had always been a daily conference call, but McChrystal extended it 7,000 invitees, across services, theatres and government agencies. The daily call happened without fail six days a week, and became JSOC’s keystone habit: everyone in JSOC and related agencies knew what was going on.
- Horizontal communication. Below the daily call, teams had to build trust and work well together without their commander’s intervention. This didn’t require everyone in JSOC to know and trust each other — it just required each team to have single trusted link to the other teams. To create these bonds McChrystal pushed embedding — between agencies and communities, and around the world — and he demanded that commanders put their best people forward for these assignments.
- Rewarding team players. SF selection already filters out those who are not team players, but McChrystal went a step further, by ensuring the success of subordinates who collaborated across silos.
- A different physical space. In Iraq, JSOC knocked down walls and created an open-plan bullpen along the lines of Bloomberg’s mayoral office. The current battle was run in the middle of the room, while the planners and analysts — who needed a bit more peace — ringed the room.
- Empowered execution. McChrystal stopped requiring subordinates to wake him up to get permission for each op.
Creating this shared consciousness made JSOC a more fluid organisation, allowing it to increase the number of raids it launched by a factor of ten. McChrystal likened himself to being a gardener, who created the conditions for success, rather than a chessmaster, who actually moved the pieces on the board.
The approach clearly has its drawbacks, however. JSOC in Iraq had a very clear and discrete mission, and its members were capable SF operators. Replicating McChrystal’s success in an organisation with diffuse aims would be challenging. The approach was less successful in ISAF, for instance, where there were very different national agendas and where McChrystal did not have the power to change the behaviours of all SF in theatre. The question of the war’s overall strategy is also outside of the book’s scope.
Team of Teams is not war memoir, it is a book about leadership and organisations. The fight against AQ-I is microcosm of the rise of complexity and unpredictability in the world, and the authors argue that the “team of teams” approach and shared consciousness are the necessary counter-measures. The authors weave in various stories from business, sports and government to lend weight to this argument. Other examples of shared consciousness include the Apollo moon mission, crew resource management in airplane cockpits, and changing the role of the lead doctor in surgical procedures. A prominent failure is GM’s inability to overcome silos in order to comprehend the Cobalt ignition switch fiasco. Seeing the book’s argument applied in multiple settings allows readers to better understand it, even if their interest is purely military.
Next events. DEF in the UK is planning a third agora and a DEF[x] in London over the next two months. For information please contact @durnure or durnure at gmail.com.
