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Copyright 2016 |Blue Sky Leadership Consulting | All rights reserved

Volume 3

Issue 8

Team of Teams Gen Stanley McCrystal, U.S. Army, Ret.

Why read this book? Team of Teams

BLUE SKY LEADERSHIP CONSULTING | 210-219-9934 | PETER@BLUESKYLEADERSHIP.COM

Blue Sky Leadership Consulting works with organizations to leverage Strategic Thinking and Execution Planning and we encompass many

of the principles in these books into our Four DecisionsTM methodology and development of company’s One Page Strategic Plans.

Whatever system you decide to use, understand them fully, implement them slowly and completely and maintain the discipline and

rhythm necessary to see concrete results. Employees tire of “Flavor of the Month” and thrive on organizational alignment, execution of

plans and achievements that garner a sense of accomplishment.

Key Quotes

“We’re not lazier or less intelligent than our parents or grandparents, but what worked for them simply won’t

do the trick for us now. Understanding and adapting to these factors isn’t optional; it will be what

differentiates success from failure in the years ahead.” (P. 4)

“Edward Lorenz – the ’butterfly effect’ is almost always misused. The reality is that small things in a complex

system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be

the case.” (P. 59)

“Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an

iceberg.” (P. 74 - Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.)

“Anyone wo has ever played or watched sports knows that instinctive, cooperative adaptability is essential to

high-performing teams.” (P. 91)

“A general is expected to have general knowledge of the army – blue, red, green, and everything in

between…we’re working to pump general officer information and awareness throughout our ranks, giving

people used to tight orders and limited visibility the insights once reserved for people at the top.” (P. 216)

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Volume 3

Issue 8

A journey – not a “how to” manual1 1. The Proteus Problem identifies that the challenge lies not in our enemy (competitor) but the new

environment in which we operate.

2. From Many, One lays out the magic and myths of teams. What creates trust and common purpose.

3. Sharing shows how to deal with continual change and increasing complexity and the concept of

shared consciousness.

4. Letting Go delves into empowered execution in an organization and getting decisions made at the

right level.

5. Looking ahead ties these concepts together

The Proteus Problem It was September 2004 when Al Qaeda decimated the crowd at a sewage plant ceremony that the question

that resulted in TEAM OF TEAMS was asked. “if we were the best of the best, why were such attacks not

disappearing, but in fact increasing? Why were we unable to defeat an under resourced insurgency? Why

were we losing?” (P. 19) (General Stanly McChrystal (U.S. Army, 2015)

TEAM of TEAMS

A large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.

Horatio Nelson’s defeat of the Spanish ships is often remembered as a strategic success yet “Nelson’s real

genius lay not in the clever maneuver for which he is remembered, but in the years of innovative

management and leadership that preceded it.” (P. 31)

Frederick Taylor was the world’s first management guru and he changed the world. “Though the notion of a

“best practice” is now commonplace, at that time a workman’s methods were part of his art; variable,

personalized, and a matter of pride.” (P. 40). Taylor legitimized “management” as a discipline and created

the line between thought and action that “managers did the thinking and planning, while workers

executed.”

A lesson to be learned is that if all we do is find a solution to a past problem we will likely miss the new

threats that come our way. The French built the Maginot Line to ensure the horrors experienced in WW1

would not be repeated but it was of little use to the German attack of WW2.

1 McChrystal, Stanley, Team of Teams; Portfolio/Penguin, copyright 2015, Page 6-7

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The book offers great insight into the difference between COMPLICATED vs. COMPLEX. Complicated

systems are much more likely to be predictable whereas the complex is often unpredictable. And because

the world has become so much more complex it has become that much less predictable.

“Resilience thinking is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of

complexity…Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put

themselves back together again.” (P. 79) The key lies in shifting our focus from predicting to reconfiguring.

When you KNOW what the right thing is efficiency makes sense yet when you lack that certainty you need to

opt for the flexibility to do things right.

From Many, One “The formation of SEAL teams is less about preparing people to follow precise orders than it is about

developing trust and the ability to adapt within a small group.” (P. 97)

Great teams TRUST one another, KNOW one another, RELY on one another, Put their LIVES in one another’s

hands. Great teams can’t predict their situations BUT can predict how other members of the team will react!

For great teams you must be aligned to the overall mission and purpose of your organization and be in it for

the team and not yourself. “Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals

into a working team.” (P. 100)

The field of “emergence” – how complex patterns and forms can arise from a multiplicity of simple, low-

level interactions. Think of an ant colony.

The airline industry changed from risk mitigation strategy to a risk adaptation focus after the crash of United

173 in 1978. 70% of aviation deaths could be attributed to human error even as safety innovations

increased exponentially. The command and control focus needed to be replaced by real time

communication and team adaptation capabilities as the complicated became the complex. Crew Resource

Management (CRM) or charm school.

MECE – Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive e.g. paying and nonpaying customers. (P. 118) Non MECE example is a football team – they can’t rely on the coach to tell them what to do play by play.

Team of Teams “On a single team, every individual needs to know every other individual in order to build trust, and they

need to maintain comprehensive awareness at all times in order to maintain common purpose – easy with a

group of twenty-five, doable with a group of fifty, tricky above one hundred, and definitely impossible across

a task force of seven thousand. But on a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a

relationship with every other individual; instead, the relationships between the constituent teams need to

resemble those between individuals on a given team.” (P. 128)

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Volume 3

Issue 8

Seeing the System

The fallacy of “need to know” silos creates a system where you can no longer predict effectively and you

miss critical links in the picture. For a plan to work “everyone has to see the system in its entirety.” Great

teams know that to counter unpredictability, they need to be able to improvise and react to the

circumstances on the field.

The story of how NASA changed its siloed organization into a developmental organization is inspiring even

today. Their “systems engineering/management created a “mechanism with a continuous cross-feed

between the right and left side of the house.” (P. 149) ELDO – the European space initiative – failed

miserably “from shortfalls of organizational communication – devastating “interface failures”, or

blinks…Europe’s lag…was not a question of money but of “methods of organization”.” (P. 151)

NASA set the stage. “whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface

failures.” And proved that the cognitive ‘oneness’ – the emergent intelligence – that we have studied in

small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organization are willing to commit to the

disciplined, deliberate sharing of information.” (P. 151)

NOTE: this changed dramatically after Apollo and they became a bureaucratic machine with the horrors of

challenger disaster.

The key seemed to be “to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise”. SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS

“Physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization.” (P. 157)

Pentagon designed to move between any location within 7 minutes yet now everything is ‘access

protected’ so you have independent, discrete groups “that might as well be spread around the

globe.”

Large, tall buildings with executive suites, private entrances or elevators

“How we organize physical space says a lot about how we think people behave; but how people behave is

often a by-product of how we set up physical space.” (P. 159) [Bell Labs, NASA, Google, Bloomberg’s

“bullpen” became models for their Joint Operations Center (JOC)]

“The structure and symbolism of the Task Force’s new nonhierarchical space was critical, but our

organization would not be reborn by just moving furniture around. We needed to renovate our

organizational culture as well.” (P. 163)

The O&I briefings lasted 2 hours daily and were attended by 7,000 people. “By having thousands of

personnel listen to these daily interactions, we SAVED an incalculable amount time that was no longer

needed to seek clarification or permission.” (P. 169)

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A key to developing their Team of Teams was beating the “Prisoners Dilemma”. This required building trust

and solid relationships with partners. Embedding team members resulted in supplying your best as they

represented you. Gaming theory found a winning strategy in “Tit for Tat” (see page 183).

“What we saw in the Task Force was that while cooperation began as conscious system 2 decision (they’ll

help me later if I help them now; cooperation is in my interest), a track record of productive collaborations

led to reflexive, system 1 cooperation – in other words, real trust. Furthermore, this trust had a viral effect:

once it passed a certain threshold, it became the norm.” (P. 183)

The GM ignition switch recall

GM became the behemoth of the car industry when it created “decentralized operations with coordinated

control” or silos. That worked great for much of the 20th century but became their Achilles heel when

changing competitive realities dictated speed and agility as crucial to continued success. Silos created:

Internal rivalries

Competitive culture

Inhibited communications

Mistrust between teams

Little cross-silo information flow

A two-dollar easy fix was ignored for 10 years because no one could connect the dots – airbags and ignition

systems were overseen by two different teams and the easy fix was discussed but never addressed.

“Top down coordination of siloed efforts works only if those on top actually understand

how everything will interact.” (P. 193)

Alan Mulally, CEO for Ford in 2005, created “One Ford” and “figured out a way to profitably produce cars in

the United States.” (P. 195) As Mulally put it, “Working together always works. It always works. Everybody

has to be on the team. They have to be interdependent with one another.” (P. 195)

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Issue 8

Part IV – Letting Go 1. “The Navy is the only service that uses the acronym UNODIR

(Unless Otherwise DIRected), by which a commanding officer

informs the boss of a proposed course of action, and only if the

boss overrides it will it not be taken. The subordinate is informing

the boss, not asking permission.” (P. 207)

2. “…our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that

could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant. I

came to realized that, in normal cases, I did not add tremendous

value, so I changed the process. I communicated across the

command my thought process on decisions like airstrikes, and told

them to make the call. Whoever made the decision, I was always

ultimately responsible, and more often than not those below me

reached the same conclusion I would have, but this way our team

would be empowered to do what was needed.” (P. 209)

3. Ritz-Carlton – “Instant guest pacification is the responsibility of

each employee.” Nordstrom – one rule: use good judgment in all

situations.

4. Empowerment should be done “only if the recipients of newfound

authority have the necessary sense of perspective to act on it

wisely.” (P. 216)

5. “Eyes On – Hands Off” “I was most effective when I supervised

processes – from intelligence operations to the prioritization of

resources – ensuring that we avoided the silos or bureaucracy that

doomed agility, rather than making individual operational

decisions.” (P. 218)

Lead like a gardener and not like a chess master

1. Gardeners plant and harvest, but more than anything, they

tend.” (P. 229)

2. “Regular visits by good gardeners are not pro forma gestures

of concern – they leave the crop stronger. So it is with

leaders.” (P. 229)

“For a soldier trained at West Point as an engineer, the idea that a

problem has different solutions on different days was fundamentally

disturbing. Yet that was the case. “

“A system requires shared consciousness before it can reap the

benefits of empowered execution.” (P. 244)

Efficiency, management,

organizational hierarchies

need to shift as they are no

match for the complexities of

our world today.

It ALWAYS comes down to

TRUST, knowing your core

purpose, and your WHY

To “see the system” requires

LOTS of COMMUNICATION

and cross pollination of teams

– SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS.

“Empowered execution

without shared consciousness

is dangerous.” (P. 244)

Think Navy – UNODIR; Ritz

Carlton; EYES ON – HANDS

OFF

Be a gardener, not a chess

master

Our old mental models will no

longer direct us to the

solutions necessary in the 21st

century

Action Items

- When did you have a team

experience that was

positive and memorable?

- Who is YOUR ‘enemy’ and

how do you need to

change to defeat them?

- How do you create ‘shared

consciousness’ in your

organization?

-

KEY TAKEAWAYS

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Volume 3

Issue 8

Calendar of Events September 23rd 8:00 AM – Wittigs Triggers – Marshall Goldsmith

October 28th 8:00 AM – Wittigs The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

November 18th 8:00 AM – Wittigs Scaling Up – Mastering Rockefeller Habits 2.0 - Harnish

December 16th 8:00 AM – Wittigs The Ideal Team Player – Patrick Lencioni

Friday September 23rd

Friday November 18th

Friday October 28th

In Triggers Goldsmith shows how we can overcome the trigger points in our lives,

and enact meaningful and lasting change. Change, no matter how urgent and clear

the need, is hard. Knowing what to do does not ensure that we will actually do it. We

are superior planners, says Goldsmith, but become inferior doers as our environment

exerts its influence through the course of our day. We forget our intentions. We

become tired, even depleted, and allow our discipline to drain down like water in a

leaky bucket. In Triggers, Goldsmith offers a simple “magic bullet” solution in the

form of daily self-monitoring, hinging around what he calls “active” questions. These

are questions that measure our effort, not our results. There’s a difference between

achieving and trying; we can’t always achieve a desired result, but anyone can try.

Goldsmith details the six “engaging questions” that can help us take responsibility for

our efforts to improve and help us recognize when we fall short. (Amazon review)

The Alchemist