What I learnt from Team of Teams
About this book
This book is written by ex US army general and the story is mainly how US adapt to the new war between the AQI and US intelligence units. It gives a good insight about the struggle and how it overcame to respond to the threats. It also outlined the history of wars, industry revolution and how the information and communication become so critical in information age.
Who should read
Initially, I was worried that a book about war. I personally prefer reading interesting stories, and this book turned out to be one of the good books to read. Not everyone of us are working in military or able to relate to war. But some of us work in big or small government or private corporations.
This book gives a good overview of what it feel to be working in a big organization with thousands of people with different cultures and backgrounds. If you are a person who is struggling with cross team communication, this book could be a good book to learn.
My random notes and thoughts
There is no particular orders, but I took some notes along the way so that I could discuss it with my mentor.
1. A new challenge in interconnected world
In place of maps, whiteboards began to appear in our headquarters. Soon they are everywhere. Standing around them, markers in hand, we thought out loud, diagramming what we knew, what we suspected, and what we did not know. We covered the bright white surfaces with multi-colored words and drawings, erased, and then covered again.
Whiteboards (pg 24)
As network theorist and military analyst John Arquilla put it: We killed “about 20 of Al Qaeda’s ‘number threes’ over the past decade, but everyone in the network is number three. To our way of thinking, an organization without a predictable methodology or clear chain of command wasn’t really an organization at all. But it didn’t. It continued to function as persistently and implacably as ever, demonstrating a coherence of purpose and strategy.
Whiteboards (pg 26)
At its heart, Nelson crafted an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands.
Managing chaos (pg 31)
2. Is it a science problem?
Taylor became fascinated by the contrast between the scientific precision of the machine in the shop and the remarkably unscientific processes that connected the human to these beautiful contraptions.
There was no explanation. “It was a tradition,” he wrote. “It had no scientific basis.” Each worker had developed his own system of hammering, melting, and hardening, of work and breaks, etc., which each believed to be superior to that of his colleagues. Because there was no forum for comparing their outputs, everyone could continue to operator under the belief that his own system was best. They could not all be right, Taylor thought – there must be one best way.
After two years of struggle, he had an epiphany: he would not make them work harder – he would show them that it could be done and then have everyone do exactly that.
The perfect step (pg 39)
The structures of our organizations reflect this ideal. Whether imbued with a “lazy worker” Theory X or a “motivated worker” Theory Y disposition, the “org charts” of most multiperson endeavors look pretty similar: a combination of specialized vertical columns (departments or divisions) and horizontal tiers that denote levels of authority, with the most powerful literally on top – the only tier that can access all columns.
Taylor’s system of reductionist planning lent itself naturally to a new generation of neat and tidy hierarchies. Peter Ducker argued that Taylor, more than Karl Marx, deserves a place in the pantheon of modern intellectual thought alongside Darwin and Freud.
We have other men paid for thinking (pg 47)
3. What went wrong actually?
Lorenz presented a paper, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” The phrase “the butterfly effect entered the world”
Being complex is different from being complicated. Things that are complicated may have many parts, but those parts are joined, in relatively simple ways. They ultimately can be broken down into a series of neat and tidy deterministic relations.
Complexity, on the other hand, occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically – the interdependencies that allow viruses and bank runs to spread; this is where things quickly become unpredictable.
Comets and cold fronts (pg 56)
Complex systems are fickle and volatile, presenting a broad range of possible outcomes; the type and sheer number of interactions prevent us from making accurate predictions. As a result, treating an ecosystem as though it were a machine with predictable trajectories from input to output is a dangerous folly.
Square peg, round hole (pg 67)
4. Will sufficient data save the day?
“Big Data”, data rich records can be wonderful for explaining how complex phenomena happened and how they might happen, but they can’t tell us when and where they will happen. For instance, data on the spread of virus can provide an insight into how contagion patterns look in our networked world, but that is very different from knowing exactly where the next outbreak will occur. Gaining understanding is not always the same as predicting.
Big data will not save us (pg 72)
“Resilience thinking” is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of complexity. In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again.
As environmentalists David Salt and Brian Walker explain in their book Resilience Thinking, “Humans are great optimizers. We look at everything around us, whether a cow, a house, or a share portfolio, and ask ourselves how we can manage it to get the best return. [but] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience.
The threat from behind (pg 79)
5. Trust is the ingredient
This is about more than the feel-good effects of “bonding”. It is done because teams whose members know one another deeply perform better. Any coach knows that these sorts of relationships are vital for success. A fighting force with good individual training, a solid handbook, and a sound strategy can execute a plan efficiently, and as long as the environment remains fairly static, odds of success are high. But a team fused by trust and purpose is much more potent. Such as group can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.
Get a swim buddy (pg 98)
The difference between command and control on the one hand, and adapt and collaborate on the other, was the difference between success and failure. The proliferation of teams across a diversity of complex environments – from special operations to trauma care – evidences their ability to thrive in the midst of the sort of challenge that our Task Force faced.
We have honed the traits of trust and purpose at the team level, but our organization at large was the complete opposite – it was a classic command.
Charm school (pg 114)
6. Something is still missing
Each team exhibited horizontal bonds of trust and a common sense of purpose, but the only external ties that mattered to each team ran vertically, connecting it to the command superstructure, just like workers on an assembly line. Meaningful relationships between teams were nonexistent.
In MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) structure, two VPs or two workers are designed to exist independently – they do not need to know each other, they do not even need to speak the same language.
MECE (pg 118)
The teams were operating independently – like workers in an efficient factory – while trying to keep pace with an interdependent environment. We all knew intuitively that intelligence gathered would almost certainly impact what our operators saw on the battlefield, and that battlefield details would almost certainly represent valuable context for intel analysis, but those elements of our organization were not communicating with each other.
We could try to solve it with a triage plan for relaying and processing data, but that would be like responding United 173 with a specific technical procedure for landing gear malfunction. At best, we would solve one particular problem; at worst we would increase paperwork.
The choke point existed not because of insufficient guidance from above, but because of a dearth of integration.
To fix the choke point, we needed to fix the management system and organizational culture that created it. As soon as we looked at our organization through the lens of the team structure – searching for weakness in horizontal connectivity rather than new possibilities for top-down planning. We referred to them as “blinks”.
Stratification and silos were hardwired throughout the Task Force. Although all our units resided on the same compound, most lived with their “kind”, some used different gyms, units controlled access to their planning areas, and each tribe had its own brand of standoffish superiority complex. Resources were shared reluctantly. Our forces lived a proximate but largely parallel existence.
Until we fixed the blinks, we would not be fully effective. We needed operational teams to gather, organize, and relay data to analysts. Simultaneously, we needed to disseminate the relevant takeaways to the thousands of people in our organization; and we needed administrative higher-ups to modify operations and allocate resources based on the analysis.
MECE (page 122)
7. Building trust at a large scale
Small teams are effective in large part because they are small – people know each other intimately and have clocked hundreds of hours with each other. In large organizations most people will inevitably be strangers to one another. In fact, the very traits that make teams great can often work to prevent their coherence into a broader whole.
How does one build a team with seven thousand swim buddies?
Commands of teams (pg 126)
Diminishing marginal returns – With most goods and services, each additional unit brings less value or gratification than the one before: a sandwich will bring a very hungry man great satisfaction. The second sandwich will bring some happiness, the third a little less, and the tenth will probably be difficult to eat and might make you sick. As it relates to manpower, this is know as the problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen.”
The point at which everyone else sucks (pg 126)
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually fall between 100 and 230. This limitation leads to a kind of tribal competitiveness.
The goal becomes to accomplish missions better than the team that bunks on the other side of the base, rather than to win the war. In other words, the magic of teams is a double-edged sword once organizations get big: some of the same traits that make an adaptable team great can make it incompatible with the structure it serves.
The point at which everyone else sucks (pg 127)
“As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate.” In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working … than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each … adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
The point at which everyone else sucks (pg 128)
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.
We don’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival. We needed to enable a team operating in an interdependent environment to understand the butterfly-effect ramifications of their work and make them aware of the other teams with whom they would have to cooperate in order to achieve strategic success.
Team of teams (pg 129)
Effective prediction has become increasingly difficult, and in many situations impossible. Continuing to function under the illusion that we can understand and foresee exactly wthat will be relevant to whom is hubris. It might feel safe, but it is the opposite. Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.
The “need to know” fallacy (pg 141)
8. Building a shared platform for everyone
NASA – all data were on display in a central control room that had links with automated displays to Apollo field centers. These rooms buzzed with activity, constantly receiving updates from contractors and teams and in turn providing information to them. As the utility of this information became evident, more and more engineers who were initially opposed started to come around.
The reason that it worked and that we got it ready on schedule was because we had everybody in that room that we needed to make a decision … it got to appoint where we could identify a problem in the morning and by the close of business we could solve it, get the money allocated, get the decisions made, and get things working.
This approach, contrary to reductionism, believes that one cannot understand a part of system without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the whole. It was the organizational manifestation of this insight that imbued NASA with the adaptive, emergent intelligence it needed to put a man on the moon.
New metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented (pg 149)
Consider a doctor and her education. Doctors come in many varieties – pediatricians, ENTs, radiologists, etc, yet while in medical school, all undergo the same rigorous overview of the way the human body works. Because the human body is not a set of independent elements, but a system of interdependent elements, you need to understand how the metabolism of sugar works in order to understand how diabetes can cause the death of issue in fingers.
Sets and systems (pg 152)
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. At Balad we needed a space that facilitated not the orderly, machine like flow of paperwork, but the erratic, networked flow of ideas – an architecture designed not for separation, but for the merging of worlds. We weren’t the only ones to be trying this – there was a growing movement in the private sector to organize offices for better cooperation, too.
In Silicon Valley, Google, Facebook, and other titans, as well as countless start-ups, use open plans that put different teams and different rungs of management in the same space.
Brains out of the footlocker (pg 159)
9. Mistrust, Doubt and Leak
The O&I, as it was commonly called, is standard military practice: a regular meeting held by the leadership of a given command to integrate everything the command is doing with everything it knows.
In early days, only the CIA liaison’s seat was occupied. Intuitively, we knew that if we could generate enough success on the battlefield, others would want to participate. The problem was how to get their participation up front. We needed to bind everyone into a single enterprise, but we had no explicit authority to do so.
One partner agency offered the same response every day for the first year of our experiment: “Nothing new to report on our end.”
In time, people came to appreciate the value of systematic understanding. O&I attendance grew as the quality of the information and interaction grew. Eventually, we had seven thousand people attending almost daily for up to two hours.
The O&I, pushback, success (pg 168)
Massive leaks are not an inevitable consequence of the current level of information sharing, but even if they were, the benefits vastly outweigh the potential costs. The sharing of information within US intelligence community since 9/11 has saved many lives and done far more good than the damage from incidents like the Manning and Snowden leaks has done harm.
What about wikileaks? (pg 171)
9. Forced Exchange
One of the most controversial moves was our embedding program, an exchange system we began in late 2003 in which we would take an individual from one team – say, an Army Special Forces operator – and assign him to a different part of our force for six months – a team of SEALs, for example, or a group of analysts. Our hope was that, by allowing our operators to see how the war looked from inside other groups, and by building personal relationships, we could build between teams some of the fluency that traditionally exists within teams.
Predictably, initial resistance was intense. “Our teams train in entirely different ways,” I was informed.
Although it was a “forced” initiative, once the mandate was in place, elite units were naturally incentivize to send their best operators and leaders. Over time, he would also begin to see some of the positives of the alternative approach. As an added bonus, they would see their newfound friend as representative of the entire unit. When these operators returned to their home unit, their positive comments on the rival unit would spread, deepening the ties between teams. Slowly, we grew the bonds of trust needed for us to overcome our Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Walk a mile in an analyst’s shoe (pg 177)
When asking for LNO nominations to fill critical positions, we used two criteria:
(1) if it doesn’t pain you to give the person up, pick someone else
(2) if it is not someone whose voice you’ll recognize when they call you at home at 2am, pick someone else.
Previously, we might have made decisions based on rank, position, or where people wanted to go in their careers. But to get this right, Personal qualities trumped everything else.
Walk a mile in an analyst’s shoe (pg 178)
10. Two essential ingredients
Fostering such engagement is more easily said than done. Almost every company has posters and slogans urging employees to “work together”, but simply telling people to “communicate” is the equivalent of Taylor’s telling his workers to “do things faster”, and stopping there.
It is necessary, we found, to forcibly dismantle the old system and replace it with an entirely new managerial architecture. Our new architecture was shared consciousness, and it consisted of two elements.
The first was extreme, participatory transparency – the “system management” of NASA that we mimicked with our O&I forums and our open physical space. This allowed all participants to have a holistic awareness equivalent to the contextual awareness of purpose we already knew at a team level.
The second was the creation of strong internal connectivity across teams – something we achieved with our embedding and liaison programs. This mirrored the trust that enabled our small teams to function.
Decentralized operations with coordinated control (pg 197)
11. Mindset shift for the leader
In short, when they can see what’s going on, leaders understandably want to control what’s going on. Empowerment tends to be a tool of last resort. We can call this tethering of visibility to control the “Perry Principle”.
Taylor’s contemporary Henri Fayol enumerated the “five functions of management” as “planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling”. The last three become much easier to attend to when you have more information, creating a cycle of seeking ways to gather and centralize more information in order to push more and more efficient directives to the organization. The function of workers is to feed this cycle and await the next commands.
Today’s managers have access to all kinds of information their employees that they lacked just a few years ago. Automated systems at restaurants monitor waiters’ movements, tracking every ticket, dish, and drink, searching for patterns that suggest efficacy as well as those correlated to theft. All of this enables the habitual centralization of power.
All under the guns of his ships (pg 208)
I begin to reconsider the nature of my role as a leader. The wait for my approval is not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.
The practice of relaying decisions up and down the chain of command is premised on the assumption that the organization has the time to do so, or, more accurately, that the cost of the delay is less than the cost of the errors produced by removing a supervisor. The risk of acting too slowly were higher than the risks of letting competent people make judgement calls.
All under the guns of his ships (pg 209)
A piece of this is the psychology of decision making. An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome. Another factor was that, for all our technology, our leadership simply did not understand what was happening on the ground as thoroughly as the people who were there.
The key reason for the success of empowered execution lay in what had come before it: the foundation of shared consciousness.
All under the guns of his ships (pg 215)
12. Becoming a gardener
From a distance, the Task Force’s fight in Iraq in 2004 looked like chess. But the chess metaphor quickly broke down. The enemy could move multiple pieces simultaneously or pummel us in quick succession, without waiting respectfully for our next move.
Years later as Task Force commander, I began to view effective leadership in the new environment as more akin to gardening than chess. The move-by-move control that seemed natural to military operations proved less effective than nurturing the organization – its structure, processes, and culture – to function with “smart autonomy”. It allowed those forces to be enabled with a constant flow of “shared consciousness” from across the force, and it freed them to execute actions in pursuit of the overall strategy as best they saw fit.
Chess master to gardener: the leaders we now need (pg 225)
Leading as a gardener meant that I kept the Task Force focused on clearly articulated priorities by explicitly talking about them and by leading by example. It was impossible to separate my words and my actions, because the force naturally listened to what I said, but measured the importance of my message by observing what I actually did.
The gardener (pg 226)
For the same reasons, the O&I was never canceled and attendance was mandatory. I felt that if the O&I was seen as an occasional event not always attended by key leaders, it would unravel.
I wanted the O&I to be a balance of reporting key information and active interaction. That didn’t come naturally, particularly across a digital medium. The participants came from different organizational cultures, were thousands of miles apart, and had never met in person. Getting candor under those conditions was not easy, but we made it work. When necessary, I would pre-plan questions or comments and plant them with trusted partners to help demonstrate to everyone what I wanted the O&I to be.
The gardener (pg 227)
When their turns came and their faces suddenly filled the screen I made it a point to greet them by their first name, which often caused them to smile in evident surprise. They were eight levels down the chain of command and many miles away – how did the commanding general know their names? Simple: I had my team prepare a “cheat sheet” of the day’s planned briefer so I could make one small gesture to put them at ease.
At the conclusion, I’d ask a question. The answer might not be deeply important, and often I knew it beforehand, but I wanted to show that I had listened and that their work mattered.
For a young member, even if the brief had been terrible, I would compliment the report. Others would later offer them advice on how to improve – but it didn’t need to come from me in front of thousands of people. When we did it right, the people left the O&I more confident about, committed to, and personally invested in our effort.
The gardener (pg 228)
I adapted a practice I called “thinking out loud”, in which I would summarize what I’d heard, describe how I processed the information and outline my first thoughts on what we should consider doing about it. After I did that, in a pointed effort to reinforce empowered execution, I would often ask the subordinate to consider what action might be appropriate and tell me what he or she planned to do.
Thinking out loud can be a frightening prospect for a senior leader. Ignorance on a subject is quickly obvious, and efforts to fake expertise are embarrassingly ineffective. I found, however, that asking seemingly stupid questions or admitting openly “I don’t know” was accepted, even appreciated.
The gardener (pg 229)
Conclusion
Leading a team of teams is a formidable task. The heroic “hands-on” leader who relies on personal competence and will power will be overwhelmed by accelerating speed, swelling complexity and interdependence. We must learn to lead differently.
Creating and leading a truly adaptive organization requires building, leading and maintaining a culture that is flexible but also durable.
The primary responsibility of the new leader is to maintain a holistic, big picture view, avoiding a reductionist approach, no matter how tempting micromanaging may be.
As the world becomes more complex, the importance of leaders will only increase. Even AIs are unlikely to provide the will, moral courage and compassion that good leaders offer. Persuading teams to network with other teams will always be difficult, but this is a culture that can be planted and if maintained, can flourish.