I wish I had read “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World” earlier. It was published in 2015 and it is one of those platform books that has inspired a whole range of books on the same topics. It is a book about structure and how to deal with the speed and exaggerated impact of small players, such as start-ups and viral trends. It explains how a hierarchal, command-and-control structure no longer works.
Life and death
What makes this book special is that it is anchored in the military, where leadership is life and death. To summarise the book in a few sentences, organisations must be networked, not siloed, in order to succeed. Only small teams can reach the agility and adaptability that you need, combined with a shared consciousness.
To defeat a network, you have to become a network
Technological progress had overwhelmed our management doctrine. We are faced with a new wave of technologies defined by connectivity—the Internet, AI, IoT, the spread of cell phones, and the growth of social media—networks whose power lies in their emergent, nonlinear behaviours, not in the sum of their nodes.
You have to become a team of teams
The leader’s role becomes about creating a broader environment instead of command-and-control micromanaging, where perfection does not exist. Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative. It is no longer about planning and discipline but agility and innovation.
Unpredictable complexity
We are now in a world of unpredictable complexity, non-linear change, and constant butterfly effects. Everything is connected. Because of this density of linkages, complex systems fluctuate extremely and exhibit unpredictability. 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.
Shock absorption
Management thinker Gary Hamel writes that companies now find themselves in “ecosystems” and “value webs”. Nassim Taleb captures a similar concept with the term “antifragile systems.” Fragile systems, he argues, are those damaged by shocks; robust systems weather shocks; and antifragile systems, like immune systems, can benefit from shocks. In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure. In a complex world, disturbances are inevitable, making such a capacity to absorb shocks increasingly important.
Resilient and robust
Robustness is achieved by strengthening parts of the system (the pyramid); resilience results from linking elements that allow them to reconfigure or adapt in response to change or damage. To survive, we need to become both robust and resilient.
Reconfigure
The key lies in shifting our focus from predicting to reconfiguring. The chains of command that once guaranteed reliability now constrained your pace. Interdependence meant that silos were no longer an accurate reflection of the environment: events happening all over were now relevant to everyone. Cordoning off separate institutional entities only works if their operating theatres are not inextricably linked.
The structure is the strategy
Anyone who has ever played or watched sports knows that instinctive, cooperative adaptability is essential to high-performing teams. SEAL teams, Rangers, and Army Special Forces are among the finest adaptive teams in the world. Understanding what made special forces adaptable and how this differed from the structure and culture of your organisation is the key to your transformation. The structure—not the plan—is the strategy.
Context
In situations of unpredictability, organisations need to improvise. And to do that, the players on the field need to understand the broader context. One cannot understand a part of a system without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the whole. In a domain characterised by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key.
Shared consciousness
The cognitive “oneness”—the emergent intelligence—that exists in small teams can be achieved in larger organisations if such organisations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information. Fusing generalised awareness with specialised expertise. Shared consciousness has to become the cornerstone of your transformation. Only with deep, empathetic familiarity could these different units function so seamlessly together—put their lives on the line for one another. Systemic understanding and strong lateral connectivity—ground shared consciousness. Collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members and much more to do with the connections between them.
Idea flow
Collective intelligence stems from unsiloed dissonance. When the ideas flow. Idea flow is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate. By measuring idea flow, you can predict the labs’ creative output with an extraordinary 87.5% accuracy. See “Ideaflow: Why Creative Businesses Win”.
Loosen up
The future is loose. The organisation, as a rigidly reductionist mechanical beast, is an endangered species. The speed and interconnected nature of the new world in which we function have rendered it too stupid and slow to survive the onslaught of predators. Increased disruption and unpredictability necessitate increased agility and adaptability, which can be achieved only by loosening control:
- “Do the right thing” rather than “do things right”
- Push authority further down the chain of command.
- Focus on “empowered execution”.
- Ask, “What do you need?”
- Be a gardener, not a chess player
- Move from a controlling puppet master to an empathetic crafter of culture.
- Enable the subordinate components to function with “smart autonomy.”
- Focus on shaping an ecosystem.
- Communicate priorities and cultural expectations.
- Watch your tone of voice.
- Less is more.
- Repeat, repeat, repeat.
- Words matter.
- The most powerful instrument of communication is your own behaviour.
- Bad examples resonate even more powerfully than good ones.
- Make “Thank you” the most important phrase, and interest and enthusiasm as behaviours.
- Adopted “thinking out loud”.
- Be transparent.
- Fuse radical sharing of information with extreme decentralisation of decision-making authority.
- Become an interconnected neural network
- Empowerment without context will lead to havoc.
- Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous.
- Whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of interface failures.
No panacea
Finally, there is no such thing as an organisational panacea—the details will always be different for different people, places, and objectives—but the author believes that the team of teams model provides a good blueprint. I agree.