We first met in a time of great uncertainty. It was 2004, and our initial expectations of rapid victory in Iraq and Afghanistan had faded into reluctant recognitions that the fight ahead would be long, brutal, and unlike anything we’d seen before.
In many ways we were very different. I was a fifty-year-old soldier just completing my first of what would ultimately be almost five years commanding an elite counterterrorist Task Force. Chris Fussell was a Navy SEAL in this organization and was twenty years younger than me. We crossed paths for only an hour at his small team’s outpost along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but even in this brief initial encounter I recognized a reflective nature that struck me.
We would meet again, less than a year later, in Iraq. Chris had moved up in the organization and was serving as an operations officer at one of the three regional headquarters our Task Force had in the country. In this context he was responsible for reallocating resources, staying attuned to operations, and sharing intelligence. In such a managerial role it was natural, and almost expected, to become ruled by the tyranny of the here and now. Chris was certainly masterful in his conduct of the current fight, but it was his uncommon curiosity about the larger how behind it all that stood out to me.
Chris’s constant questioning revealed a unique interest in the design and experimentation taking place at the Task Force’s strategic level. For example, he wanted to know how we managed the decentralized decision making that he and his peers had become accustomed to; how we maintained awareness of, but did not impede, the resourcing decisions taking place at the small unit level; and where I saw the broadest gulfs in information sharing between our organization and outside partners. His queries were informed, but in the context of the overwhelming tasks of the daily fight he was orchestrating, to find the time and willpower even to ask them was notable.
Chris was therefore a natural selection to be the aide-de-camp for my final year in command. If he truly wanted to see behind the organization’s strategic curtain, a year at my side in Iraq would be a grand opportunity to round out his learning. His primary assigned duty was to manage the logistics of the Task Force’s senior leadership team, and ensure that we were spending our time in accordance with the organization’s priorities around the world. In addition, I advised him at the outset to exploit this opportunity—to actively learn how it all actually worked.
And that is what he did. For a year Chris took it all in, observing the nuances of our organization’s process and structure with keen interest. He then went on to graduate school and, still not satisfied, wrote a master’s thesis on how our Task Force had organized our intelligence fusion centers around the globe to identify and capture best practices throughout our teams.
So perhaps it was inevitable that over time Chris and I found ourselves connected after the war by a shared fascination—almost a fixation—on the disorienting new phenomenon of complexity that we’d faced on the battlefield, and could see across almost every facet of life now that we’d left the service.
In the autumn of 2010, six years after we’d first met, Chris and I sat at my kitchen table and talked about how the special operations community had made such a significant organizational leap in the post-9/11 years.
“If this doesn’t get captured in a book, history will get it wrong,” he said. By “it” Chris meant how our Task Force had adapted to an insurgency in Iraq that was a technologically enabled, interconnected network of highly autonomous individual actors. More akin to mobs or violent gangs than a traditional understanding of insurgency would have led us to believe, its membership was motivated by an extremist ideology to foster unconstrained violence wherever possible. To combat the speed and effectiveness of this type of adversary, we’d shifted, reluctantly, from a masterfully constructed, purpose-built, centralized structure to a decentralized but deeply interconnected entity whose distributed teams could move with the fluidity of a network while retaining the focus and stability of a bureaucracy.
At the time of that conversation, I was just beginning to write my memoirs, which would consume my efforts for the next two years. But underlying that biographical work was an alternate story, the one that I most wanted to tell, and in the spring of 2013, we told it via the writing project that Chris had first suggested: Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which would be released in the spring of 2015, reflecting years of thought and extensive research on the topic we’d first considered at my bland kitchen table.
Team of Teams met our intent to lay out a case about environmental change in modern competitive realms, and deeply resonated with leaders across a wide spectrum of organizations. The consistent “You described my organization’s problem” type of feedback we received reinforced our conclusions that the challenge the Task Force had encountered was not unique to combat but rather reflected the common conditions of our era.
The hierarchical organizational models and leadership norms that we all grew up in were designed for a different type of environment from what we’re now all facing. Organizations must adapt to the realities of the information age or face existential risk. Our “team of teams” approach, with its emphasis on shared consciousness and empowered execution, was an important framing and gave language to this universal threat.
Though we didn’t call it such at the time of the Iraq war, a team of teams is an operating framework for an organization that we’ve seen work on the battlefield and in industry. It is grounded in the creation of true strategic alignment across an organization; executing disciplined, broad, and transparent communications; and decentralizing decision making to the edge of the enterprise. It allows traditional organizations to retain the strength of their bureaucracy while moving with the speed of a network.
But Team of Teams was not written to address a possibly more important follow-up question: How, exactly, do you create an adaptable organization?
When we realized that there was a clear need for a book to address the specific practices and behaviors that made our transition possible, I immediately thought that the right person to take on this project was Chris.
Chris has been more acutely focused on the how of our organizational transformation than anyone else I knew. Sure, other officers might have led at higher levels, had more intense battlefield stories, or saw parts of the war that Chris did not; but in my many years within the special operations community, I didn’t know a single leader who was more intellectually curious as to what was practically taking place at an organization-wide level, across all tiers and different perspectives that our hierarchy offered.
Of equal importance, Chris will offer a view on what behaviors a team of teams model requires from its leaders if it is to truly thrive. In the Task Force, we had not only to create a new series of practices but also to leverage that model through the communalization of new cultural norms and behaviors.
Among the Task Force’s senior leadership, it was obvious that the various parts of the organization were, in the early days of the fight, both unable and unwilling to connect and collaborate. We had to redesign ourselves and create not only the capability to connect, but the willingness to create a new culture, one populated by exceptionally powerful tribes. Without both aspects in place, the effort to establish either one is redundant.
The pages ahead offer, in my opinion, a critical response to one of the most difficult questions that the world is currently wrestling with—how must our models for leading and managing large systems evolve? Chris and his coauthor, Charlie Goodyear, a brilliant young Yale graduate, map the course toward a hybrid structure that is, more through disciplined trial and error than through academic forethought, what we eventually created within the Task Force.
I believe that organizations hoping to survive in today’s increasingly complex world will need to (as we did on the battlefield) retain the strength and stability of a hierarchy while simultaneously adopting the speed and decentralization of a network—as well as the behaviors necessary for them to function.
If you’re a leader looking to build your own team of teams, Chris and Charlie offer you a road map.
—General Stanley McChrystal (Ret.), March 2017