General S McChrystal > Quotes

“Harvard Business School teams expert Amy Edmondson explains, “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“we nurtured holistic awareness and tried to give everyone a stake in the fight. When we stopped holding them back—when we gave them the order simply to place their ship alongside that of the enemy—they thrived.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We dubbed this goal—this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence—shared consciousness, and it became the cornerstone of our transformation.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“an organization’s fitness—like that of an organism—cannot be assessed in a vacuum; it is a product of compatibility with the surrounding environment.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The two major determinants of idea flow, Pentland has found, are “engagement” within a small group like a team, a department, or a neighborhood, and “exploration”—frequent contact with other units. In other words: a team of teams.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In place of maps, whiteboards began to appear in our headquarters. Soon they were 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 multicolored words and drawings, erased, and then covered again. We did not draw static geographic features; we drew mutable relationships—the connections between things rather than the things themselves.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“First I needed to shift my focus from moving pieces on the board to shaping the ecosystem.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“the developments of recent years have led to a completely different—and less predictable—world.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“In the past twenty years, the costs of copying, sharing, transmitting, and manipulating data have dropped practically to zero.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“only the senior leader could drive the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation we needed. I could shape the culture and demand the ongoing conversation that shared consciousness required.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Mulally’s goal at Ford, like ours in Iraq, was to wire all his forces together to produce an emergent intelligence and create shared consciousness.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Under Taylor’s formulation, managers were both research scientists and architects of efficiency.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The Task Force had built systems that were very good at doing things right, but too inflexible to do the right thing.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The world of “many to many” has produced tremendous gains in some sectors, but these gains have come at a high cost in others—specifically those that require coordination at scale.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Our players could only see the ball once it entered their immediate territory, by which time it would likely be too late to react. With no knowledge of the constantly shifting perspective of their teammates, they would have no idea what to do with the ball once they got it. They were playing Krasnovian soccer.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Efficiency is no longer enough.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Where once an educated person might have assumed she was at least conversant with the relevant knowledge on a particular field of study, the explosion of information has rendered that assumption laughable. One solution to information overload is to increase a leader’s access to information, fitting him with two smartphones, multiple computer screens, and weekend updates. But the leader’s access to information is not the problem. We can work harder, but how much can we actually take in? Attention studies have shown that most people can thoughtfully consider only one thing at a time, and that multitasking dramatically degrades our ability to accomplish tasks requiring cognitive concentration. Given these limitations, the idea that a “heroic leader” enabled with an über-network of connectivity can simultaneously control a thousand marionettes on as many stages is unrealistic.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Reductionism lay at the heart of this drive for efficiency.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“The first was extreme, participatory transparency—the “systems 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.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World