Transcript - THE LEADERSHIP LIST podcast - Stanley McChrystal - Team of Teams - Episode 03

UNITED STATES

06.17.2020

Story by George Maurer 

American Forces Network Radio (AFN Radio)

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Full Transcript:

(upbeat music) Tony Scott (announcer) - The American Forces Radio Network presents, The Leadership List.
George Maurer (host) - Welcome to this edition of The Leadership List, interviews with authors from command professional reading lists, because great leaders never stop learning. I'm your host George Maurer, welcome. Today from the Professional Reading Program of the Army Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, and the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a book titled, "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World." Authored by retired Army General Stanley McChrystal, and co-authored by Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fusslle. My guest today is General McChrystal, welcome sir.
General Stanley McChrystal - Thanks for having me, George, I appreciate it.
(upbeat music) Maurer - Looking ahead at today's episode, adaptability is more important than efficiency in the 21st century, everybody else sucks, and can the flap of butterfly wings in Brazil, set off a tornado in Texas? General, you laid out a basic five-step plan for leadership in a complex world, which starts at the problem, and wraps up with a solution. It's a plan that can be used regardless of the field in which one may work, and we'll touch upon the five steps in a bit of a meandering way, but we'll wrap everything up very nicely at the end, sound good?
McChrystal - Sounds great.
(upbeat music) Tony Scott - Leadership tip from "Team of Teams", The Proteus Problem.
Maurer - Proteus, the Greek god of the sea, refers to the liquid qualities of water, if I'm reading it correctly. Think of scooping up water in your hands, and no matter how hard you try, it eventually drips out between your fingers. When you took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, it was obvious to you conventional military tactics were not working against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI. They were able to attack and disappear into the

local population before we could respond effectively. Explain how AQI was different than any enemy the United States had faced before.
McChrystal - Certainly, when we think about unconventional warfare, guerrilla forces or terrorists, we always think about hit-and-run tactics, or things that are different from conventional warfare. But what I'm talking about here is departure from what had been to that point, known about unconventional warfare. So in reality, all the terrorist groups in history, had been formed on sort of a efficiency-based model, think of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy, General Motors sort of an idea. And while that seems strange to people that aren't in the counter-terrorism business, it makes a lot of sense to people who'd been focused on it, because you typically had a strong leader, or a founder, tight procedures to protect security, ways to train people, and then the ability to do precise operations which were important for a terrorist group. And that's what we'd seen traditionally in all terrorist groups, to include Al-Qaeda, which was formed in 1988, in Pakistan. What we ran into, was in 2003, there emerged something that became known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Same name as Al-Qaeda, but the reality was a completely different DNA. And you say, "Well okay, we got a different thing, "why does that matter?" It matters because our counter-terrorist forces were designed to take on the more traditional kind of terrorist threat, and we were, quite honestly, formed on traditional models to be efficient, predictable, purpose-built. And yet Al-Qaeda emerged, and it seemed to have little or no structure. And when we looked at it at first, we said, "Well how could they possibly be effective in that way?" But what they did was they leveraged information technology, which had emerged in the 15 years since the birth of Al- Qaeda itself, and they leveraged that to give them a different mode of operating, different qualities. So as a consequence, they were loosely connected, but they were very well focused together on intent. They were wickedly fast, they learned all the time, and at the heart they were adaptable, they adapted to the conditions and the problem, in each place, and each time. And we weren't ready for that.
Maurer - One interesting comparison you make is between the complicated and the complex. AQI certainly represents the complex. Human beings like structure, we like when things are comfortable, easily recognized, and we can see patterns, predict outcomes. The merely complicated allows for some structure, but the complex is a whole other animal. Please explain the difference.
McChrystal - Absolutely, it really comes from something called the Cynefin Model, which goes from simple, where things don't change much over time, and you do the same thing over time, to complicated, to complex, and then chaotic. But for today we'll compare complicated and complex. In a complicated world, think about the most difficult jigsaw puzzle you ever had to put together, or a model airplane you were making as a young child, or a building being built. They seem daunting at first, but you realize, that if you study the problem enough, if you bring the right expertise, it can be dissected, it can be ultimately understood, and the problem can be solved. It may take a while, but it can be solved. And if something's complicated, how it operates can be predicted. It may take a while to figure out, but it can be predicted.
Maurer - Okay.
McChrystal - Complex is different entirely. What it means is, in a complex environment you have more variables and the velocity is greater, so the reality is it's impossible to predict something, you can only judge it in the rear-view mirror, after the fact. When something's impossible to predict, suddenly there is no complicated structure or process that can solve that problem. Instead it takes an approach where you have to step out, try things, and iterate in response to what you are finding in what is a constantly changing environment. That requires an organization to be less purpose-built and focused, and predictable, and much more adaptable. Because in reality, you're always shooting at moving targets. We're not set up for that, we're not set up for that organizationally. The Industrial Revolution, under Frederick Winslow Taylor and others, didn't create organizations for that. And to be quite honest,

most of us were trained in a complicated world because it's more comfortable. We can at some point master it. In a complex world, you adapt to it.
Maurer - Now in a complex world, can the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil, really cause a tornado in Texas?
McChyrstal - They can, and of course that comes from the great analogy of something very small could potentially have effects that we can never predict, because as variables in the world keep changing, who knows what the tiniest thing can cause next. It's way too complex for us to try to map that out, but the reality is we know that even smaller, seemingly unrelated things, can have disproportionate effects in a different place. Once we accept that reality, and we can't control the flapping of every butterfly’s wings, then what we need to learn is how to deal with hurricanes, in Texas or anywhere.
Maurer - When you first stepped into your role as commander of the Special Operations Task Force, you were obviously faced with an incredibly daunting task, you needed to essentially re-invent modern warfare, to take on this brand new enemy. What were your thoughts at the time?
Maurer - Well George, I would love to say that I stepped back and I understood these environmental differences, and I came to the conclusion that we had to do that, but that's not how it happened at all. The reality was, I was trained in a complicated environment, I, like the organization I was part of, the Counter Terrorist Task Force, I was designed to be predictable, I was designed to be efficient, I was designed to do things in a complicated way, to complicated problems. But as we started to go after Al-Qaeda in Iraq using traditional methods, and expecting traditional outcomes, we found that didn't work. It took us a while to understand that the basic nature of Al-Qaeda in Iraq was different. Not because they had intentionally designed it that way, but because the emergence of information technology had just caused them to evolve that way. And so what we made the decision is, we had to win. We didn't have a clear roadmap, we didn't even have a real good appreciation, except for the fact that we knew things had changed, we knew that our traditional methods were not working. And therefore, instead of being able to map out a clever path from point A to point B, B being victory over the enemy, we were gonna have to iterate, and that was gonna be an indirect course. As we go one way, we make mistakes, we learn from 'em, we adjust. And we came to understand that we were gonna feel our way along, and that required us to change our mindset, instead of trying to make what we had always tried to perfect in our processes and our culture, and our techniques, instead of trying to perfect and make them work, what we had to do, was do what works, and learn from that, and then keep changing. There's an old adage I was taught as a brand new lieutenant that said, if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid. (laughing) And never did anything prove more true. And so we all had to step back, put our egos, you know, in our rucksacks, because when you're in a learning mode, you're not the person who knows everything. And the entire organization just had to take this approach that says, we are gonna figure this out, and gonna probably do it, making a lot of mistakes en route.
Maurer - Something you already touched upon, for the last 100 years or so, something called the Principles of Scientific Management, set up leaders to gather data, and then make decisions based on that data. In your book, you discussed Fredrick Winslow Taylor, who is considered the father of Scientific Management. Break down a process into its individual parts, and then figure out the best way to accomplish each part. And this leads to a very efficient process, the Henry Ford assembly line, for example, very predictable solutions to very predictable problems. What were some of the challenges you faced in convincing others to move away from this world of the predictable?
McChrystal - Absolutely, I had heard Fredrick Winslow Taylor's name when I was younger studying, but I wasn't really familiar. But in reality, all of us were products of his thinking, and his colleagues who wrote and studied about it. And really, as you described, Taylor tried to figure out the one best way to do each task, and then from there built processes that link together, and from there built organizational designs that most efficiently executed those

processes. And in a world where your requirement doesn't change rapidly, i.e. you're building the same product over time, you can create those processes, you can tighten up the procedures to be very efficient, and produce a repeatable action, or repeatable product very well. The military for a long time, has had to take thousands and thousands of young men and women, basically untrained in military things, train them up, and move them from point A to point B, which is a logistical masterpiece if done well, and get them to do difficult things on the battlefield, hopefully like an orchestra playing a symphony, very, very well. We all know that that's difficult to do, but that's the goal. To do that over time, what we did is we figured out the best solutions to problems, and we sort of bend those together as doctrine. The best way for a rifle squad to maneuver, for a tank platoon to go, and then when you get to higher levels, the best approaches to solving higher level tactical and operational problems. I remember reading that the German Staff College formed in middle of the 19th century used to have as a standard, if we give two staff officers the exact same information for a problem, we want them to produce the exact same solution to that problem. And almost mechanical in nature. The reality is we try to teach a military to do things a certain way, because for some reason, either historically or looking forward, we think that that will work. That only works if the problems that you are trying to go after fit into a certain range, and the capabilities of the organization that you have also match up with ability to execute that doctrine. So inside the military there was, it's almost a security blanket, and it's not to talk badly about ourselves as soldiers, but the reality is, if you have the right way to do something, the idea is if I follow doctrine, if I don't violate the nine principles of war, I'm probably in pretty good shape, is a bit comforting. The danger is, what if those don't work? What if that doctrine is not appropriate, or those principles of war just seem to elude us? How do we create a mindset that says what really matters is solving a problem, even in the way that seems entirely unconventional.
(upbeat music) Tony Scott - Leadership tip from "Team of Teams", from many, one.
Maurer - While Scientific Management was very effective at making some industries very successful, manufacturing for example, everyone gets very good at one piece of the overall process, but they also get trapped into their own individual silos, and silos is a term you used a lot in the book.
McChrystal - Sure.
Maurer - For example, I add this particular part to the frame of an automobile as it rolls past me, but I don't understand how my job affects those who come after me. For an organization like NASA, Scientific Management was a disaster. And not many people remember, NASA was at one time a national embarrassment, as you described it. We were getting killed in the space race with the Soviet Union in the early '60s. Once they employed something called Systems Management, everything changed. In Systems Management, everyone has their own piece of the puzzle, but they also understand the overall mission as well. Tell me how Systems Management helped turn NASA around.
McChrystal - Absolutely George, there's a concept called MECE, mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive, and if you think of a puzzle, those pieces may not touch each other except where they connect, but each part of the organization, each station on the assembly line, does their job in isolation, and then some brilliant plan puts them all together and they create the perfect product or outcome. What NASA learned was, you could take something, divide it that way, have all the pieces be done to, let's call it perfection, but when they come back together there's an organic nature to creating something like a space vehicle, and the reality is the smallest change in one thing affects all of the others...whether the pieces fit together. And so what they found was the idea of MECE didn't work because the problem is constantly changing. People are making an adjustment to one part on a space vehicle, and then you realize that the effect changes many other parts, may change the overall weight of the vehicle, might change the need for fuel, any number of things. And the only way they could solve the problem, without taking

forever, is to make everybody understand the entire entity, look at the picture of it and understand how that particular part of the contribution to it has to fit together. And so silos just don't work. You just can't iterate enough times for silos to work, and instead creating what we call shared consciousness, a broader contextual understanding of the wider, let's people operate extraordinarily more effectively. And also it produces a different mental approach to it, if you remember the great story about NASA, where I think President Kennedy goes to visit, and he runs into a janitor mopping the floor, and asks him what he's doing? And the guy says, "We're sending a man to the moon."
Maurer - Wow.
McChrystal - And so it's the idea that you're a part of a whole, that is the approach that's so powerful.
Maurer - That is a great story, and you're right, to feel a part of something bigger than one's self, is something that goes a long, long way. Now you discuss SEAL teams at length in your book, which is a huge surprise since you were the commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force.
McChrystal (laughs)
Maurer - Their effectiveness is greatly enhanced because they tap into the power of the team. They work together very well, there's great trust among the individual members, and this gives them the ability to overcome almost any obstacle. Something they would probably never be able to achieve if they were lead strictly by one individual who made all the decisions. Please explain this dynamic.
McChrystal - Sure, in a team, any high-performing team, whether it's a sports team, a SEAL team, or another, what you typically produce is an admiration for the competence of the other people in the organization, a sense of common purpose to what you're doing, a trust that they are there for your welfare, and; therefore, the outcome of the team. So you start with a foundation that allows the team to build, and then on top of that, they take on shared tasks, they often go through common challenging experiences to build confidence and bonds between them, and they develop this almost organic way of operating, so if one person throws a glass ball up in the air, they're confident someone else is going to catch it, because they just interacted so many times, that they start to understand one another. It's in their interest to do that, and we will automatically do that. It takes a different kind of leadership, because it's hard to be commanding control or directive in that kind of environment, because you're asking for more buy-in from members of this small team. And they produce extraordinary outcomes. The problem is, small teams tend to be cohesive and insular, and almost tribal in nature, because they get so close, they start to develop a culture that can be insular from outside cultures. And so small teams like that don't always learn as well from the outside, and they don't always interact well with other small teams or other individuals, and so creating an effective larger team from small teams, is a pretty interesting challenge.
Maurer - When you're good at something, there's naturally a little bit of competition involved, just as you mentioned, and that's not a bad thing, competing makes us better, even when our competition includes our fellow service members. In that situation it's quite normal to develop an attitude that says everybody else sucks. (laughing) I love that, by the way. Unpack that for me, how do you get groups who all think the other group sucks, to work together, to become a team?
McChrystal - Yeah, if you start with the basic dynamic that creates a sense of being an elite organization, you're asking people to ask more of themselves to be part of that, to live to a higher standard. And typically, you compare that higher standard to everyone else, so if the organization achieves that and lives that, then they almost naturally start to think of everyone else as not as good as they are. We got the SEAL with that great quote that says there's a point at which everyone else sucks, what he's saying is, in my small team they are my family, in my platoon, they are

my extended family. There's a point at which outside of that, people are not my family, they're not trusted, and therefore, they suck. It's not evil, it's natural. It's almost part of being elite means you've got to achieve a higher standard than other people may hold themselves to. The challenge is, when you're taking these multiple elite organizations, where there's a natural competition between, as you talked about, and a desire to achieve a very high standard, they will try to achieve the most, to score the most points, to do the most missions, to capture the most terrorists, whatever it is the metric is, and to a certain degree, the willingness to subordinate their group's outcome to the greater good, doesn't come naturally. What we've found is, you need to do a number of things. The first is you try to build links between the organizations so that some of the disdain they have for other organizations naturally, isn't based on fact. You undercut that by giving them interaction, and when you start to know people you start to respect them. And then the second part is you start to not make it all about an individual or a small team's batting average. You know, you say it's great if you have a batting average, but it only matters if the team wins the games. And so you try to pull them up and say we are really trying to send a man to the moon, so you need to mop the floor as best you can, that is just as important as the person that does the software for the lunar lander, because if you don't do all of those, nobody gets to the moon. And it takes a very intentional and constant effort both at messaging and coordination, and making people feel like a part of it, to make that work.
Maurer - And that is where you came up with the phrase, Team of Teams. You mentioned in the book, when you grow the size of these teams, they tend to lose that dynamic rather quickly. What special things did you do to ensure that camaraderie remained among the smaller groups, yet they were still able to work with many other groups, to become a team of teams?
McChrystal - Yeah, this is tricky. If you think of the US Army, for example, and if you ask somebody what they are, they won't typically say "I'm a US Army solder." They will says I'm a cavalryman, I'm an artilleryman, I'm a dogface soldier. They tend to identify with subgroups. And that's because there's a certain element to a smaller size entity that's easier to identify with, and of course a lot of the subgroups have different cultures, and so how you get them to sort of simultaneously identify with two things, the subgroup that they're part of, but the larger element, and what we've found is to do that, you have to tie them to the mission of the larger element. When we were in the fight, we didn't have a lot of people go I am a JSOC soldier, automatically they always tended to go with subgroups if they were identifying themselves, but when they talked about the mission, they could talk about trying to destroy Al-Qaeda in Iraq. That was a mission they could get their mind around, and you had to keep pointing people to that.
(upbeat music) Tony Scott - Leadership tip from "Team of Teams", sharing.
Maurer - Getting these groups to work together required something you already touched upon, transparent communications and shared consciousness, and it all sounds very "Luke Skywalker" kind of stuff. (laughing) What exactly is that?
McChrystal - What you want is people to understand as much about the big picture as possible. But if you think about the inside of many organizations, but particularly the military, there's always been this aversion to sharing information. Part of it was security. If something's secret, you need to know if the person that wants the information has a true need to know. Beyond classified information, there just is a certain power in knowing. If you ever ran an organization where the operations officer or somebody, knew the schedule, they were pretty important people, and sometimes they took great pride in knowing more than everybody else about what's happening next week. When in reality their function is to make sure everybody knows what's happening next week. What we tried to do in the organization was create this idea of shared consciousness. We used to tongue-in-cheek say, we want everybody to know everything, all the time. Now obviously that's impossible, but the reality is we wanted people to know vastly more than they ever did before. And we wanted them to have a contextual understanding of the big picture, shared

consciousness, so that if they understood that, they could make decisions on how to contribute to the overall organizational mission without specific orders. So what that means is if people see the big picture, they know the strategy, they know what's happening, they can take action without an order, which pushes decision making down to what we would call empowered execution, down much closer to the problem, and let's the organization be much faster, and actually much more effective, because people closer to a problem can often decide what should happen and when.
Maurer - And obviously that required a huge culture change with the folks you were working with. What kind of resistance did you run into when you were trying to install this new line of open communication?
McChrystal - Sure, I mean, if you talk about the classified information, it started with just habit, you just habitually didn't share classified information.
Maurer - Sure, loose lips sink ships, for example?
McChrystal - That's right, I mean it's just habit. In 2007 we captured many of Al-Qaeda in Iraq's personnel records, and we did it on a raid that was west of Mosul, and when we captured their personnel records, I remember my intelligence officer was telling me how valuable they were, and I opined if we could share them with the countries of origin for these foreign fighters, they could do something about it, but that's classified information. And I was reminded by my intel officer, in fact, I, as a capturing organization, had classification authority. So I said, "You mean I could make them unclassified?" and he said, "You could." And we would have never dreamed of doing this a few years before, because we captured secrets from the enemy, but the reality, the enemy knew their personnel records, so we weren't divulging anything to them, and they actually knew that we had done that raid, so they probably knew we captured them. And so we declassified and we shared them, there was lot of consternation across the intelligence community about that, but it turned out to be very, very effective. Now in retrospect, it was a common sense thing to do. In the moment, it seemed bold. And that sort of highlights what our culture was. And then the idea that we would share information on a real-time basis about our operations, seems to be dangerous to our force, which obviously taken or done incorrectly, would be. But what we found is the war was going so fast, that most information that had been carefully controlled in the future, had a very limited lifespan, meaning 24 hours later it wouldn't matter if the enemy knew it, because we'd have already done something about it. So the reality was we changed how we thought about that, we accepted a little bit of risk, but the idea is we got so much more power out of people, had a much greater understanding of what was happening.
Maurer - Sure, in your book, you have a chapter called, "Getting the brains out of the footlocker." Referring to something your dad used to say to you when you were a kid, and you did something stupid, as you called it, he would say, "Put your brains in the footlocker, I'll do the thinking around here." And in Iraq, as you described with your intelligence officer, you went against this advice. You wanted all of the brains out of all the footlockers. How does that help a leader in any given situation?
McChrystal - Absolutely, and my father was always joking when he said that, but the reality is if we think of organizations we've been a part of, information was sent up to the highest levels where the smart people were, and the directives would come down, because they quite honestly, had the best conduits of information up to headquarters, and then they could make decisions, and we really couldn't judge them, because we didn't have access to all that information, to know whether it made sense or not. I remember being told years ago that the US Navy was an organization designed by geniuses to be executed by idiots. (laughing) And yet if you go to the deck of a modern aircraft carrier, where you got 18, 19 year old kids doing amazing stuff, they're making a lot of decisions out there.

Maurer - Sure.
McChrystal - And so the reality was, there were two parts to this getting the brains out of the footlocker. The first was information technology. It unlocked our ability to do this like never before. Suddenly instead of being hooked to landlines like during the First World War, limited number of radios during the Second or later, now suddenly we could connect everybody all the time, so there was no longer a technical reason why we couldn't get just about every piece of information we knew, available to every member of the organization. Really, the ability to get the brains out of the footlocker pinned upon two things. The first was information technology. You know, historically in the days of landlines or couriers, information went to the headquarters or the C-suite, because practically that's the only place you could get it, and put it together, get a fairly complete picture, and then issue directives. So everybody out executing was reliant upon the people at the head-shed, to know what's best and tell everyone what to do. After about 2002 and '03, suddenly we had the ability, leveraging information technology to get all of the information we had available to everyone, all the time. And that was an extraordinary change. But the other bigger part of that was a cultural change. Because the physical ability to get information to people doesn't always come with the cultural comfort in letting everybody have all the information. Because if you think about it, when we were at most senior levels before, and we had a monopoly on the information, if we made a decision, nobody else could really second- guess us in the moment, because we could say well we have information you don't have. And whether we said that or not, we implied that. Suddenly if you can get information across the organization, culturally, everybody can sort of judge every decision all the time. Now that's not a negative, because what it really lets you do is give people that picture, then push down the authority to make decisions to a lower level, because they have all the information that used to only be resident at higher headquarters, and they could act with incredible effectiveness, closer to the problem.
(upbeat music) - Leadership tip from "Team of Teams", letting go.
Maurer - We've all worked for leaders who want to be intimately involved with every decision made under their authority in their command, and in today's world, so much is happening all at the same time, it's just overwhelming trying to stay on top of everything. In order to adapt to the constant change you faced against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, you used something called empowered execution. Give me an example of empowered execution when it was an effective solution for you.
McChrystal - Yeah, I would really describe it as eyes-on and hands-off leadership. There's an interesting tension that has grown with the rise of information technology. In the days in which the information really only went to the headquarters, the decisions had to come from headquarters, and so they did.
Maurer - Sure.
McChrystal - Suddenly with information technology, you can get the information out to everybody, you empower the lower levels that are closer to the problem, to have the information necessary to make decisions. It's funny, at the same time you have the technology to decentralize, you have the technology that encourages micromanagement. I used to be able to sit in one of our command centers, we had a number of them, we called them Situation Awareness rooms, where there would be 10 or 12 big flat-panel screens, and I could watch, from usually from an unmanned aerial vehicle, full-motion video, I could watch every operation as it was being planned and then executed. And through our secure internet, we had our FM radio communications piped in, so technically I could watch every operation from a bird's-eye view, and listen to and talk to the tactical communications on the ground. So you see a team get off helicopters and start to maneuver on an objective, and from the safe, warm security of our Situation Awareness room, I could watch the chess pieces move. Now it's remarkably tempting to think that because I am in that vantage point, that I am the best positioned person, and the oldest, and the wisest,

to make decisions on what they ought to do. And yet, not once did I listen to their communications, and not once did I reach in and give a directive, because we figured out very quickly that that was absolutely self-deceptive. This two-dimensional picture of what's happening tempted us to believe we were in the position to move the chess pieces around. But we're not on the ground, we don't hear the gunfire, we don't know the temperature, we don't know how tired they are. It still has got to be done by the person on the ground, or the people on the ground. And so you have to live with this tension, this ability to see, and technically to touch more, but take a hands-off, a greater self-discipline, to not mess with it. Now you can do things which might be helpful, and we would maneuver potential reinforcements, or fire support, or medevac support. But the reality was, we took it as sacred not to reach in and try to exercise a level of command and control, inappropriate for the situation.
Maurer - I can only imagine what that room must have been like during operations. And you already touched on the metaphor of the chess master; however, you recommended being more like a gardener. A chess master controls, but a gardener enables, rather than directs. Dig a little deeper on the comparison of the chess master and the gardener.
McChrystal - Sure, if you think back historically to warfare, think the Battle of Waterloo, you have the Duke of Wellington, and his front line is about a mile in length. And Napoleon's opposite in this, a little bit wider but not much, and essentially it's two chess masters moving units on the field, a bit like chess pieces. Now it's not quite that neat and clean, but that's a pretty good analogy. And the Duke of Wellington would send aides off with little orders written on pieces of paper to subordinates to do things, to move the next chess piece on the battlefield. In our fast- moving environment, where things are so much more complex, the temptation using modern command and control to move chess pieces, is pretty significant. I mean, you really gotta fight that inner urge to do that. But when you are fighting against an enemy that operates in a decentralized manner, and in fact, they make decisions close to the problem, they change, they adapt, you find that no chess master is good enough to play against all of these autonomous chess pieces on the other side, because they are not linked the same way to a rigid command and control. So what that means is you gotta step back, and I came up with the analogy of gardener, because my mother was an avid gardener, and she had me out there diggin' manure and stuff, not doing any you know, skilled work. Because what a gardener does, is maybe not obvious to people, because you'd say, "Does a gardener grow plants, or vegetables, or flowers?" And my response would be no, only plants can do that, but a gardener creates the environment, a gardener prepares the ground, feeds, waters, weeds, harvests. A gardener creates an ecosystem in which plants can do, that which only plants can do. And if a gardener does it well, plants are all doing it simultaneously. And so the reality is, if a leader now takes more of a gardener approach, they unlock in the organization all the plants the ability to do what they do. And if you try to micromanage, there's just no way you can do that at scale or speed. Now it's a different mindset for the leader, because it's a little less ego-based, it's a little bit less heroic, if you want to describe it that way. And it takes the leader to take a more humble approach, because they don't have quite the front and center role they may have once had, but I will argue it is just as important, maybe more so.
(upbeat music) - Leadership tip from "Team of Teams", looking ahead.
Maurer - Imagine a leader, and you don't have to imagine because you've been there, but imagine a leader where your organization just gathered together a brilliant solution to a problem which has incredible consequences if not handled properly, world peace, for example. And then tomorrow, everything is different. Time to come up with a brand new solution, because the problem has evolved. How does one keep up in that world?
McChrystal - Yeah, it's wickedly difficult for several cultural reasons. First, the first is think of a great football team, that team members get their reputation, their credibility from their proficiency in what they do. And to suddenly

say, "Hey, tomorrow we're gonna play basketball." It's very threatening to people, because they spend a long time mastering that, and so they become very protective of their role, their expertise, and nobody wants to be embarrassed. And beyond that, you maybe tooled, or armed, or equipped for something that next week is entirely wrong. You may be organized incorrectly for what comes next week, and so, are we supposed to reorganize every week? Are we supposed to re-equip ourselves every week? Are we supposed to go to the very core of what has made us a disciplined, effective structure, and change that, and if we do, won't we just be a disorganized mess all the time? And the answer lies in a hybrid, and the hybrid means you can't afford to reorganize constantly. But what you can do is create an organization that constantly task organizes, like the military's been doing for years, and does it very quickly for requirements, and has the familiarity to do that on the fly, I mean, almost instantaneously. And the culture across the organization that when you bring those things together, it's not a cultural high-jump that the members can't make. They gotta be used to that, they gotta be expecting that. And so they almost get up in the morning realizing that agility is more important than anything else. The ability to rapidly adapt to new problem as it really is. You know, they always say you gotta fight the war you're in, not the one you wish you were in. And if we can make that a core tenet of how we develop leaders, how we create our organizations, I think we become far more effective. But it's easier to say, than it is to do.
Maurer - Of course, now we covered a lot of ground here, so let's do a quick review because there's just so much here. I'll give you each of the five steps, one by one, and then you give me a one or two sentence summary of that step. And if you can beat the clock there will be a prize at the end.
McChrystal - (laughing)
Maurer - Sound good?
McChrystal - Sure.
Maurer - Okay, ready?
McChrystal - Sure.
(upbeat music) Maurer - Step one, the Proteus Problem.
McChrystal - Dealing with a rapidly changing, complex environment, and the answer's agility. Maurer - Step two, from many, one.
McChrystal - It's creating organizations which are prideful in their own competence, but also willing and able to come together as larger teams.
Maurer - Step three, sharing.
McChrystal - This is the ability to share information and resources that hitherto we just weren't able or willing to do.
Maurer - Step four, letting go.
McChrystal - This is leaders, this is the ability to push down responsibility and authority to lower levels, while still retaining the role which is ultimate authority of the leader.
Maurer - And step five, looking ahead.

McChrystal - This is the fact that tomorrow's not gonna be like today, and you gotta prepare for tomorrow.
Maurer - Well I must say, you did excellent. You certainly beat the clock, but I hate to admit, but I do not have a prize for you. I hope you can forgive me.
McChrystal (laughing) - I will, George. Maurer - Okay, good, and thank you. McChrystal - Sure.
Maurer - Retired Army General Stanley McChrystal, author of "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World," For a more in-depth dive on these ideas and principles, I highly recommend you give it a read. Thank you so much for making time in your very busy schedule, sir.
McChrystal - You're kind to have me, George.
Maurer - Thank you for listening to this edition of The Leadership List, a podcast produced by the American Forces Radio Network, and the Defense Media Activity. I'm George Maurer, and remember, great leaders never stop learning. Until next time, bye bye.
(upbeat music) Tony Scott - The Leadership List is a production of the American Forces Radio Network. Creative consultants, Dave Beasing, CEO of Sound That Brands, a podcast development business, and AFN Radio's Grant Peters and Tom Arnholt. Additional narration provided by Tony Scott.

• Date Taken: 06.17.2020
• Date Posted: 06.17.2020 23:57
• Story ID: 372348
• Location: US