A number of books have strongly influenced my thinking on program management: Black Swan by Nasim Taleb,Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. But over the last few years, the one book that draws me back in more than others is Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s Team of Teams. No other book captures the challenges that I confront on daily basis. It is surprising the person who has captured it better than anyone else is a 4-star General who managed the Iraq occupation rather than someone more closely related to my profession. It isn’t for lack of trying that I haven’t found a book by a professional engineer who put these ideas on paper.

What are the problems that McCrystal describes that resonate with me? In Iraq, McCrystal’s enemy was al-Qaeda in Iraq, who worked (very successfully for some time) to terrorize Iraq in order to discredit and foil the US forces and their goals. al-Qaeda in Iraq was not the traditional enemy that the Army and McCrystal had planned and trained to fight. Their org-chart was a mess, it resembled a non-hierarchal network of computers on the internet rather than a corporate or military org-chart with one name at the top and positions growing linearly as one progressed down each level of the chart. The US Army’s early metrics of success turned out to be meaningless against such an organization.

We killed “about 20 of al Qaeda’s ‘number threes’ over the past decade, but everyone in a network is a number three”

Despite all of the in expenditures in equipment, technology, and life that the US and it’s allies were pouring in, this headless, and relatively poorly equipped enemy, was winning. McCrystal and his organization recognized this, and began to look to how they could mirror the successful organizational techniques of their enemy. McCrystal’s next met took aim at a metaphorical enemy - Frederick Taylor, a rather famous engineer from the past. Taylor begat corporate America’s continuous drive for efficiency gains through rigorous adherence to standard processes. Engineers and program managers feel the effect of Taylor every day. Is your program behind? Over budget? You need a more detailed plan - use this template. Your design has a flaw? We have a new process that will force you to get it right the next time. I’ve made a lot of plans. I work hard at them. I’m above average at making them. No matter how hard I work or plan ahead of time, there is no way my program will go according to plan. McCrystal says that I’m doing it wrong. In the complex world that McCrystal, and by implication in the book, I am working in, requires a different approach. Efficiency should no longer be king…

The pursuit of “efficiency”-getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money-was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.

McCrystal doesn’t believe that finding the perfect process for each problem works in today’s complex rather than complicated world. The world changes to fast today to try and find the perfect answer. Find a just good one and be prepared for the next change.

What makes the book better is that once the problem has been identified, McCrystal goes on to give practical suggestions on how he changed his approach. One suggestion in particular really sticks with me, and continues to be something I experiment with implementing today. The command and control model does not work in a rapidly changing, complex environment:

In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.

Put into practice, this is pretty radical change from how things are generally done today. In a complex environment, there isn’t time for someone at the top of an organization to be educated on the details of an issue, make a decision, and then push that decision back down through the org-chart. To keep up today, decisions must be made by the doers as needed. To make the right decisions, the doers need to have the big picture in their head. In the complex world, that is the job of the leaders. To make sure that their team has situational awareness.

Part of my interest in coding, data-science etc. is it offers me more powerful tools to collect data (data science) and then communicate that information out to the team (javascript, blogging, etc.) I’ll try and find ways to share my progress in the future.