#313： How Leaders Build Great Teams
Episode Stats
Summary
Chris Fussell served with General Stanley McChrystalstal in the early days of the war on al-Qaeda in Iraq. In his new book, "One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams," he shares the tactics and tools the military used in Iraq to transform themselves into a more agile organization.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We live in a
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complex, ever-changing world. Thanks to our network, Global Society, small players can
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have a huge impact in geopolitics and world business. Unfortunately, most organizations
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aren't structured in a way to thrive or even survive in this new fluid environment. My guest
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today experienced this firsthand as he worked with General Stanley McChrystal in Iraq during the
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war against Al-Qaeda. His name is Chris Fussell and his latest book, One Mission, How Leaders Build
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a Team of Teams, Chris shares the tactics and tools that the military used in Iraq to transform
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themselves into a more agile organization. Today on the show, Chris and I discuss why traditional
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top-down leadership organizations aren't effective today, either in the world of military or business,
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and how civilian organizations can apply the lessons he learned during combat. We discuss
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the legacy of John Boyd's OODA Loop philosophy and how McChrystal took that idea and scaled it to the
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large and often bureaucratic armed forces. And then Chris delves into how to develop a sense of
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shared consciousness in your organization and how to empower subordinates to make decisions to move a
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goal forward without having to ask for permission from a superior. We then discuss why complete
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decentralization isn't a cure-all and why it's important to have the structure of a top-down
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leadership hierarchy. Whether you're a corporate manager, business owner, or a leader in a nonprofit,
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you're going to walk away with some actionable advice to make your organization better.
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After the show is over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash Fussell. That's F-U-S-S-E-L-L.
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Hey, thanks. Appreciate you having me on. Looking forward to the discussion here.
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We got a new book out, One Mission, How Leaders Build a Team of Teams. The follow-up to your book
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that you wrote with General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams. Before we get into the idea of Team of
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Teams and One Mission, I think a little bit about your background would be helpful because it'll
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explain a lot of what's going on here. Can you walk us through your background and what got you
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to the point where you're writing a book called One Mission and Team of Teams?
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Sure. I'll try to start where it gets relevant. In the late 90s, I graduated college in 1996 and
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went into the Navy after that and directly into the SEAL pipeline. I started SEAL basic training,
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the BUDS program in 97. And then in 98, I joined the SEAL teams on the East Coast, the U.S. and
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Virginia. Spent the next 15 years in that community inside the special operations world, specifically
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in the SEAL teams that entire time, but working with a broad swath of other services and then
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sort of interagency partners until 2012 when I left active duty. Obviously, in the years after
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2001, the world has changed dramatically and the military had to adjust the way it did operations
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overseas as a result of this new type of conflict that we find ourselves in battle inside of. And
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the special operations community was in a very interesting and complex part of this global fight.
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So I'm sure your listeners are all well aware of how dramatically those communities have changed in
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the last 15 years or so. And so I had the unique optic to be involved, you know, at multiple levels in
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that change process. First, as a sort of a junior officer inside those communities in the years after
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2001, and then sort of rising up to mid-management sort of positions at the operational level.
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And then one year in my career, I spent as then three-star Lieutenant General McChrystal's aide to
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camp his last year of five years that he commanded a global task force specifically focused on
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counterterrorism. So in that year, we were basically forward deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for about
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a year straight. And I was able to sort of sit right next to General McChrystal and other senior
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leaders in that community. And having experienced the change from the ground level, I was then able
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to sort of witness the organizational processes as a, you know, an observer to that staff, which was
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just a fascinating process for me to sort of see behind the curtain and say, oh, this is how we've
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gotten so much better. Not at battlefield operations that we had amazing units on the ground that were just
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improving exponentially, but at the synchronization of this global enterprise. There was an amazing
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process behind that. So when I left service in 2012, I partnered with General McChrystal, who had
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created what we call the McChrystal Group. And we had started doing work with industry, helping them
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consider similar changes in their sort of global operating model. And about four or five years ago,
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we started having this conversation. Let's work on a book that tries to capture these lessons. So that was
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the origins of Team of Teams. And what we found was that as we started to dig into that subject,
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we realized there's a lot here. So the first book, Team of Teams, is very focused on sort of the macro
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theory of the case, what has changed in the world. And our thinking led us to some deep discussion in Team
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of Teams around the information age, the speed with which individuals can connect, share ideas,
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create actions. That's increased the complexity in the world on orders of magnitude just in the last
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10 years or so. And the argument we made in that initial book was that traditional systems aren't
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capable to restrict bureaucracy of dealing with that level of speed and interconnectedness that now
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sort of swarms us everywhere we look. So that was the idea of the first book. And then when we
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finished that, we realized there's there's more to be said here. What are the processes that actually
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allowed the enterprise that McChrystal oversaw and other organizations that are going through this
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to change the way they operate to react to this, this big change that we're all dealing with.
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And so that's what we focus on inside of one mission. And as we finished up Team of Teams,
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had a long conversation with McChrystal, and he encouraged me, hey, you sat on the staff and observed
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this, you should write the next book from that optic as a person who was sort of not in the senior
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leadership team, but watching how they did business. And then I went on, after that, I had gone on to
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grad school and done some thesis work on how those systems were working. And so that was the origins of
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of one mission. And so we're pretty excited now that the two go in in great compliment to each
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other, the theory of the case, the change we're all dealing with. And here's a practicum on how
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you can actually implement this sort of change model inside your organization.
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That's awesome. For our listeners who aren't familiar with the changes that the military went
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through, particularly the special operations part of the military, what how was how did the military
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organize itself before these changes? And how was the way they operated? Why did it like not work?
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Well, the military is in simple terms, very much like any other big enterprise, it's it's structured
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in a top down sort of fashion. And this is not to attack traditional hierarchical approach there.
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There's a lot of strength inside of that system. And, you know, over the past 100 years or so,
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say in the industrial age, collectively, you know, many folks around the world have learned those
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systems and refined them to a near as near perfect state as one could hope. You know, we've seen that
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in industry, we've seen that in governments, we've seen that in the military. And that is all premised on
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the idea that I have enough subject matter experts that can read the environment, predict what is likely
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to happen. And that could be predicting what products people will want, what the next election
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cycle will look like, what our enemy on the battlefield is most likely to do based on their
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supply chain, their leadership model, the terrain, etc. All the underlying foundation of those systems
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is very similar. And so that's the type of system that I came into, even inside the special operations,
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the operations that had gone on for years in that world were premised on the predictability of the
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environment. And so you could then say, okay, here's what's likely to happen or here's what's
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just happened and what will occur next. Therefore, here's the unit we're going to use to address that
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issue. They will go out, they will execute an operation, they will come back with new intelligence,
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and then we will decide what we do next. What we found in the early years of the conflict in Iraq
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was that the technology age, you know, which was creating an entirely different space than what
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we found on the battlefield, but the threats that we were facing there were leveraging what we now
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consider just sort of commonplace realities of the information age, you know, you can connect with
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people very quickly over email and cell phones. And now you can create massive amounts of followers
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on Twitter. And there's just countless things that you can do in the information age to connect
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individuals around ideas that simply didn't exist when the models that we had come to be so
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comfortable with were developed. So this 20th century sort of traditional top-down model versus
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a massively distributed problem set, the two don't marry up very well. And I would argue what most
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organizations and what we were feeling in the military was the distributed model, think of it as a
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just a mass flash mob. It's not going to necessarily beat or destroy this big traditional system,
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but it will bite away at it in so many different parts all at once, that eventually the big system
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just sort of can collapse under its own weight. And what we found on the battlefield was, you know,
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Al Qaeda being our first sort of understanding of these distributed networks, they didn't have some
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massive, you know, great plan that they were going to put in place. It was going to, they were going
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to replace system with sheer chaos and introduce, you know, some very deliberate ideology into that
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vacuum. But that's not what they were worried about. They weren't trying to create, you know,
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a nation state to replace the old system. They are intent on creating chaos into which you can then
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inject whatever idea set you want to. So that was sort of the tension in the fight that we found
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at a systems level. We have, we have a model built on premises that no longer exist, facing
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a network threat that has no rules. It just, it exists on a narrative that's strong enough to pull
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in followers and it can grow exponentially in a very short order. And I guess we're seeing that
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in full force recently in Europe with all these sort of terrorist attacks that just come out of
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nowhere. There's no hierarchy. It's just network people who are keyed into that narrative and they
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decide to do something about that with that narrative. That's right. And that's, there's a
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really interesting part to all of this, which is, you know, what is it that makes networks in any space
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in, you know, in, in, in the way a nation runs itself, in the way a military functions, in the way a group
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like this is put together, the networks that have this sort of really powerful narrative that is
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very attractive to people. And that's not a judgment on whether it's good or bad. You might
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think it's a, it's an evil narrative, but it doesn't really matter what you think. It matters
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what people are willing to become part of that thing. And if you connect with enough of a followership,
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like we're seeing in Europe and other parts of the world, you know, folks will flood from pockets
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all around the globe now to be part of something that they think has great meaning. And so that's why,
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you know, the idea of fighting an information age war, the information campaign, it's not new,
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but we're seeing it. It's just a very, very intense part of the struggle right now is look
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that until the story catches up with the realities on the ground, we're always going to be one step
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behind these things because they do tell a very powerful narrative to those that would wish to be
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part of them. We saw the first stages of that in Iraq in the early days, and now it's just
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continued to grow over the last 10 or 12 years. Yeah. As I was reading your book and the ideas,
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it made me think about John Boyd's OODA loop and how, what he was writing 50 years ago,
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like we're starting to see manifest itself today with these sort of network terror cells and like
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how, and he said like, this is how we need to respond. Like he was probably talking about,
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he was talking about guerrilla fighters in Vietnam who acted very similar. And he said,
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in order to combat them, you needed to, we needed to change the way we operated on a,
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on the, on the military level. So you kind of implemented this idea of the OODA loop often
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gets simplified, but it's very complex where it's all about just constantly taking information and
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making decisions rapidly on that information so you can combat the enemy.
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Yeah. And you know, Boyd's got an interesting history inside the air force and it was never
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promoted up to a very senior level because his ideas were probably contradictory to a lot of big
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systems thinkers. And this, this is how you structure a big enterprise. And I think they,
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they were probably folks that saw Boyd as too much of an outlier or sort of a threat to
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traditional thinking, but he's a fighter pilot. So he started at the small level, which to your
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point, it often gets simplified down to that, but he was actually a big systems thinker.
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But the OODA loop observe, orient, decide, and act his, was his foundational argument that said,
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look, if you can get an individual in a, in a fighter jet to do those things in sequence faster than
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the person in the enemy fighter jet, they will win in the dogfight. They can observe the situation,
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orient themselves, their thinking and their aircraft to it, make a decision about what
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they're going to do next and take action. The tighter you can make that loop, which is dependent
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on all sorts of outside variables and their, their ability to triage very quickly, then they will
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shoot down the other fighter, which, you know, makes total sense. If you think of the sort of top
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gun scenario, two, two airplanes, dogfighting, which doesn't really happen in today's air to air
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conflict anymore, just based on weapon systems, but it's a, it's a logical sort of easy to
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understand concept. Scaling that up to the enterprise is where it gets really, really
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challenging. And, you know, it's funny you mentioned, boy, because on the, as we started
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to feel these changes inside of the counterterrorism task force that, that McChrystal oversaw, people
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started to throw that language around to say, wow, we, we, we were speeding up the OODA loop
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of this global enterprise. I mean, there's thousands of people spread around the world and,
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you know, multiple countries in every time zone, but acting as a unified whole to be able
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to reorient all the strength of that system against a very specific problem and make a
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decision, take an action within a matter of minutes sometime. So the ability to do that
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was a whole new way of, of thinking. So sometimes if it's, as we're talking with industry leaders,
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I'll often start there. If they have some sort of background understanding of, of Boyd's theories
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to say, look, you can now scale this up to the enterprise level and, and really,
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really orient yourselves globally very quickly.
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And what was the transition like from this top down? I mean, I think you call it dotted line,
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hierarchy structure, right? Where there's a chain of command where you wait, you get your orders
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from someone else and they get the orders from someone else. And then to more of this distributed
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model, talk a little more, it's more of a hybrid model. We'll talk about what, you mean,
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what that means, but what was the transition like? Did it, were there a lot of people who were,
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you know, dug their heels in and like, no, I'm, this is, I'm not comfortable with that.
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We had to do it the way we've always done it. Or were people pretty open to that?
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Yeah. In one mission, we talk about sort of the solid line, traditional hierarchy,
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coupled with dotted lines, sort of distributed networks. So if you, anybody that's worked in
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a big enterprise has stories or can talk directly to, yeah, we were structured this way, but to
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actually get business done with this division of this department, you had to go to this person
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and that person. So what they're doing is they're describing these sort of darker networks
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that exist inside of any enterprise. So that's always existed. I think what McChrystal and the
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senior leadership started to realize was how can we put a place, a structure in place that identifies
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and leverages those networks? Because that's where things happen really fast in a big enterprise.
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That's where key relationships sit. That's where interesting, unknown decision makers lie within
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the organization. So how can we couple those with the strength of the traditional solid line system?
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If we can bring those two things together, then we can have the stability, power, et cetera,
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of the traditional system, which we don't want to lose, and move with the speed and distributed
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nature of these networks that we're fighting. Now, all that sounds great in hindsight. I think to
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your other question, what did that change process feel like? It was very organic, very sort of,
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let's pursue what works and cast off what doesn't work. There was not a master plan that was put down
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on paper and said, here's where we are, here's how we're structured, here's what the new threat
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looks like. Therefore, here's a 24-month change cycle that we're going to go through, you know, a very
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traditional approach. Because the problem was so new. And the senior leadership that started to have
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this conversation, they just said, okay, what we're doing now isn't working. We're pushing the
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traditional system as hard as it can possibly move, and we're still watching the threats grow.
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So we have to look for a new solution. And very organically, through broader and more inclusive
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communication processes, through a very conscious effort to decentralize decision-making further and
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further down into the field, through a whole series of steps like that, where we ended up was,
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wow, we've created this sort of dual-axis system where we have traditional top-down structure as a
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baseline and stability, and we have the ability to move very quickly as a network sort of model.
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So those two things coupled together as this sort of hybrid structure. Now, had there been a master
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plan out of the gates, because the thinking was so new, it probably would have gotten more pushback
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than just organically navigating toward things that were working and throwing away those that weren't.
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I don't know, it's a hypothetical, so it's hard to judge. But I think there was a certain advantage to
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saying, hey, we're all in this together. Let's figure out what it looks like. And what we ended up,
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was a very deliberate model that we found is repeatable in other spaces.
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That's awesome. Well, let's talk about, I can understand how this hybrid approach,
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where you have a structure, solid line hierarchy with this more distributed network model as well,
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how that would be great for the military in fighting the war on terror when you're also fighting
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a networked enemy. Take this to the business. How does this apply to the business? Why should a business
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start looking to maybe going transition to a hybrid model where it's not just solid line hierarchy,
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Yeah, no, it's a great question. And it's interesting when I left the service in 2012,
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started having deeper conversations with folks in industry. That wasn't that long ago,
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but this sort of thinking, I think, was still new to a lot of folks in industry, in big government
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outside of the military, in big systems like healthcare, et cetera. But now, I think we're seeing,
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you know, just click on the news any day. We're seeing such rapid change and traditional systems
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getting attacked by, you know, new players in almost every way that people start to realize,
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okay, there's something going on that's different than it was 20 years ago. This is not a battlefield
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or terrorism-based problem. So, the solution set, I think, speaks to the idea that, look,
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your traditional system, you know, if you run a company that's been around for 80 years and you're
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doing really well, you've built a model that's based on facing similar sort of competitors.
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So, if I want to compete in your space, I'm going to read your playbook. I'm going to look at your
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history. I'm going to try to build out a similar system, but with a more efficient model. I want
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better talent. I want to build a better widget, whatever we're competing over. And then, I'm going
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to start to slowly eat up your market share. I can come up with a very deliberate way to attack you
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and also become a big player. And maybe one day, I'll completely usurp you and I'll buy you and now
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I'm the dominant player, right? So, we've all seen that work. So, the focus is, you know,
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how do I become more efficient? How do I optimize my system? How do I get the better talent?
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We're competing directly with each other. Now, those systems are still very important because
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there are big competitors, but there's also a totally different type of competition that doesn't
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play by any of those rules. The interconnected sort of external actors, startups that can scale
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overnight or don't need to scale. They can just release a new technology that just disrupts
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the market that you're in or a consumer base that can interconnect in a way and, you know,
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debunk a new product that you release before it even hits the market. A consumer experience
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where someone enters one of your stores or, you know, the recent United example is just perfectly
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illustrates this where you have, you know, a problem on an aircraft and a system that isn't
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quite comfortable yet decentralizing all the way down to truly empowered folks at a gate
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that say, this is escalating. We're going to put in a lot of, you know, more time or money
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right now here in the moment than we would have traditionally, but we're going to solve this
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problem. Instead, when you have to rely on sort of a traditional approach, it can cost, you know,
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millions of dollars in shareholding over, you know, in a very, very brief period of time
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if you're not comfortable creating that decentralized model down to those that are closest to the problem.
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The problems aren't new. They've always existed. The issue is these problems can now interconnect,
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be shared and drive thinking about your organization at a speed and at a scale that
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traditionally they simply couldn't. So I would argue that the traditional systems really don't
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have a choice. Organizations will not be run the same way they are now in 20, 25 years. So we are in
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this transition point. I would argue that this hybrid sort of structure is one way to bridge
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through this transition, but those that are convinced that the 20th century model will
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continue to be the right solution as the information age gets more and more complex. I think it's a
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So the planning cycle is getting shorter and shorter. I mean, it used to be where you could plan
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for a year, then maybe a quarter. Now you have to like, maybe it's just day to day or maybe hour to
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hour. You have to be able to make decisions that fast.
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Yeah, I think so. But I think you have to be able to do both. I mean, there is long-term planning
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where you, you know, you want to know where you recruit from and you, you want to have a relationship
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with that graduate school or whatever the case may be. You want to have a good intern program that
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you get to look at people over multiple years. So those aren't minute to minute decisions. Those are
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deliberate relationships that are built over time. In the military, you're not, you know, minute to minute
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deciding what the next aircraft carrier is going to look like. Those are, you know, long time horizon
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programs. And so you don't need some sort of distributed system that's capable of dealing
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with sheer chaos in a system like that, that you can control. I'm not saying it's easy. Those are,
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you need a lot of smart people that know how to manage things very well from people to money to
00:23:17.480
communication plans, et cetera. But whether you like it or not, there are also spaces that,
00:23:22.460
that move in that minute to minute fashion. And so back to our experiences in the counterterrorism
00:23:29.100
world, you couldn't say, well, let's just completely focus on empowering the teams on the ground so
00:23:34.620
they can move minute to minute when they're, when they're in, you know, literally in the,
00:23:38.520
in the target environment and cast away the fact that we still have to come up with a training plan
00:23:43.140
for next year, or we still have to recruit people over a multi-year time horizon. So those two things
00:23:48.600
need to live in, in congruence with each other. The hard part though, is that the fact that there
00:23:53.860
are minute to minute things that can disrupt you. That's just the reality. Now organizations need to
00:23:58.720
have a system in place that's, that's capable of dealing with that, which is why you have to get
00:24:03.580
comfortable living on these two axes at the same time. So let's, let's dig into a little bit of how
00:24:07.420
you develop sort of the how to the nuts and bolts of this team of teams approach. And one mission you
00:24:13.080
talk about the first step is developing or having a mission focus. Is that something like a corporate
00:24:19.360
mission statement that people roll their eyes out or is it something else? You know, it's
00:24:24.440
interesting. So we talk a lot about this idea of creating the right type of aligning narrative in
00:24:29.000
one mission. And yeah, everybody's got the poster on the wall. It says, you know, be the best or
00:24:33.200
whatever the case may be. And those are there for good reason. Those can become eye rollers. And I'm sure
00:24:37.840
the task force that I was part of under, under McChrystal had some version of that, that I was never
00:24:42.780
aware of, or maybe I was, I just can't recall at that point. The problem is they don't, they don't
00:24:47.020
really have enough meaning when it comes to connecting different parts of the organization.
00:24:50.820
And so we lay out in one mission is our leadership started to change that from whatever sort of
00:24:56.100
bumper sticker narrative it might've been to a story that really forced us at the, at the low level to
00:25:02.100
make a choice. And what we had inside of this, our, our global task force was a culture that's not
00:25:10.140
unlike you'll see in big, big enterprise where we had these incredibly capable, proud, very tribal
00:25:16.540
verticals. So I was part of the SEAL teams, army units had their versions of that. We had air force
00:25:22.720
folks, we had interagency like intelligence teams that became part of our task force. And when you
00:25:28.140
went far enough down onto the ground, each of those groups had a really strong, powerful grip on their
00:25:33.960
members, which served us really well for, for a long time. And it, it, it means a lot to be part of the
00:25:39.220
SEAL teams. Obviously you go through, you know, many, many years of wickets to, to reach that level
00:25:44.580
and you, the, the, the tribe speaks a certain language. It carries itself a certain way.
00:25:50.460
It wears its hair a certain way. All those little nuances mean a lot when you're in the, in the system.
00:25:56.120
And when you look at another tribe that is on the same big org chart on the wall, they're, the way they
00:26:02.120
carry themselves is a little different. They wear their uniforms a little different. The language they use
00:26:05.600
is slightly different. So there's an immediate uncertainty about, are they really part of the
00:26:09.520
same organization? And all of us, we're all human. So you'll default back to your, your tribe and say,
00:26:14.580
this is where I'm comfortable. Now, the problem we found that, that led to in a very interconnected
00:26:19.200
fight where the threats have one common story that they're just bolting people onto to create action.
00:26:25.060
And we find that we have little different nuances between our, our organizations that can lead to
00:26:31.520
massive separation when it actually comes to trying to fight this interconnected network.
00:26:36.240
So what the narrative that our senior leadership started to talk to us about was at a very high
00:26:43.340
cultural level saying, look, we, we are not coming together as a holistic organization. We do not trust
00:26:51.020
each other between tribes. We do not have genuine cross boundary relationships that allow one unit to
00:26:57.820
pick up a phone to another unit and say, here's what I think is going on. And you listen to them
00:27:03.620
as if they were part of your own team that you trust and, and believe their, their optic on the
00:27:08.500
fight as much as you would believe somebody in your own tribe. Until we get to that level as an
00:27:12.520
organization, we will not be as interconnected as the threat we were facing. And even though we're
00:27:17.360
stronger and faster and better trained and better equipped, all these things, they will still stay one
00:27:21.600
step ahead of us. And so if that level of powerful narrative, that's not a bumper sticker on the
00:27:26.760
wall, that's a call to action that says you can stay comfortable inside of your tribe, or you can
00:27:32.480
become part of this larger story that's going to truly pull us together as a, as a, you know, one
00:27:37.860
mission focus type organization, then we win. So the choice is up to you every single day, you're going
00:27:43.000
to have to decide, do I want to stay comfortable in my tribe or to want to be part of a culture that has
00:27:47.940
the potential to win in this environment. And so that was a, you know, that didn't happen overnight.
00:27:52.940
That was a consistent conversation that went on for weeks, months, and then just became the DNA of
00:27:58.240
the, of the organization. But for me personally, coming up through that system, that was the most
00:28:03.400
powerful part of what our leaders did for us was forcing us to truly think about which, which hand
00:28:09.240
we wanted to play. Do I want to be comfortable in my tribe or do I want to get uncomfortable and try
00:28:15.380
So the part of developing that one mission team of teams approach is this idea of shared
00:28:21.340
consciousness where everyone's on the same page. So the idea of shared consciousness is basically
00:28:25.280
everyone has that one mission focus, no matter what team they're on, what tribe they're part of,
00:28:29.480
but also there's a shared consciousness of the information that's available there and how it
00:28:33.920
affects all the other organizations, right? So maybe the SEAL, maybe the SEALs have some bit of
00:28:38.860
information that might be useful to another organization. I think people understand on the macro
00:28:43.760
level, but how do you do that? How do you get that shared consciousness going across organizations
00:28:51.740
Shared consciousness is one of the things that most people have experienced. If you've been in a
00:28:55.060
startup, if you've been on a high performance sports team, anytime you've been in an environment
00:28:59.920
where there's six of us or 12 of us or 20 of us, and we all connect emotionally and we all are close
00:29:06.720
enough in physical proximity or we resynchronize ourselves at a fast enough pace that I can
00:29:15.380
understand what you're thinking, you can understand what I think. That's shared consciousness. Most
00:29:19.580
people have felt that at some point, but they'll describe a, I would describe a SEAL platoon. You
00:29:23.940
might describe a startup that you were part of or a sports team you're on. So how do you scale that up
00:29:30.580
to the enterprise level became the big debate. And I remember our senior leadership when we were going
00:29:35.480
through this transition saying, we are, you know, our core strength is our small teams, our ranger
00:29:41.140
platoons on the ground that just move with complete fluidity. Is it possible to scale that up to this
00:29:47.300
global enterprise level? Because if we can do that, no one can keep up with us. But it seems sort of like
00:29:52.480
a pretty big challenge, right? So very organically, what became the backbone of creating that sort of
00:29:59.780
structure was increased periodicity. So the speed with which we resynchronized ourselves went up
00:30:07.180
exponentially. And then the amounts of personnel involved in those resynchronizing communication
00:30:14.240
structures also went up. So we started to ask the question, how fast is the threat externally
00:30:20.300
changing? And can we realign ourselves to marry up with that pace? Now there's a whole history to how we
00:30:25.660
got there. But essentially the takeaway was these networks, Al Qaeda and networks like this, there's
00:30:30.500
something different every morning. When they wake up, they look around and they say, what are we going
00:30:34.440
to do today? And they redesign who's talking to who and what they're going to execute in that next 24
00:30:40.000
hours. So that's the cycle that we needed to keep up with. Now this was happening multiple layers above
00:30:45.200
where I was in the organization at that point. But that's the conversations that they started to drive.
00:30:50.760
Then they backed that up and said, okay, if that's 24 hours, how do we resynchronize ourselves every 24
00:30:55.360
hours in order to be able to keep up with that pace? So we, over time, started to look at the
00:31:01.140
battlefield in these 24-hour cycles. The first 90 minutes of that cycle would start with a global
00:31:06.640
video teleconference. And in time, that grew to thousands of people around the world sitting in
00:31:12.440
this one common forum every 24 hours, seven days a week for years on end, developing this sense of
00:31:18.000
shared consciousness. And it wasn't a top-down, here's what you're going to do today. It wasn't a
00:31:23.640
mid-management, let me update everybody on what's going on. It was a 90-minute discussion about how
00:31:29.200
people were seeing the problem. What was the new data? What teams had gone out into the fight and
00:31:34.600
learned something new? Very raw and honest discussions about what was actually happening
00:31:39.520
inside the problem. Then you could go into these windows of decentralization. So you'd have thousands
00:31:44.760
of people that would walk out with that same sense that you and I might have if it's a three or
00:31:48.920
four-person startup after our morning cup of coffee. And we'd say, okay, let's go get them.
00:31:53.300
Same thing was happening, but with thousands of people around the globe. So then we would go into
00:31:57.140
22 hours of truly decentralized operations where you could push responsibility deep down into the
00:32:02.780
units that were on the ground. And then 22 and a half hours later, they resynchronize and we have
00:32:07.240
the same conversation. Is it, you know, no single day was ever perfect, but over time, you marry all these
00:32:13.320
things up and you truly created this global enterprise with a sense of shared consciousness that you would
00:32:22.300
Okay. So the regular 90-minute meeting, right? And I think people hear that. And I think you sort of
00:32:26.840
mentioned, it's not like a management update meeting, right? It's like, here's what's going on. It's
00:32:30.360
something different. So like, say someone wanted, they have a business, they want to incorporate this
00:32:34.360
sort of cross-communications amongst different organizations within the company or their own
00:32:38.460
business if they have one. What's like the agenda? Like, how do you start that meeting? Is it just
00:32:42.660
like, you have a topic? I mean, what are the mechanics of that?
00:32:46.940
Yeah. No, it's a great question. The temptation is to say, okay, got it. Let's do that on Monday and
00:32:53.820
we'll get, you know, we'll get 500 regional managers onto a call and we'll just start talking
00:32:57.880
about stuff. Well, that's, of course, we know where that's going to go. It's just going to turn
00:33:00.600
into total chaos, right? So when we're doing work with organizations, we will start with what we did
00:33:07.040
very organically inside the task force underneath McChrystal, which was starting with a conversation of,
00:33:12.740
okay, what are we trying to accomplish? What's our strategic intent as an organization?
00:33:17.120
That quickly led to us. And what you'll see in large organizations is there's actually multiple
00:33:21.780
different fights going on here. So we're not on the same page about what our strategic intent is
00:33:26.440
and how we're going to get there. So that's this place I would say for any organization to start,
00:33:31.060
get the leadership together, really determine what's our strategy, what are we trying to accomplish,
00:33:35.420
cascade that down into your verticals, your regions, however you're structured. And that, you know,
00:33:39.680
that will change over time, but you have to get some sort of common baseline. Then from that,
00:33:44.340
you can start to look at the speed with which the problems are moving. You know,
00:33:49.040
so you probably have a traditional system that's capable of moving in that linear fashion versus
00:33:53.000
big traditional competition. What are the other problems and how fast are they changing? To deal
00:33:58.060
with those in a decentralized fashion, how often do you have to resynchronize? So you start with those
00:34:02.640
two ideas. What are we trying to accomplish? How often do we have to realign to be able to do it in a
00:34:07.280
decentralized manner? Then you can get into the creation of this sort of communication model
00:34:12.420
based on those former two. And the agenda itself will be informed by the first work you do, which
00:34:18.020
is what are we trying to accomplish? And then you can grow these things steadily over time. If the goal
00:34:22.680
is to have 500 regional managers involved in something like this, start with 10, then make it 30,
00:34:27.780
then grow in time over to that large number. And because you want people to show up and every time
00:34:34.040
they come into a forum like this, say, I'm a busy person, but that's the best hour I spend this during
00:34:39.620
the week, or that's the best two hours I spend every other week, because I walk away with a real
00:34:44.120
understanding of how the leaders throughout the organization are looking at the problem. And I'm
00:34:49.640
very comfortable now operating in a decentralized fashion until we resynchronize. So it's a driver of
00:34:55.700
human behavior as much as anything. Now, for us, the structure of it was important.
00:35:01.900
There had to be a solid background. We had a very consistent agenda that was consistent as much
00:35:10.880
that we always had one. It was very structured, 90 minutes. We knew ahead of time who was going to
00:35:15.960
talk about what for how much time, et cetera. If you went to our portal system, that was the first
00:35:22.100
thing you'd see on the homepage was the agenda for the next cycle. So very transparent there. What was
00:35:26.940
being talked about would change over time based on what was going on in the fight. But people
00:35:31.780
needed that baseline to say, okay, here's what we're going to talk about. I understand how the
00:35:36.680
senior leaders are seeing the fight based on the type of agenda they're structuring. Then we would
00:35:40.760
use a controller. And we highly recommend this to any organization. Train and develop an individual
00:35:46.480
or team, depending on the size of the enterprise, that is responsible for making sure that a forum like
00:35:53.000
this runs smoothly. Working with the IT backbone, making sure that briefers are prepared,
00:35:58.780
coaching them along to like, here's the type of conversations we try to have, keeping the schedule
00:36:03.460
running on time, taking taskers and follow-ups that you can push, you know, things that need to
00:36:08.380
go into a sidebar discussion, you can follow up on those. There's a whole bunch of tricks that you
00:36:12.500
want to do in that space to keep it nicely controlled and functioning. And then we would use
00:36:16.740
a sort of a technology backdrop as well. I mean, our technology then was pretty rudimentary compared to
00:36:22.500
what is available now. But of those, if we had thousands of people on the net, a good majority of them
00:36:27.500
would have a device open, like you'd be on your classified laptop, and you'd have a series of
00:36:32.480
chat rooms going during this forum. So that in the conversation itself, there's, you know, these
00:36:38.200
point to point conversations going on with other people contributing sort of additional information
00:36:43.900
based on the conversation that you didn't want that to turn into total chaos. In the backdrop,
00:36:48.580
you would have 10, 12, you know, maybe more individual or big party chat rooms going on your
00:36:55.180
laptop. So as you're briefing some new insight that you've discovered in one corner of the world,
00:37:00.500
I can reach out to dozens of contacts and say, hey, that's really interesting what they're talking
00:37:05.360
about right now. Have you seen that report? What do you know about that new piece of equipment
00:37:08.920
they're describing, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not a constant interruption and chaos. The chaos can
00:37:12.960
happen in the backdrop. So those were, that gave us the opportunity to create those, those new dotted
00:37:18.160
line networks. Every single time we resynchronize these, you created the best possible opportunity for the
00:37:24.220
right people to connect and say, oh, wow, I didn't know that. We can create a sub network very quickly
00:37:29.220
that's going to solve for that issue, or I'm going to do something differently in the next 22 hours based
00:37:33.760
on what that person just said. So that, and that's why so many people were drawn to be part of something
00:37:39.460
like that. So if we had thousands of people on the net, most of that was organic growth. Most of that
00:37:43.740
was people deciding I want to be in this forum because it gives me the opportunity to create my own
00:37:48.800
sub networks every 24 hours and tackle the issues we're facing in, in, in a new way.
00:37:54.680
Yeah. As I was reading the, sort of the mechanics of it, if I was thinking like Slack could be a tool
00:37:59.980
for a small company who doesn't have the infrastructure, the IT infrastructure to build
00:38:03.480
their own platform. But I think it's the same sort of thing. You have sort of a main channel where
00:38:07.440
you're, everyone's getting the same updates, but then you can go off into little channels
00:38:10.620
on your own and discuss things about the main channel.
00:38:13.760
Exactly right. We use a combination. I mean, and this technology is, you know, there's no
00:38:18.800
barrier of entry for anyone. You can get freeware as a startup between Slack and other systems that
00:38:23.800
are out there and quickly create this, this sort of structure. But yeah, we, we use Slack in our
00:38:28.520
own organization and it, it's a much prettier version of what we were using at the time, which
00:38:33.520
looked basically like sort of MS-DOS chat rooms. But, but yeah, that coupling those two things
00:38:41.080
All right. So let's talk the hybrid approach. The benefit of it is it gives, you have that
00:38:45.600
solid line hierarchy where you can do some long-term planning and make sure, you know,
00:38:50.260
the things that require long-term planning and logistics get done, but you also have this
00:38:55.360
networked approach and this, but this networked approach gives on the ground subordinates a lot
00:39:01.580
of autonomy to make quick decisions for themselves based on information they've gotten from this
00:39:06.660
shared consciousness that they've received from these updates or whatever else, or whatever
00:39:12.400
this communication that they're using. How do you ensure that these autonomous individuals don't
00:39:19.980
deviate too far from the, the mission focus with their decisions? Cause it's one thing like,
00:39:24.980
Hey, get out there and just do it. But then they might do something really stupid that hurts.
00:39:29.120
Yeah. Yes, they might. And you know, what's interesting is I remember as a, as a junior
00:39:35.880
officer in these communities, when my own sort of naive view on things at the time was, Oh,
00:39:41.460
they're going to decentralize and empower, and we're going to be flat. And basically what you just
00:39:46.380
described, like, this'll be kind of up to me and our team and we'll just go for it. And then we come
00:39:51.660
back every often, every so often and tell them what, what we're doing. Well, that's, that's not how it
00:39:55.980
works. And that, you know, in our environment and, and any high risk or, you know, big enterprise
00:40:01.660
system that can create way more risk than it, than it's worth. If you just say, okay, everybody
00:40:07.020
go for it. And then we'll resynchronize because you, you might be a very seasoned actor and I'm
00:40:11.000
brand new. There's no way I should be empowered or held to the same level of accountability that,
00:40:15.700
that you should be. So what I'll describe here again, happens sort of through organic conversations
00:40:21.940
over time inside of our initial environment. But there's a very deliberate approach that
00:40:27.020
organizations can take to create this model. If they start with that original discussion around
00:40:32.220
strategy and cascading that down into sort of measurable metrics within teams, which is an old
00:40:37.300
sort of management model, but very critical baseline that it can provide. So if you have that in place,
00:40:42.580
you can then come down to, you know, me, you, and one other person as let's say,
00:40:46.980
back to the regional sales manager model. If you're, you know, six years in that position,
00:40:54.060
the, the higher level leadership can say, okay, here are the 20 things we're going to empower you
00:40:59.780
to do with at your level. So you don't come back in and check for permission. When we're in these
00:41:05.680
windows of sort of decentralized action, you own all of that. Here are two or three things that I'm
00:41:10.620
going to, going to constraints that I'm going to put on top of you because we're in a volatile market
00:41:15.660
when it comes to joint ventures. If you're talking to any of these three competitors,
00:41:19.140
check in with headquarters because, you know, there's new sort of legal constraints. If you're,
00:41:23.920
if you're encroaching into this sort of environment, check in with leadership, everything else up to you.
00:41:28.760
So that makes a lot of sense to you. You're probably, okay, I'm a seasoned experienced leader.
00:41:33.020
I, I understand why I'm constrained, but I'm also, I know where I'm expected to act with speed and
00:41:38.980
independence. If I've just been promoted up to regional sales manager, I might have three things that I can
00:41:44.740
do at my level and 20 things that I'm constrained by. And that list can get very, very detailed,
00:41:49.940
which things like this happen in a lot of organizations. You know, you have different
00:41:53.720
sorts of actors, but when you took that sort of measured approach and you can do this in great
00:41:59.280
detail inside an organization, if you, if you want to roll your sleeves up, you can literally map this
00:42:03.940
out. Coupled with the inclusion and transparent nature of the communication forums that were put into
00:42:10.100
place. You could literally see every single day as a new actor in the system. I understand my
00:42:16.060
constraints. I understand my authorities, but every 24 hours, I'm getting a new opportunity to see
00:42:21.260
somebody like you, a seasoned member of the organization, talk and operate at a much higher
00:42:27.240
level. We might be peers on an org chart, but you have all these other authorities and I can see you
00:42:32.420
leverage them. I can see the actions you take. And more importantly, I can see how you tie your actions
00:42:38.420
and new information that you might be finding back up into the strategic conversation. So as a new
00:42:43.840
actor in that, in that model, you're probably, even if we're on paper peers, you're thinking
00:42:49.220
multiple levels above me. And every day you're unintentionally, you're coaching me to become
00:42:55.040
an actor like you. And so I see what right looks like most traditional bureaucracies. When that happens,
00:43:01.320
it happens behind closed doors. So I see you as a competitor. I don't understand. I think the boss is
00:43:06.680
just like you more. And I don't have time to sit down and you don't have time to sit down and coach
00:43:10.620
me along. And you might be incentivized not to do that based on myriad of things inside of an
00:43:15.320
enterprise. But in a transparent system like this, I can just see it happening. And when the reverse was
00:43:21.400
also true for us, when a seasoned player could look across and see me as a new member of the
00:43:27.420
organization who is highly constrained, you were also incentivized to reach across and coach me,
00:43:32.520
literally picking up the phone and saying, here's where you can improve. Here's how you should be
00:43:36.200
thinking about the following. If you want these sorts of authorities, here's what our leadership
00:43:39.800
needs to see from you. That was not necessarily because you thought I was a great guy. But every
00:43:44.840
time I pick up the phone to ask permission around one of those constraints that are layered on me,
00:43:49.280
I'm preventing our senior leadership just because I'm eating up their time from doing the up and out
00:43:54.660
thinking that you want them to do. You don't need permissions. You need new relationships with other
00:43:59.560
organizations. You need new funding for a massive strategic project you're focused on. I need
00:44:05.140
permission to go from A to B. So you want me to either figure out how to get from A to B on my
00:44:09.780
own or just get out of the way, right? So you're incentivized to come over and help coach me along
00:44:14.980
to get there. So it also starts to act as a tool for breaking down those tribal barriers between
00:44:19.880
different verticals, different regions, where normally there's a sense of competition. Now people
00:44:24.320
can see, wow, if I make that team better, it's going to greatly benefit my team as well.
00:44:29.560
Yeah. You gave a good example of this on-the-ground coaching where you get a call from some other
00:44:34.360
guy in another organization kind of chewing you out, but he did a coaching experience. So yeah,
00:44:40.280
again, it takes a lot of conscious, intentional, deliberate work to make this approach work in an
00:44:49.940
No, that's right. And what's described in one mission, I would say there's a whole series of
00:44:58.120
basics in there, but coupling them together at a pace that keeps up with today's environment.
00:45:04.040
That's the challenge because it's not good enough anymore to come out and be really good once a
00:45:09.880
quarter at the town hall or to be really good on your quarterly analyst report. You've got to be as
00:45:17.060
good as you can be every single day if you're going to expect the organization to be able to move fast
00:45:21.640
enough. So you talk about this in the book, the military doesn't just rely on organizations within
00:45:27.620
the military. They also work with outside parties where they don't have control over them, but
00:45:34.260
they're a vital part of the mission. I'm sure there's a lot of businesses too that work with
00:45:38.060
outside entities to further their mission and their business strategic goals, but they don't have
00:45:44.140
control over them. For example, my own business, I use a lot of independent contractors for video
00:45:49.700
editing, whatever. How can you apply this team of teams approach with these outside third parties so
00:45:55.760
you can work with them and maintain that rapid operating tempo that you need to survive and
00:46:01.300
thrive in today's world? Yeah. A few things changed in the way that this task force was run by our senior
00:46:07.940
leadership on that front that I think are applicable over to many other parts of industry. One being people
00:46:14.340
have to feel like they're part of the team, right? So I think especially so in today's world. So even if
00:46:21.600
I'm a contractor doing, you know, editing for you, I want to feel like I'm part of the mission that
00:46:26.500
you're accomplishing because that's the sense that everybody, we're so interconnected now that people are
00:46:31.940
looking for sort of the purpose behind any particular thing they're doing. So we try to leverage that same
00:46:38.400
sort of emotional connection with any outside entity. So people weren't just welcome to work
00:46:43.960
for us or be attached to us. They were pulled in as part of the team. So I'll give you an example from
00:46:50.320
like the SEAL community. Historically, you might deploy to a conflict zone. This is going back,
00:46:55.400
you know, many years and why sort of first came into that environment. And you might have, you know,
00:47:00.400
a young civilian intelligence expert from some, you know, outside entity who based on his or her
00:47:08.180
sort of background or experience, they're going to be part of your team and they're going to advise
00:47:12.140
on X, Y, Z. And so they, because of the tribalism, there was, you know, a bias toward, okay, this is,
00:47:18.420
you know, Karen and Karen, here's your office over here down the hall. And here's the team room. And
00:47:22.200
here's where we eat and work out. And here's where, you know, you can use this gym down the road and
00:47:26.420
that sort of thing. Like, we appreciate what you bring to the table. Here's the meetings that you're
00:47:29.840
invited to, but we're the team and you're an additional capability. It's sort of exaggerating
00:47:34.520
it, but we've all felt that sort of pressure. And we're certainly part of the sort of tribal
00:47:38.660
nature of these teams. And what our leadership forced us to change toward and think through was
00:47:43.640
Karen needs to be part of this team. And that doesn't mean on paper, she's assigned to your
00:47:48.160
unit for X number of months. It means she's in your headquarters. She knows how you think. She sits
00:47:53.300
through all the meetings. She's in your chow hall. She uses your workout facilities. She is
00:47:58.060
integrated into how you operate as a culture. And then her subject matter expertise will be able
00:48:04.700
to be much more effectively leveraged inside of your thinking. She becomes part of your OODA loop,
00:48:10.340
so to speak, as we were talking about earlier, which if you're trying to take a linear approach
00:48:14.960
where, you know, the tribe will think about it to this level, we hit this brick wall, then we call
00:48:20.180
in Karen and she drops in this one amazing insight. And then we solve the issue. That's just
00:48:24.740
completely unrealistic in today's age. She needs to be part of that from step one, not just in the
00:48:30.380
information sharing, but in the way that that culture interacts with one another in the way
00:48:35.300
it sees the problem. So that was one big part of it internally to teams, like pulling people in and
00:48:39.900
really making them part of your tribe. The other was external. As you talk about external partners,
00:48:46.020
our leadership used the liaison model, which is not new in the military, in a wholly different way.
00:48:50.720
So the idea of exchanging folks between different organizations goes, you know, far back in
00:48:56.140
military history. But part of their function historically was just to make sure that, you
00:48:59.740
know, units didn't run into each other and that next moves were aligned between different parts
00:49:04.520
of the battlefield, those sorts of things. So it's a pretty transactional position and you could,
00:49:08.140
you didn't need to put a super high performer in to be able to do that. It could be a junior person,
00:49:12.140
it could be a B player that kind of didn't have a home in the unit, etc. But in the speed of the
00:49:19.080
battlefield made that old model just, just totally ineffective. So our leadership started grabbing
00:49:24.100
very seasoned folks from the battlefield that were clearly on a track, a high performance track,
00:49:30.580
and we're going to be senior leaders inside the organization in short order, where the units
00:49:35.720
would be tempted, like, this is where I want to grab this person and put them in charge of this
00:49:38.980
unit that's in the toughest part of the fight. They instead would have, you know, they drop their
00:49:43.240
body armor and weapons, put on a suit and tie and go work in a civilian intelligence agency or work
00:49:48.300
at an embassy or work in a non-traditional capacity under the title of liaison. But what they really
00:49:54.200
were was a senior enough and insightful enough individual that they connect directly with senior
00:50:00.080
leadership in those other spaces. And they were tethered directly into our senior leadership.
00:50:04.160
So you had this amazing web of connectivity between our sort of hybrid system and these other
00:50:10.420
actors that they could run their organization however they saw fit. But when what we were doing
00:50:15.780
needed to get to those other enterprises with, with network level speed, you had all these
00:50:21.360
positions embedded inside of them that could quickly walk into the offices of the most senior
00:50:25.880
leaders and say, sir, ma'am, here's exactly what you need to understand right now. Here's what we're
00:50:29.740
doing to, you know, handle the situation. We'd like your guidance input, et cetera. I can get you on a
00:50:34.740
phone call right now with our senior leadership. We're going to have a video teleconference on this
00:50:38.420
in 10 minutes. You're invited to sit through and, and sort of guide it from your direction.
00:50:41.900
And they felt like they were truly part of that, that enterprise based on the connectivity that
00:50:46.380
those liaisons provided. And I think you can do similar sorts of models in, in industry. We've,
00:50:51.640
we've, we've done it inside of global enterprises, establishing these sorts of positions between,
00:50:57.540
you know, global regions, et cetera. Or if you're working with outside actors, like here's a joint
00:51:03.420
venture partner, or, you know, even a frenemy in a space, like we have to start exchanging people.
00:51:07.760
So we really understand how each other is seeing this, the market so that we can best leverage,
00:51:12.800
uh, our collective strengths. It's a, I think it's a very universal system.
00:51:17.140
That's awesome. Well, Chris, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more
00:51:22.480
Yeah. So, uh, the McChrystal group is just, you know, hop on our website and see some of the work
00:51:27.040
we do. And one mission is out, uh, 13 June. So we're excited about its release and hopefully be
00:51:33.680
hearing, hearing more about that. If they want to sort of understand the depth and background,
00:51:37.180
you can start there and then go back to team of teams or the other way around. But between the,
00:51:40.820
the two of those, there's a, there's a sort of a story about our experiences and how we think it
00:51:46.720
That's it. Well, Chris Fussell, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:51:51.000
My guest today was Chris Fussell. He's the author of the book, One Mission. You can find that on
00:51:55.480
amazon.com. You can also find more information about his work at mccrystalgroup.com. Also check out
00:52:00.360
our show notes at aom.is slash fussell where you can find links to resources where you can delve
00:52:04.460
deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast.
00:52:21.360
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:52:24.500
artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy this show, have gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate if you
00:52:28.400
give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps that a lot. As always, thank you for your continued
00:52:32.160
support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.