Stanley McChrystal's Shared Consciousness and Empowered Execution

JSOC was built to run precise raids against terrorist groups with a top-down chain of command. In Iraq in late 2003 it met al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had no such chain. McChrystal says his units kept running good raids and kept missing the result. It took about two months to accept that the hierarchy they were hunting wasn't there, and that the problem was now them.

McChrystal's fix was to share far more information than JSOC ever had. The old rule was need-to-know. In JSOC meetings, McChrystal says, the goal was for every person to understand everything all the time. He admits that's impossible. In practice it meant sharing as much as you practically can, so each person saw the wider campaign around their own role. He compares the result to a group of four or five people who can finish each other's sentences, at the scale of a whole command.

People hear "empowered execution" and call it decentralized authority. McChrystal disagrees. Authority handed down with nothing else leaves people unsure what to do or when to do it. The shared picture is what lets them act well.

On The Knowledge Project he uses the blind men and the elephant to explain 9/11. Each agency held a piece, and none was wrong about its own piece. His lesson was to connect organizations as far as possible to complete the mosaic, and to stay humble about how much any one part can see. Andy Grove made the same point about companies: the people at the edge see a strategic inflection point before the top does.

McChrystal calls Team of Teams a set of principles with left and right limits. He is wary of templates, because systems dropped on a company from outside get rejected because nobody there invented them. Treat the steps below as the limits and let your team design its own version inside them.

1. Make the case for change first. He says JSOC could not have changed in peacetime. It changed because it was losing. If people don't accept that something has to change, every later step runs into a headwind.
2. Start with trust and common purpose. His four ideas come in order: trust, common purpose, shared consciousness, empowered execution. Common purpose comes from telling people what you're trying to do and letting them help shape it. Patrick Lencioni also puts trust at the base of his Five Dysfunctions pyramid.
3. Set a regular sync and match it to your pace. JSOC re-synced every 24 hours because that was the speed of the war. McChrystal Group, his own firm, meets twice a week, and it went to six days a week when COVID hit. The point is to align everyone on the mission and the current situation, so teams stop sending decisions up the chain.
4. Send the reports ahead and talk about what they mean. Offices taking turns reading status updates aloud is the version that fails.

After the headline, ask what it means and let the groups discuss it. When the sync works, people leave knowing what affects them and which decisions they can make on their own.

5. Push authority down past your comfort. He says to push it as low as you can, which is not always the very bottom.

6. Keep middle managers responsible. His middle leaders asked whether they still owned the result if a subordinate decided and failed. His answer was yes. Their job became preparing people: picking the right ones and giving them the training and information to succeed.
7. Watch your face when someone reports a failure. JSOC failed on about 30% of its operations, and McChrystal pushed that rate higher, because a unit that tries to drive risk to zero barely acts. Leaders reported failed missions on the daily call in front of about 7,500 people. If he looked angry, he says, the other 7,499 would play it safe the next day.

Works best when conditions change faster than one person can track. McChrystal says a strategy set at an annual offsite no longer lasts a year, so you re-sync as things move.

Works best when the leader takes a different job. He calls it gardening: stop moving every chess piece yourself and build the place where other people make the moves.

Fails when you launch the big meeting cold. Announce a 90-minute call for tomorrow, he says, and you'll hold it once. A few people will like it, the rest will call it a waste of time, and nobody will come back.

Fails when controls pile up. When he took over JSOC, every past mistake had left behind a new approval or backup rule, and the unit could barely act. Trust, he says, means you can't put a check on everything. It also takes time and a track record.

Fails when the leader talks up risk and punishes failure. People cut risk to zero and stop going out. Brian Chesky argues that founders should stay deep in the details. The disagreement below covers when each side is right.