Admittedly, the ASU/GSV Summit, an incredible gathering of education and technology leaders, is an unlikely venue for a career soldier to attend – much less to keynote. Yet the opportunity to meet and to listen to the challenges leaders and many young entrepreneurs face in tackling America’s most important challenge – educating our children – was more than just an honor, it was a fascinating experience.
Paradoxically, the wars I’d known, and the efforts of these leaders are less different than alike. I had led a Joint Special Operations Task Force against an agile network in an environment marked by dynamic change, and later studied and outlined the transformation we drove in our book, Team of Teams. And although education, business, and war feel far apart, we shared a powerful common denominator – the need to leverage the agility and adaptability of great small teams at a scale that can have real large-scale impact.
We seemed to approach the problem from different angles – but sought a common endstate. My Task Force was a collection of professional warriors organized into peerless small teams possessing strong cultures that were the foundation of our effectiveness. But the tribal nature of their cohesion made them resistant to change, and some of our processes reflected the sclerosis common to most organizations as they grow large. Still-small startups typically enjoy tremendous agility, but most dream of growing big. We all sought to reach the “sweet spot” of admirable agility at scale – which is a daunting challenge.
At first glance, the challenge I faced in the military seems more akin to the problem-sets of CEOs of large companies. We had internal silos and divisions— cross-functional collaboration was anything but easy. Tribalism and different perspectives meant that we lacked a common purpose (and indeed, sometimes even worked at cross-purposes). But most of all, we were painfully slow. Information made its way up from the operator on the ground to the commanding general at the top through a snaking hierarchy, winding its way up the chain-of-command like a distorted game of telephone.
But if you looked at our smallest, most elite teams, you would find something entirely different. Our Special Operations forces actually had more in common with the Silicon Valley types. Like their military counterparts, startup members enjoy the magic of small team dynamics. There is a shared consciousness and focus on a common goal that allows each member to confidently advance the cause in a fluid and empowered manner, without hesitation or second-guessing.
However, very few startup founders dream of leading a small team forever; instead, they often have visions of their small companies taking off, with money, global offices, and meaningful change along the way. Similarly, our fight wasn’t confined to the tactical battles that our small Special Ops teams could win— it was a global effort, and we were losing at the strategic level. The lesson is universal: while individual teams are capable of accomplishing great feats, larger organizations are often clunky and ineffective. Unfortunately, the magic of small teams is difficult to replicate across an organization of thousands.
We all value the agility of small teams, but we also want to achieve success on a global scale, which requires organization, processes, distribution systems, etc. In short, we want 21st century results using the 20th century processes that we are most comfortable with. These approaches will forever be at odds— we’ve got to adapt our processes and leadership behaviors at the enterprise level if we want to recapture the advantages of small nimble teams.
We learned this the hard way, eventually realizing that in order to win we had to make the overall Task Force more than a collection of competent small teams. The synergies and connections across the force had to approximate a “team of teams” that achieved the magic of a small team – at the scale necessary to win. To do this, we had to transform our organization in a myriad of ways that can be sorted into three major categories: Information Flow, Operating Processes, and Leader Behaviors, that cumulatively represented nothing less than a radical shift in the organization’s culture.
By employing Information Technology and new operating expectations to dramatically increase transparency across the command, implementing a disciplined operating rhythm to enforce collaboration, and aggressively decentralizing formerly top-driven decision making, we were able to breach the formidable walls of bureaucracies and align disparate parts of a necessarily diverse team with tremendous benefits. And we did this in the middle of a war that we were initially losing.
While an established company has to relearn these behaviors and retool their processes, startups have to remember to retain them, adapting and scaling up as their company grows. Speed and ease of collaboration are decisive advantages for a startup; keeping it that way is the difficult part.
Take it from us—it is much easier to build in adaptability and structure as you grow, rather than to retool a large global enterprise later on.
General Stan McChrystal is a founder and managing partner of the advisory services firm McChrystal Group, which uses a team of teams approach to build adaptable organizations capable of tackling the world’s most complex leadership challenges. For more information on team of teams and scaling startups, click here
