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Gazette Januar y 2021
“ The education in The King’s School is not for the exclusive benefit of those upon whom it is bestowed, but for the that of the entire community.”
Delivering Leadership In December 2018, I had the pleasure of travelling across Italy and France with my beautiful wife and three amazing children, with one particular highlight being Strasbourg famously known for its Christmas Markets. Every December, as we decorate our tree and house, we enjoy pulling out the ornaments we bought at those markets, taking us back to a moment of nostalgia. We have a beautifully crafted nutcracker, handmade decorations and a really random soap holder in the colours of the Alsace region of red and white - which I bought! Another clear memory this ritual takes me back to is meeting an impressive American woman on a walking history tour we did of Strasbourg. This lady was a Leadership and Management Consultant and we discussed some of the clients she had worked with across Europe and North America. Towards the end of the tour I asked her what was one big theme or lesson she had gained recently. She answered simply Team of Teams, you need to read Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal. So I did. Stanley McChrystal was commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2003 to 2008. After which, he with several academics and colleagues, wrote Team of Teams – New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. McChrystal discusses early in this paradigm shifting book that despite his Joint Task
Force’s superior pedigree, gadgets and commitment, things were slipping away from them. McChrystal argues that a significant factor in this failure to gain an upper hand against what appeared to be a less resourced and numbered enemy was the strict chain of command and centralised hierarchy which his force, and that of most modern armies, had held on to. This model was in stark contrast to that of the insurgents, who had evolved into what he coined a “Team of Teams” organisation. McChrystal painfully and slowly came to the realisation that his Task Force’s enemy had a decentralised command, which allowed the insurgents, who shared a common understanding and goal, to move faster, regroup quicker and be more agile, all the while having the confidence in their own judgement and support of their superiors to make decisions in the field and thus act and execute plans when they felt the time was right.
Stanley McChrystal continued to articulate these observations into objectives for his army with the realisation his Task Force needed a shared consciousness and empowered execution. His army needed to have a common and clear understanding of the objectives, which when established, needed to be matched with the knowledge and authority to act and carry out action – be empowered to execute plans. All the while, each small team needed to be acting autonomously, yet be sharing and absorbing information to form a network of teams – a team of teams. The Task Force needed to reduce the lag between when a Seal Team collected information and when they were given authority to raid the appropriate compound by a senior general back at the base, which to this point in McChrystal’s story was so long that the compound was usually empty when the Seals finally executed the raid.
