CENTCOM initially prohibited the Pentagon staffs from viewing their internal web site out of a (common) fear of giving “higher headquarters” visibility into unfinalized planning products. Such absurdities reflect the truth that most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
The problem is that the logic of “need to know” depends on the assumption that somebody – some manager or algorithm or bureaucracy – actually knows who does and does not need to know which material. In order to say definitively that a SEAL ground force does not need awareness of a particular intelligence source, or that an intel analyst does not need to know precisely what happened on any given mission, the commander must be able to say with confidence that those pieces of knowledge have no bearing on what those teams are attempting to do, nor on the situations the analyst may encounter.
Our experience showed us this was never the case.
More than once in Iraq we were close to mounting capture/kill operations only to learn at the last hour that the targets were working undercover for another coalition entity. The organizations structures we had developed in the name of secret and efficiency actively prevented us from talking to each other and assembling a full picture.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
Effective prediction – as we have discussed – has become increasingly difficult, and in many situations impossible. Continuing to function under the illusion that we can understand and foresee exactly what will be relevant to whom is hubris. It might feel safe, but it is the opposite. Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
Internal and external analysis later concluded that all these problems stemmed from shortfalls of organizational communication – devastating “interface failures,” or blinks. In his 1964 book The American Challenge, French journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber argued that Europe’s lag behind the United States in the Space Race was not a question of money but of “methods of organization above all . . . this is not a matter of ‘brain power’ in the traditional sense of the term, but of organization, education, and training.” On the other side of the pond, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concurred that Europe suffered from a managerial deficit: “The technological gap was misnamed.” It was a space age Tower of Babel: the countries’ inability to speak to one another obstructed their joint effort to reach the heavens.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
NASA’s success illustrated a number of profound organizational insights. Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of “interface failures.” It also proved that the cognitive “oneness” – the emergent intelligence – that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information. This runs counter to the standard “need-to-know” mindset.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
