Team of teams

Big fan of this book.

It's about how to enable huge, complex teams to be adaptable at scale.

It deep dives into 2 main strategies:

1. Creating shared consciousnesses so that folks at the front lines have a very high level of information and context.
2. Delegating decision making so that senior leadership don't bottleneck, increasing speed, adaptability, and empowerment.

Lots of fantastic, well placed anecdotes from: the fight in Iraq, US companies, NASA, historical books, and the author's personal life.

It takes a bit to get going but warms up by chapter 6 on org structures, which is fantastic. Loved chapter 8 on the O&I meeting structure, and chapter 11 on a leader's role on a team of teams.

It's not immediately drag-and-drop applicable to software teams, but that's also what's so good about this book, as the tactics from a different context (the war against Al Qaeda) spur thought on what methods you could apply to software teams and how you might adapt them. The strategies are generalized enough to last for decades.

I would give 4.5 stars. Going to round up as this is just so well written, with such interesting, practical examples. The best book on empowerment at scale that I've read yet.

Team development

Eventually, we all have to take a leap of faith and dive into the swirl. Our destination is a future whose form we may not find comforting, but which has just as much beauty and potential as the straight lines and right angles of the past century of reductionism: this future will take the form of organic networks, resilience engineering, controlled flooding-a world without stop signs. (249)

Put simply, I enjoyed this book.

It's been a title on my “To Read” list for a while, and now that I've gotten through it for the first time, I find that it's given voice to much of what I've consulted over the years as well as I've studied during and following my doctoral dissertation. Command and control is a bit of a myth, functional in specific, tightly-focused contexts and perhaps more broadly in a bygone era. In my world of emergency management (and emergency services more generally), an example to clarify this statement is helpful. Command and control can greatly benefit the tightly focused operations of an incident scene (or a single incident scene within a larger disaster), where the goal is largely agreed-upon. Yet, for the purposes of wrapping one's arms around the totality of the disaster, command and control struggles (if it doesn't outright fail).

What's needed in these situations?

From the perspective of my dissertation, I explored the applicability of “shared leadership.” Others might think of an even broader term: “collaboration.” McChrystal and colleagues dub it a “team of teams,” and that's an apt moniker.

Perhaps the most important insight from this book is that even though the authors advocate for a team of teams approach, they quickly expand that recommendation with a reminder that the amoeba-like nature of the structure means that it's nearly impossible to describe it prescriptively. Every organization finds itself in myriad contexts, each of which may bear relevance to the ultimate structure of the team of teams. With that, I couldn't agree more.

I appreciated the authors' efforts to use military and civilian examples. the book leans military, and that's okay because that's the primary context of the majority of the authors and the inspiration for the line of thinking that came to be known as “team of teams.” Could the book have benefitted from, perhaps, small business examples or organizations from sectors focused on innovation? Sure it could have, but that's not a critique of the text so much as it is my recognition that all of us would love to see uber-relevant, seemingly cherry-picked examples from contexts like our own. There again, the point of the writing is to prompt one's thinking, and I (the reader) carry the responsibility for judging the applicability of the text for my own experience (a small business owner and college professor, which are the vocational manifestations of my identity as an emergency manager as described above).

If you work in the field of emergency management, then I highly recommend this book. In fact, I tend to agree with author and emergency manager Kelly McKinney's assertion that this is required reading for emergency managers.

So, pick it up, set aside a few hours, and enjoy.