Team of teams

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.