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Team of Teams
Military inspiration for the world we could create
A book on military strategy may not seem like an obvious place to find a model for the future of humanity, but I found Team of Teams tremendously inspiring in terms of the world we could create.
When General Stanley McChrystal arrived in Iraq in 2003 as the newly appointed commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, he found that al-Qaeda were running circles around the task force, despite being massively outgunned in terms of numbers, equipment, and training. To put it in biblical/American terms, the Davids were whipping Goliath’s ass. This realisation led to a radical restructuring of the way the task force operated, in order to become more nimble and responsive to fast-evolving situations in real time.
The story told in Team of Teams makes an interesting complement to two other books I have read recently — Coping With Chaos and Finding Our Way (which I reviewed in this blog), and one that I read a while ago, Reinventing Organisations.
Coming from very different directions, all these books arrive at the same conclusion: in this increasingly complex (versus merely complicated) world, hierarchical power structures…
