Resilience + Innovation Roadmaps
“Today’s rapidly changing world, marked by increased speed and dense interdependencies, means that organizations everywhere are now facing dizzying challenges, from global terrorism to health epidemics to supply chain disruption to game-changing technologies. These issues can be solved only by creating sustained organizational adaptability through the establishment of a team of teams.”
An opt-out button for pain
One way to skip some of the pain of learning new things is to learn from others. Books help in this way. Here are four books that help opt out of pain by offering a roadmap to thriving in uncertainty.
TLDR;
Buy the books
The pain I hear about most: how to shift out of "crisis mode" into surviving and thriving
People I've spoken to are saying "we made it through, but I don't want the next 90 days to look like the last 90 days." Alongside that concern is a related realization that managing disruption isn't a theoretical need. The pace of disruption has been accelerating relentlessly for years.
Disruption has been showing up as a concern in CEO surveys consistently and with increasing frequency over the last few years. Hopefully, there will be the type of breathing room experienced between hurricanes: time enough to rebuild stronger. But everyone who lives in a coastal town that has a hurricane risk knows that the time to build for resilience is not when the storm is rolling in.
There are good books that talk about the problem...but don't fully address "next steps" in specific ways such that a company can take immediate action.
Best selling author Nassim Nicholas Talib outlined disruptions and some shortcomings of existing systems to handle them in books like Black Swan and Antifragile. These are good books, but they don't tell you specifically "here is what to do right now"—that wasn't the goal of the writer.
At the other end of the spectrum are the trademarked consulting methodologies. They say "do exactly these steps, and by the way, they are all proprietary and trademarked." While many of these books are useful and extremely well done, it can be difficult to separate the ideas of value from the pitch in a way that you can get buy-in from your teams fast.
Examples that resonate
There aren't many domains where teams have to find ways to succeed amid turbulence and do it at scale. For that reason, it's rare to find a book that combines both theory and practice outside of academic studies of companies.
So it's remarkable that I found Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World to be outstanding. It details the transformation US. Joint Operations Command (JSOC) had to undergo and it's implications for all businesses based on command-and-control mythology.
I have recommended it previously. Since reading it, a followup work came out, and two other authors filled in more details about the transformation. Together, they provide a complete set. All of the books maintain a level of consistent quality and highly actionable content.
Together, these books provide a proven roadmap to resilience, from perspectives we rarely get to see
This set wasn't written or marketed as a set, but it functions as a set all the same. Together, they provide a roadmap for transforming an organization—even when the organization is facing immediate threats and disruption. And they explain why the changes are necessary, and how they iterated to find the right approaches.
The map takes shape through 3 viewpoints
The books come from two pairs of primary authors. Those pairs each founded private sector companies after retiring from the military. The pairs don’t seem to have coordinated their writing, and still, the books fit together very well. To my mind, this is a measure of how completely JSOC pulled off the transformation because you have two separate accounts that fit together almost perfectly.
Viewpoint 1: CEO and Leadership Team
General Stanley McChrystal (US Army, ret.) is the primary author of Team of Teams, and he authored the book with his aide de camp (think Chief of Staff or COO) Chris Fussell, Tantum Collins, and David Silverman.
This is the view of the CEO’s view and the leadership team. It includes a full account of why a change was critical, and how leadership assessed the situation and came up with specific solutions. It includes the principles that guided this transformation.
Viewpoint 2: COO or Chief of Staff
Chris Fussell and co-author C. W. Goodyear follow up Team of Teams with One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams. This work is a “double click” on the first book as it covers how the principles were operationalized. It provides the guidelines for how to do so along with tactics and examples.
Viewpoint 3: The Front Line
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin worked their way up through the ranks of the Navy SEALS into leadership positions during this unique conflict. As highly experienced operators, their duties included training the next generation of their leaders.
Leadership within the “front line” and empowerment of the front line are major themes within all the works. This viewpoint is given from the perspective of the leaders on the front line. Their pairing of these authors is similar to McChrystal/Fussell. It follows that of CEO/COO in many ways: you have a senior role thinking through systems, and a direct report responsible for translating those systems into action with the team.
In this case, Jocko Willink was the ranking officer of the pair and is now CEO in their private venture, with Babin, who came up under his command initially as the president and COO of the private venture (Echelon Front).
The two books from these authors take us to the front line leaders. Extreme Ownership: How US Navy Seals Lead and Win outlines a set of operating principles laid out as the 4 laws of combat, which could be easily called the 4 laws of teamwork. These concepts are simple (though not necessarily easy) to apply to business contexts. The ideas align well with the academic research and yet have the simplicity that only comes from the pain of putting the ideas into practice. Where this book is on operating principles, the next book The Dichotomy of Leadership is concerned with how to apply those principles in practical ways.
In my next post, I'll start by reviewing Team of Teams. Subsequent books will move through the stack.