 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to New America. Thank you for coming today. We're very thrilled to have Chris Fussell talk about his new book. Chris is a fellow at New America, senior fellow at New America. He also teaches at Yale. He is the co-author of the bestselling book, Team of Teams with General McChrystal. He is also a partner at the McChrystal group and was in the SEAL teams for a decade and a half. I think we met each other about a decade ago. Wonderful to have you here, Chris. Chris's wife Holly is here, and his daughter Lenear, and his mother Raimel Sharon. We're thrilled to have them here too as well. Chris is going to make some opening observations about the book and then we'll open it up to questions and answers. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Peter, and thanks everybody for making it. If I seem a little anxious, if you have your nine-year-old daughter in the audience, it changes the dynamic a little bit. I will get a thorough critique tonight, I'm sure, about what works and what doesn't. So, I thought maybe just some opening framing comments. Much of what we try to lay out in one mission is sort of an organizational structural argument from the special operations lens. But the work we've been doing since that time, I left the service in 2012, has been in a broad range of industries. And what we're seeing there is a very similar pattern to what we experienced on the battlefield going back 10 to 15 years from a systems level. Big traditional organizational models that are not designed to deal with the speed of change in the information age. That was very visceral, obviously, in the military because you were sending forces out into harm's way and they were realizing there's a problem that's growing much faster than we're able to handle. But the same conversation is happening across industry, which is where we've done most of our work since then. And I think now, luckily, we're starting to have deeper conversations in industry, beyond industry, in healthcare, in political systems, in economic sort of dialogue, etc. where this sort of problem that I'll describe is manifesting in different ways. But I think it's tied to the same core issue, which is ultimately come down to this idea of sort of big traditional hierarchical models that we all grew up inside of versus a new sort of external environment. So in one mission, we try to lay out a bit of a history of this sort of organizational model, which has been around forever, as long as it's been humans trying to organize themselves, but really refined in the post-industrial age revolution. So when we learned how to capture a lot of energy and build big things, we also perfected our model for how to put humans inside of that and build these big systems. So the org charts and the bureaucracies that we've all grown up inside of, they have a really interesting history and they were designed to solve for a lot of problems. What they're trying to do is add order and structure to the universe as we sort of grew in our capability as a human race. One of the underlying assumptions here is that these are designed to fight systems that look the same, fight, compete against, interact with, however you want to look at that. This is how you can fight wars, this is how diplomacy works, this is how any big system is looking for other similarly structured sort of models. And so that was one of our biases when we entered the conflict post-2001, even inside of the special operations community. I know myself joining the SEAL teams in the late 90s, I didn't know anything about big structures or the military for that point, but I did assume I'm entering some sort of different space going into the special operations SEAL community, et cetera. And to a certain point that was true, when you think about the popularized version of small military units, what they look like is this. There's an org chart somewhere on the wall, the lieutenants in charge over the case may be, but as soon as they get out into the field, step off the helicopter, so to speak, they start operating like this as just a network of individual, highly capable actors, right? And so this is the structure that we had going into the fight. This is what all of our mentality was focused on. These are the small teams that we're going to deploy and eventually win with. And so when we got into the conflict, I'm sure there were folks in this room that were there in Iraq 2004, 2005, when the problem really started to escalate. These teams were doing what they were purpose built to do and doing it very well, going out and identifying problems and interacting with them, right? And every time they would find you go to a target, you would find new bits of sort of raw intelligence. Now, our bias about how systems work, especially when we started to think this is an insurgency, was that it must have some sort of shape like this. Because if you're going to get big enough and remain organized, this is how you do it. And insurgents throughout history have done that. It's just they don't map it out so everybody can see it, right? They do this in the shadows and then eventually they sort of stand up and they try to overthrow the state very quickly. So our assumption was Zarkawi is the big, very senior charismatic leader of Al Qaeda and then others that came behind him. They were building out some sort of model that looked like this. And our challenge was to see these lines. We have to find enough intelligence that we can eventually connect these lines. What we didn't realize was until nearly too late, but eventually we got to handle around it, was that this is what they're structured like. This is just a distributed network of individual human actors that are not playing by any sort of traditional rule book, which is what these lines represent. There were folks like Zarkawi and others that had great influence over this, but they weren't sitting here. They were sort of super actors inside the network. They could push more influence and they could drive more information flow. But removing one of them or going directly after one of them was not going to create some inflosion because there was no hierarchy to rip apart like that. So the basic fundamental view on the problem was incorrect, right? And what we had missed and I'd say broadly, USG policy, our partners, etc., what we all missed in the last 15 or 20 years was the effects that the Information Age was going to have on movements like this. And this is where it starts to cross over into industry and the politics, economics, etc., where I think we are still dangerously undervaluing the ease with which these connections can be made. So historically, there have always been networks out there, but there's an upper limit to how big they could get. With your group of friends, you can only know so many people or get so many people involved in your tribe or your movement before it gets unstable. And then you have a choice. You either become this and then systems like this can see you and say, okay, now you've grown up, you're going to play our game by our rules, or you split the tribe and you create subnetworks, right? It was very hard for these to scale to thousands of people historically. But now, you've got a good enough idea and these are ideas more than anything. And people are passionate about your idea, well then you can communicate from your seat here with a million people around the world at light speed. So that is extremely disruptive. We're having this conversation in broad terms, but going back 10, 15 years, this was new thinking and very surprising to these traditional systems over here. So the first sort of realization and tension that we encountered up and then I'll pause and let them have some discussion on how we handled it, was the realization from these teams down here really that there's a new battlefield, so to speak. And it's right here. It's the intersection between these big traditional systems and this sort of constantly changing dynamic problem. Because the assumption going in as we talked about was, we will go out, find new raw intelligence here and we'll plug it into this hierarchy that we think exists. So our headquarters were covered with Post-it notes framed out like a hierarchy, PowerPoint slides. I'm sure there are people in this room that spent years trying to build those, right? And then you realize, okay, those are all a waste of time. And these teams started to say, hey, every time we put a piece of information into the structure we're hoping to see and then make a next move based on that, when we get out there, this is again, this is a totally different problem. So we're never fighting the current problem, we're fighting yesterday's problem or two days ago problem. And that's natural in any system, right? You never get an exact snapshot. But these sorts of structures can't change nearly as fast as these. So this is literally a different army every morning in Al Qaeda. And so I think we're seeing that sort of rapid change in other social movements, etc., in many other spaces beyond the battlefield. So that was the initial sort of tension that we started to feel. I'll fast forward to what the sort of the end state solution looked like and then we can get into a discussion. The whole one mission and the team of teams concept was it makes the process that we that the organization went through under then the leadership of Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal sound very clean and crisp, etc. There were a lot of sharp elbows. It took years to sort of muscle through this. And it was never formulated or drawn like this at the time. But I would argue what the system eventually became and the model that I would strongly espouse that most organizations need to consider in today's world is a dual structure hybrid model between traditional bureaucracy and the strengths of distributed networks. So I'm sure many people are here familiar with the idea that it takes a network to defeat a network that became the buzzword of the counterterrorism world. In hindsight, I think that's a half truth because this bureaucracy never went away. We never got so flat that we felt like we're all peers. I was not, you know, on a peer level, flat level with General McChrystal. There was military order and structure because that has a lot of strengths to it. That's how you can scale, deploy, interact with other similarly structured organizations like the Pentagon, etc. You can't just become this massively decentralized entity and then cross your fingers and hope it all works out. But there were incredible strengths that Al-Qaeda was demonstrating by leveraging network methodology. Unbeknownst to them, I mean, I don't want to give them too much credit. I think they just stumbled into this. ISIS has since refined it a bit and there's a deeper understanding there, but it's still not very academic in my opinion. But layered inside of that with a recognition that there's something to learn here, then developed a series of internal, interconnected and constantly changing subnetworks. So these were individual actors or these small teams on the ground that were given the authority to cross connect in as real time as they needed to to reform themselves around that constantly changing problem externally. Then in time, these networks also started to extend external. So you could, you would in place individuals in other organizations around the world, partner groups that were critical of a fight be that intelligence agencies, host nation partners, et cetera, who could or could not, it was up to them change their structure. Some did, some didn't, and that was a choice left up to this organization. But by creating these sorts of ties externally, what we called our liaison network that was spread around the world, you allowed this sort of hybrid methodology to influence at least and pull in at a communication and relationship level, all sorts of organizations around the world. So I'll pause there. That's eventually what the system became. And this took probably 18 months to gain traction. If I would say this change model started to be discussed at the senior leadership level, well above my pay grade, but I know this in hindsight, probably late 2004, so maybe a year and a half or so into the invasion probably took another 12 to 18 months for trickle down to the small team level, so that these operational units on the ground realized there's something different happening here. And then by probably the 24 to two to two and a half year mark, it was just ingrained into the DNA of the organization, and that's accelerated and advanced since that time. So it's not an immediate fix. There was not a playbook that was being implemented. This was very organic change based on aggressive and visionary leadership that we had in place at the time, who were at least willing to step back one level and say, if nothing else, let's be honest with ourselves and say the world is a little bit different than what we were structured to do. So let's give ourselves some opportunity to rethink how we're structured and see what comes of it. And what eventually came from it was this sort of model. So I'll pause there, but thank you for the attention. So just been joined by Amory Slaughter, who's a CEO of New Americans, just written a book on networks itself that just came out. So if you have a question, let's wait for the mic. But while we're waiting for the mic, I'm going to raise your hand and identify yourself. You were losing the war when you implemented this model, or the United States was losing the war. Obviously that's kind of a big kind of impotistic change things. And I mean, I guess two questions. One, do you think that the JSOC community and others have kind of retained this model today, because obviously we're in a kind of different space where we're not losing in quite the same way? And secondarily, do you think that, I mean, I thought this was very interesting because you kind of remodeled a little bit of how we understood what happened because you said this hierarchy really was necessary. And also this network, which is a hard thing to pull off, because for all the obvious reasons, and how you kind of hit that sweet spot, whether you're a corporation or a government entity, that I guess is a real question and puzzle. Yeah. First, let me qualify. I use we in a very royal sense. I was one of these knuckleheads way down here, but I've had the unique advantage of the last few years to sit back and consider a lot of this change, which is where all this comes from. But the, to your point, I think, I've been out of the service for about five years, so and I have no special access to anything. But just based on the way that operations are taking place around the world and the sort of the DNA of the organization when I did leave in 2012, I believe this continues to accelerate in advance. But part of that, there's a few factors I would say probably attribute to that. These communities in particular, special operations communities are very close loop, you know, so you come in and leaders tend to stay in that environment for years. So there are senior leaders now in this space that have been in there for decades, right? And which is which is helpful. So it becomes routinized as people move up, then locked into sort of the DNA of the organization because they know at every level they see how this succeeds, right? So undoing it now would probably be just as difficult as doing it was in the first place. But I think the driving factor there is proximity to the most difficult problems. For better or worse, our country hasn't allowed these entities, these parts of the military and intelligence agencies to get any distance from them in the fight. So they're in a state of constant iteration. I do think other big systems that became part of this structure, you know, Pentagon coordination, other intelligence agencies, et cetera, as we've, there's been more distance between those organizations probably in a good way, in many ways, in the fight, that any system will naturally regress, in my opinion, back to a traditional bureaucratic model because it's easier. It makes sense. That's how you, that's how you budget, that's how you interact with the Pentagon or with Congress, et cetera. That's how you train and recruit. So it's just an easier way to structure. And until we learn this lesson in depth, I think we'll, we run that risk of always going backwards. Yeah, Chris, just kind of following on that. I think one of the interesting things I took from the book was just how quickly that back in one of your case studies, just how quickly that backsliding effect took hold. If the sort of leadership wasn't constantly maintaining, cultivating and sort of iterating it, and it wasn't something you just put in place and walk away from it, there was a constant need to sort of, and in one case it sort of failed for that very reason, right? No, that's right. And I would say that the, you know, going back to this, because we, we do get this question a lot with the work that we do in other spaces, which is maybe to Peter's point. Okay, that makes sense, but you were at war and there's people going out in the harm's way, like that's a pretty good driver for change, which is absolutely true. It's a great forcing function. And, you know, had we shown up and the old system was working, there would have been no impetus to drive any sort of change. I do think, though, now, and this, this, I've been having this conversation for several years outside of the military, it's getting any easier and easier to convince people that there's something weird going on in the world, which I think is tied to this shift over here. And major global change, you know, political cycles that are getting a little bit weird, where insurgent models can quickly use a traditional approach to running campaigns, for example. Brexit, where you have a sort of a flash mob mentality that overthrows very traditional economic interaction in Europe, et cetera, right? So people are starting to buy the thesis a little more in today's world. But the, I think, for leaders that are really trying to convince their organization to change, that's the conversation they need to be having. That it's not about you and who we have here and where we recruit from and how we train. Some of that will adapt. The big burning platform, whether we realize we're standing on it now or not, is this, the external environment. We are in the middle of transitioning still into the information age. And if you deeply believe, as a senior leader in a large organization, that the 20th century model that was designed by your great grandfather's boss is going to apply 10 years from now, then I think you're missing the bigger picture here. So that's the real risk that leaders can capture. Did anyone else write a book on network theory? Only one question. My book on network theory relied heavily on your first book on team of teams. And indeed, when I present a strategic network design, it always gets a huge boost when I'm able to refer to your experience in General McChrystal's experience in Iraq. People listened and you created what I call an execution network or a task network. But I want to ask you about one dimension, if you can turn it to the back. So for this to work, you have got to convince the people at the bottom, as you said, the kind of foot soldiers, to be able to reach to the people at the top. And so I have two questions about that. One, how did you do that? That's hard, right? I mean, to get somebody at the bottom to reach out to the general without going up, that's a big culture change. But two, and I just read, I was just reading Ray Dalio's new book, Principles and, you know, how he did work at Bridgewater. And he has this absolutely anybody should be able to talk to the boss. And yet my experience here, Peter is going to look at me, is when I've encouraged subordinates to walk right into my office and circumvent their boss and tell me their problems, their boss typically is not real happy about that. And I often really don't have the information I need in engaging with that person. So how do you make it happen? And is it really always such a good idea, as long as you have some hierarchy? It's a great question, and you're right, it's not easy. And Elon Musk put out a memo recently to his team advocating something similar to Dalio's approach. But I think a lot of those organizations, especially those types of leaders, they can get caught in this sort of Iron Rand fallacy where, well, yeah, if you're Bridgewater and you recruit nothing but geniuses from Brilliant School, then you can sort of play with the model, right? But a lot of us are normal people down here at this level who are driven by other things aside from just pure intellectual capability. So I think the, probably coming from the military, I'm more of a, or at least historically, more of a process person than a behavior person, those two interplay, obviously an interorganization to, and that's really what makes your culture, right? And what this started with was process change, which drove a behavior change. And the process change came from the idea that questioning, how do small teams do so well, right? We have these highly adaptable small teams, what do they do that works? Well, they communicate very organically, they trust each other, they have deep, deep relationship. And that's unique inside the military, but special operations especially. And so, okay, how do we scale that up? Well, one step that our leaders started to take was a different approach to how they communicated globally, right? And so I'll try to sort of map this out to what I think it looked like. If you think of the layers of any organization from strategic all the way down to your front line to your point, they all operate on these different sort of wavelengths. You are looking at five-year strategy for New America. You have, you know, fuzz in the middle trying to make sense of it all, and you have, you know, frontline researchers that are moving very quickly on problems, right? And so when you want to get something down to this team here, historically what you do is you follow this, and there's a whole layer of human gates that you go through. And it doesn't work anymore, right? But that sort of defines how fast you can do that, right? And so one approach is, well, let's just hack that whole system and anybody can walk into my office. Well, okay, but that's going to be really disruptive to this layer of the organization, right? And rightfully so. So instead of doing this sort of top-down, left-to-right approach over time, there was a recognition that, look, regardless of us trying to run an organization on this traditional model, there's a different sort of problem. It's also moving a long time because we all share that variable, whether we like it or not. But it is going like this. It's moving left, right, creating new relationships. It's growing faster than we can keep up with. And so there was a, it wasn't articulated like this, but a slow realization that if we keep playing this game, this problem is, it looks, it has a whole new set of rules, right? So let's move to small team sort of approach to alignment. And that can't cut out the middle, right? So we started to live on these 24-hour cycles because there was a recognition that that's how fast this problem changes. Every morning it's different. And so every 24 hours, General McChrystal and the senior leadership team, this is where they put in these sort of infamous now global communication forums. And there would be six, seven, 8,000 people a day on one single net, communicating about the problem, right? And so we would spend the first 90 minutes talking globally and just having a bottom-up bed conversation, which is where the behavior side comes into it. Because the senior leaders are the only ones that can say, we're going to start this conversation here and pull up the latest information through all these levels. Tell me what you're saying. This is the equivalent of walking into your office, but they're doing it in front of 6,000 people in our case. That would create this small team understanding of what the problem looked like here at that very moment, knowing that it's going to be changing even as we're having this conversation. You could then decentralize down into these teams for these 22-hour windows. They could move with speed and autonomy because you're as aligned as you're going to get without checking in for permission over here, and then you would repeat. And so that's the cycle we lived on seven days a week, years on end. Very aggressive and I wouldn't recommend it, but somewhere in there that cadence is what I think most organizations need to consider. How fast are we moving here? And how fast is this problem changing down here? And how do we re-synchronize ourselves then like a small team? Anybody can layer in. I mean, you can put everybody on a conference call every morning if you want, but if you don't have... But the behavior from the senior level is what's most key to make those actually productive conversations. So when you go and talk to organizations or NGOs or whatever, I mean how do you... Because obviously most organizations can't do a global VTC with 6,000 people. So how do you tell them about what are the ways to operationalize this? Yeah, it starts with some... The bigger question of do you agree with this theory of the case, if so, then let's look at your current structure and strategy and sort of map that out when it's at full tilt, when it's an optimal performance. What is it capable of doing? And then let's consider big recent misses, whether it's... You lost this deal because the right people didn't talk to each other fast enough. The West Coast office is dissatisfied because they're not getting information flows quick enough on the East Coast, crisis management and big systems, etc., which crisis now can move accelerate paces, obviously. Those sorts of things that you can then map out and then compare that traditional structure somewhere inside of that then we'll start to give you a focused look at where you need to speed up your communication and who needs to be involved. This one was dynamic because obviously you need it as many people to have that small team understanding because the problems moved so quickly and you needed so much autonomy pushed down to that team on the ground because they are making very strategic decisions, sometimes multiple decisions in one night, but in most organizations that cadence can end up slowing down to a weekly or fortnight sort of basis and that's much faster than the quarterly and annual cycle that the big traditional bureaucracy encourages us to follow, which is based on economic models that we design. It has nothing to do with the external environment. A lot of corporate kind of enterprises are moving much more to like a Hollywood film making model where you do something where you just grab a bunch of people together to do one problem. I mean I guess that's an advantage for this network thing. There are other approaches for that kind of it's not an organization like New America that's been around since 1999. It's something that's going to last for nine months. They're going to do something very specific and then they're going to kind of do something else. Yeah, there's a in a good way there's some pretty deep discussions going on these days around what acknowledging that there has to be a new sort of model. So there's the Hollywood model to your point, bring all the smart people together and actors and make a film. You can apply that sort of thinking to any sort of organizational problem solving. There's a holocracy sort of a massively decentralized approach. There's the whole leaderless organization argument that there's buzzwords like flat decentralized everybody's in this space right now. But I honestly I've yet to see something that all of that sounds cool and fun and exciting and fast. But it disregards long term planning in the military you're not going to design the next aircraft carrier through a network approach right that's that that needs big players of long term thinking etc. You have to interact with Congress and play all sorts of funny games in that world. You can't just say well we're going to take a leaderless networked approach and still be able to interact with global systems right. So the that's why I believe that this hybrid structure is is the closest that I've seen to what Wright looks like. Well then you raised a very good point about the Pentagon itself which is you know I mean JSOC is obviously a much more agile enterprise than the main building in across the river. And they are dealing it seemed they have an industrial model in an age which is very different in terms of the F-35 or any of these big systems. And I mean what do you assess of the DIU or some of the use you know the Pentagon in the Silicon Valley. I mean there's a defense innovation board which Eric Schmidt shares. I mean how is the Pentagon dealing with this problem which they have in space. I mean I haven't been building a long time thankfully but I think there are yeah it's unfair to just to just look at that in the entire DOD system and say well this is what the answer looks like. This is part of the answer but there are also other sort of big things that they need to understand and incorporate into their thinking which is why I think this I'll throw one more idea that may get to this. That's why I think this sort of structure can help organizations find that middle ground. So in one mission I reference an organization model called the Knephen model designed by a Welshman named Dave Snowden which is a pretty ironic name. So he makes an argument around four different quadrants that leaders can put themselves in to consider the relationship between cause and effect in any given moment and you can everyone's lived in all of these spaces simple complicated complex and chaos chaotic and this is an old theory around sort of when I enter a situation as a leader I need to quickly digest what's the relationship between cause and effect can I know it immediately is it sort of hammer and nail that's simple is it predictable but probably outside of my scope as an individual so I need to put the right team together make sure that structure is appropriate so I have the right SMEs in the room and that can be 15 people that can be 50,000 people. The underlying assumption here though is if I have the right level of folks with understanding I can predict what's going to happen next in my environment that's you know the cold war that's international diplomacy for the 20th century etc then you cross this invisible line here where you go into a complex domain where things can't be predicted and this side tends to be dominated by these structures this side I think is where most of us live on a day-to-day basis is dominated by this network methodology this has always been there but before the information age you could live over here and special operations is a great example of that you could fight a war over here World War II and you could send the Rangers over to deal with these small little headaches that were going on around the battlefield there were network complex issues but they couldn't scale right in the information age boom we're all on this side of the the field whether we like it or not and these things are growing exponentially in a chaotic environment this is like we've just been through with you know natural disaster and 9-11 etc you'll never really be able to digest the cause-and-effect relationship the tricky part here is you can if you spend enough time and energy you can reverse engineer what just happened and we wasted a lot of time in Iraq trying to do this because you think you're still over here and you say ah there it is we figured out how that happened in but in reality you're never going to see that pattern again so it can create a dangerous behavior for organizations because then they're trying to pattern recognize and it's never they're never going to see it again but you can convince yourself that you are Chris I have to ask you if you've often the White House because I've seen you draw this in the past applying this model to what happened in the last election sure we can talk politics it's a very fruitful way of looking yeah I would I would say I'd love to hear people in the group agree or disagree I think and I am not a political scientist theorist at by any level but I do think this is a ubiquitous argument about what's going on in the world so and I've never been closely involved with campaigns but as an outside observer I think you have you know big D big R systems there's a there's a party structure that's that that exists you know regardless of political cycle we're in and then you get candidates that come in and they come in with different levels of structure you know and then they plug into this model so it's not their job to maintain this model during the off cycles then these models they've been around forever and they go to big systems that they can rely on depending on which side of the fence they're on and big systems like unions wall street you know these big verticals that are very very degrees of organization right and but they have charters like here's here's what we represent here's the new party we're constantly negotiating what we represent and when the new candidate comes in we're going to start checking off stuff on our list and then if we get enough stuff on our list check off we go down to our part of the electorate that just the body populace down here and these tend to channel as well you know I have interests that you know span this full range but my most top priorities are here here and here right and so that's historically how you play the game you said here's the things I can get for you and you and you bring me these voters and these voters etc and so there was a there was a very structured way to making order out of the chaos that's down here in the population well I think what just we just saw with with uh Trump was he came in with a really weird system up here as we all know totally disregarded how the game should be played at this level and was was smart enough to go here and say what what's on the list okay I'm going to incorporate just in my language and how I present the number one thing on all of these these lists right and then I'm going to usurp this whole model through digital media I'm going to bypass you I'm going to certainly bypass you I'm going to write down here and I'm going to start addressing directly all of your concerns right and so I've got your number one on my list I've got your number one on my list etc and over time he builds out this flash mob this massive movement that allows him to punch most importantly right here into the middle right so he built out this huge network obviously we saw the results of that the problem with that in its manifest in a lot of ways but one of the major problems with that I think is and this is not a political statement this is uh sort of a warning of how we're how can you govern through this model how can you leave an organization if it if that's the basis of power for the senior leadership because if this is your network and I've I've decided to vote for you or be in your organization because you checked off my my number one concern and you checked off this person's number one concern and they happen to be the same therefore you and I are now connected but when you go back on that there's no structure that you can go through and say this is why I can't follow through on a promise I apologize please go talk to your people we'll get to it next year now you just have individual frustration in in the network that you've built up and this person and this person realize we were bonded on number one which is now gone and number two through five make us natural enemies so this network starts to break apart very quickly right so as if that's what you've built up here you're watching it just dismantle itself naturally every time you're doing what a politician has to do which is make constant adjustments and deals and we just in the last two weeks and we were seeing really massive examples of this so I don't have an answer to that I think I think that's one way of explaining what happened and it is a sort of a warning about what what does the future look like in politics and and any big system you're shaking your head you totally disagree oh good I'm nervous Isabel I'm then this gentleman over here hi I'm Isabel I'm Anne Marie's assistant and I have a question you don't have to flip back to it because I think it was like five pages ago but when you were illustrating sort of the diagram of what New America would look like or what an organization looks like where there's leadership at the top maybe there was fuzz in the middle trying to make sense of things and then there's there's all the foot soldiers all the foot soldiers at the bottom and you were giving the example of the the call the 90 minute call every day where in front of everybody the top would solicit information from the foot soldiers and what they were seeing my question is because there's so many people at the bottom and if this is happening on a day if something like that call is happening on a daily basis is there is there any vetting what gets determined for what what people at the bottom volunteer information because there's a lot out there that it is just noise or that isn't going to be useful to the top or whatever so what is the sort of winnowing process to make that time valuable and who gets selected yeah no it's a great question um and a natural concern about this sort of model and i'll i'll say the what we found um was not anticipated uh and that was obviously a risk as this grew over time and the same question comes up from every executive team in industry if you work with what actually takes place and this is why there has to be real discipline around the approach to this you have to uh you have to you have to stick to it you have to make sure that people are want to be part of that system and attend with regularity not just attend the communication form but attend mentally they're there as part of the group what you do is you create a just a series of human filters inside your subnetworks so in the traditional system it's this is where it becomes counterintuitive you'd say uh i don't have to be involved in all that i'll just tell you what's going on in my world and i'll send it up through the reports or whatever the case and 30 years ago there was less going on externally it didn't change as fast right so so that was a reliable system now there's a thousand new things changing in your world every single day if the only approach you have is the the bureaucratic system where i email my boss or whatever that's why we're all flooded with too much information i think but depending on those old models in a new structure it doesn't happen overnight but once there's a an understanding at all levels of the organization what really matters it allows people the foot soldiers to your point to be those filters and say okay a thousand things just change in my world but here are the three that matter to everybody if i don't have that access to listening to senior leaders and listening to other people in the organization articulate how they're seeing the problem then my default is well here's all this stuff and somebody somebody up there will figure it out right because that's how i kind of cover my my backside in a traditional bureaucracy in in this sort of model the the onus is on those people inside the organization to say i'm an active listener i understand we're trying to accomplish here are the two or three things that i should be talking about right now and when new people enter they'll go into the the laundry list of stuff and it takes you have a peer network that quickly stands up and says you're you're sort of wasting everybody's time right now it's okay we understand that this is a new behavior but we all understood eight through ten on your list yesterday so let's let's move on right so so social embarrassment is a powerful tool then uh peer adjustment yeah however you want to but the transparency does really help uh those sorts of behaviors for sure so i guess my my follow-up question or clarifying question about then is so is there a role then for the the sort of people in the middle of the people like fuzz the the mid-level managers to um enforce that cultural shift yes i yeah naked in the annex to um one mission just given your role there's a there's like a 10 page little mini white paper i i serve a similar role with general crystal on how i approach the job so you can digest it and tell me okay okay good yeah i so i'll add one more comment on that though because it's a really important one that mid-management is usually the part of any structure that's most concerned about a system like this because the anmaris point they're the ones that feel like they're being naturally usurped and actually what they what they become i mean that's anybody that's been at that point in their career that's the that's the most unrewarding few years of your professional career because you're just you're just managing information flow right you're not doing and you're not leading you're you're keeping the trains running um sorry fuzz uh but it can get painful in a in a model like this what those and then we felt this for sure in the military they their reward for coming to work goes through the roof compared to what it's naturally designed to do because they get to create all these subnetworks they're seeing it and shaping the the momentum of the organization teams from your chart from different parts of your chart and throwing that something right a new story of the war right how do you um achieve career growth like if their org chart isn't observing their behavior in the field there is an observing your behavior during a momentary crisis how do you get a sense of that their that their growth is linear that they're mentoring that they're not just deploying and solving temporary problems they're feeling engaged all the way up to the top yeah that's a great question and that's all that's a very um organization and industry specific uh area that you have to dive deeply into you know so it's it's the the incentive and the career development in the military context is radically different than in finance than in healthcare etc but again back to that sort of hybrid structure there is a recognition that you have to live in these two worlds what it does do and this is certainly the case that we experience it forces a real triage of that you can't be strictly a bureaucrat and make it up to the ranks anymore right um because that's now exposed and people but you also can't just be a frontline person who's disregarding everything about the long-term structure that that will be that's demonstrating an upper upper limit to your ability to manage the that other long-term linear sort of less cool but very important stuff inside the organization so that takes time and mapping for any culture going through this but acknowledging up front that we're going to get more of this but not at the disregard either way tends to at least create a safe place to start having the conversation hey chris uh yawning with new america as a senior fellow here as well one of the um interesting pieces that you brought up earlier is that a lot of people think that these networks that you you're describing um it's about the lowest possible you know enterprise being able to address the highest level and that's not necessarily you know what we were doing i mean it's actually the exposure of multiple nodes to each other in many many regards and and the sharing of information and the ability to see the commander that somebody may have not ever seen except for a visit uh to identify different uh problem sets that everybody may have commonalities with um i'm just curious because having experienced this what's your sense when you bring this model to the to the business world when you bring it out to corporate america and they explain their challenges with their nodal connections what's some common themes that you're seeing but i think they're coming out in the book but you know for the audience here yeah they uh thank you uh if you don't know yana it was part of this whole process as well um the uh from a different community but we serve together overseas the concerns are there's some common ones around and some that have come up um you know what is what does it do to sort of traditional incentives what does it do to structural relationships and all those you can sort of predict what what you really have to do with organization with senior leaders is convince them that hey there's something different going on in your in your environment so let's map that out and then when if you can really get them focused in on that and most people are ready to have that conversation these days then that usually ties back they'll say oh that's why we have this matrix part of the organization or which you know finance loves to do well that's why we build out these cross functional teams to identify this this this new upcoming problem a lot of stuff that we we tried back in in the old day right and people think that's that is a half step solution towards this new environment but actually i think what that's doing is it's it's capturing one view and we ran through this same problem my opinion it's capturing this one view of what the network looks like right now and saying ah there it is this is unique it's out of domain for any vertical let's create a matrix or a cross functional team and they'll solve that issue and you put it together and there's a performance spike because yeah but that problem is changing as you're putting together your your matrix or whatever it is and so three days three weeks three months whatever that starts to dip off but by the time the performance dips off it has become its own little mini bureaucracy right and then back to the sort of the incentive and career tracking structure in some organizations you're not going to promote until you let a part of the matrix or let a cross functional team then people are incentivized to convince you that the problem's still there because this is my one opportunity to show I can lead a cross functional team so it can actually be doubly negative on the organization there are some areas that that cfts and matrix they make total sense but the big difference here is that these subnetworks change as quickly as they can based on the environment and that comes with a whole new level of trust from senior leaders to empower their organization to do that to get them there you have to convince them what what what really matters this network is not about you connecting with this person on the front line because to Emery's point you can open your door you can do that anytime you can force that as a senior leader especially in the technology age right you can plug everybody into their conference call and they'll be there what you're trying to do is foster the relationships between the horizontal actors in your system so that they understand oh wow you're seeing the other side of this elephant and let's let's develop a true relationship share information and then we'll move as a collective before we come back and tell the boss because the boss has now empowered us to do that and the role of senior leaders I think is to create that that ecosystem where those those connections inside the network become possible what organizations or or companies corporations are doing this well it's yeah they're we lay out a few case studies in in one mission of folks that we've done it with personally and then others that are that are doing it have done it on their own that we thought were interesting to study I think the big there's some big tech out there like google etc that are trying to reverse engineer into this that sort of started as distributed networks and they're playing around with how much structure do we need on top of it most organizations obviously are like us coming from the other way we're we're big but we need to act act small in many ways I think the the systems the spaces that are thinking most deeply about this right now number one in my mind is healthcare because it's it's being attacked by from so many different angles and it's a naturally networked space right because you walk into a hospital and nobody really works for anybody and they all work for somebody right so it's really confusing and they have all these active outside actors between regulation and insurance etc so that's becoming very hard so they're they're looking aggressive and they don't want to throw away the big structure nor should that so that that's probably the space that's looking most aggressively at this a lot of folks in finance are looking aggressive with this because that world is so much more dynamic than it was 15 or 20 years finding areas of value is much more difficult technology is looking at this in in in great depth forget the googles etc of the world but just the big traditional actors from the and there's a great case study in in one mission on intuit like turbo tax and quicken etc so really forward-thinking leaders that said we are we were the insurgent now we're the big actor and we're getting attacked by insurgents all the time we can't move fast enough anymore so how do we interconnect ourselves be able to keep up with that pace the big concern there in the tech space in general is as soon as you're big enough to feel comfortable you're gonna you're gonna miss something big in the market and that can have strategic impact in days sometimes so it's more by I mean there are good there are good individual organizations that we try to highlight the book but I think it's more interesting by sector yeah the classic case to me is blockbuster and Netflix I mean they both have the same model on blockbuster is like totally gone and Netflix is probably one of the world's biggest entertainment companies yeah that's right I think there's an interesting and this applies to what I'll say here applies to the battlefield as well right so if you think about the one advantage we had we still don't the battlefield is a lot of the problems were derivative of sort of the the technology curve that's that's growing exponentially right so so early al-qaeda al-qaeda 2.0 say aqi they jumped off that technology curve and just started leveraging social media etc I mean they were not sophisticated about it but they were better than we were but they they jumped off that curve and said we figured out let's move this way which is I think what blockbuster did they said oh VHS and let's create stores and let's move this way and and Netflix went wait a second I'm gonna wait till here and then I'm gonna jump off right so the challenge in any organization now is you can't forget the technology curve and this that you know that's the innovator dilemma it's not it's not a new idea but you have to you have to have part of your team that is sitting on that curve and constantly challenging the the traditional system that has left off to to pull up a level a level a level and there's different ways you can approach that but I think again this this sort of hybrid model allows those two sides of the organizations to exist comfortably where most organizations you know they have tiger teams they have or they miss it entirely and they get really comfortable and then in in today's era they're they're gone in a matter of months or or we sometimes have a question David thanks David Sturman here with New America my question is one of the implications of the theory you're putting forward is he can have sort of the old more legacy leadership that's constraining a developing network within the organization when you're facing enemies that you're trying to deconstruct their organization like al-Qaeda or ISIS I'm wondering what thoughts go into evaluating whether it will actually be beneficial to knock out sort of leadership or other more established parts of the organization that act more like the legacy tradition whether it's a mini-statelet whether it's territorial control whether it's taking that drone strike to assassinate the leader or middle management especially in context of some studies that suggests drone strikes have actually increased violence because the leadership was controlling it and the network below actually wanted to engage in more indiscriminate violence so both how do you think we should do that and how do you think we were doing on that now or when you were working on these issues I don't I don't think it's going extremely well if you think about how long we've been at this game but I if I was you know going to try to influence this conversation in one way that would be a political level it would be if you really look at these problems through a network lens we're hooked on finding the nodes right because that's a great sound bite and you can put resources towards it etc etc and it feels like you're making some sort of success but we sort of proven that that's a that's a really hard way to get out of these problems it's a very important part but it's not the sole solution in my opinion what keeps networks together is not the individual actors but the story that they're all part of right it's the connections that matter and my two cents is what why does isis still exist why is there going to be a a 4.0 after they're gone it's because that story is still really powerful and that story is tied to you know disenfranchisement disenfranchisement bad leadership for generations and trying to reclaim a culture that was once very strong and powerful and reflected around the world which is now you know completely alienated so there's a really powerful story that are bonding those individuals together that's where the strategic effort needs to go which is which is aid which is not cutting the budget to state department which is introducing those other actors in military terminology far left of bang and trying to settle these issues before they become kinetic once you're in the kinetic phase you can stay there as long as you want but what you should be trying to do is de-escalate so that you can get into that back in this little left of bang theory and for whatever reason we don't we're not going there yeah potentially but the narrative is just too good at this point so you have to your theory of the case in iraq was indeed that de-capitated leadership was not really the answer it was taking out the middle managers right but if you really take them out at that and the aqi was basically out of business by 2010 yeah i'm not advocating you know i'm not a dub on this stuff obviously like you have to stay aggressively focused on the kinetic side of the stuff i just think it we tend to we put too much expectation on that side of it as a nation and say well eventually this will settle down well no no well we can keep doing this really well for a long time but it has to be other resources have to be put in place to to create the stability underneath hey guys brian castello thanks for the conversation today i found i find all of this stuff really interesting i've i've read team of teams i've not yet read one mission but it's on my list so i am an attorney here at one of the big law firms i'm wondering what a junior person in a big organization can do to implement some of these changes and i'm also interested in whether you've taken a look at any law firms or other entities in the legal field so the the bad news is for junior up leadership on this is very difficult this is a cultural change in the organization ultimately which it really is a top-down decision the the good news is maybe like to fuzz this point you can certainly run your peer network or and you can anchor that almost back to like the hollywood model discussion to say look no one's going to care if all the junior attorneys are getting a lot of good stuff done right so figure out how to create those subnetworks and eventually someone will ask wow how you guys are really solving problems fast how is that working and then you can share the model up but you have to you're not going to be able to convince senior leaders of this until you just prove results right um so that that would be my my one recommendation on the law firms are kind of they're different from corporations which because they're partnerships with like a hundred you know i'm just making it up but i say a hundred partners who may i mean it's not a typical kind of hierarchy in itself and so how you you know maybe getting kind of collective action in the law firm would be harder i mean i just question not a statement no it's but it's funny i i haven't spoken with a single attorney in a big law firm and even one's up to the global level that haven't said this is exactly what law needs especially as automation becomes a real significant threat outside i mean bottom lawyers are going to take over here pretty soon right and so they identify the risk also have not found one that could think through how to implement in their organization because of the complexity that peter identifies so if you want to try to crack that together we can give a shot good afternoon thanks for the conversation i'm dan uh grad student at dw uh question kind of more security lens but not ct focus do you see your model uh being effectuated in near uh peer and near peer states that could be potentially adversary to the united states and if so you know from our defense levels would we need to counter them having this new model um yeah i think the biggest threat right now uh on a the security stage is uh russia is doing this really well i mean if you take that hybrid structure and map it against how pootons run in things in russia i mean he's doing this brilliantly he has a lot of advantages i mean he's not a crat he's incredibly popular he's the wealthiest human on the planet uh he can do anything right so he can break all these rules but um just look at any of their recent actions um you know ukraine's a great example of fourth generation interconnected warfare i don't know how they would map it out but this is how i would explain it look he he'd leveraged all these external networks put different actors confused the heck out of the world nobody knew what really was happening on the ground and no one even considers that a war really unless you thoughtfully looked at it through a close lens which most people don't have the time for so it's brilliant but he can control economy he controls media he controls you know just a whole series of things that you don't want necessarily that level of control in democracy but at the near peer level that's what we need to figure out right um and couple into that artificial intelligence which on that technology curve eventually one of these big actors is going to jump up on that level this is a discussion around just the connection of human capital right we did this with powerpoint and conference calls right introduce artificial intelligence in a completely unregulated fashion like a a big actor like russia or china might be willing to do and the ability to close that that capability gap is very questionable right you can al-qaeda is not going to get ahead of you so you're just figuring out shoot how are we going to clean up our system so that we're also networked when artificial intelligence becomes a new actor a real actor at a nation state level this curve goes you know orders of magnitude above and it might you might not be able to close it which is why it has to be a constant part of the conversation in today's environment i'm mike snider i work for excenture and i um i'm supporting a client it's in the hospitality sector they just completed a pretty significant acquisition of another major competitor last year i'm pretty sure we can all guess who they are um i'm seeing this where we have a the tradition the main the acquisition entity was a was a traditional bureaucratic bureaucratic approach the organization that was that was acquired took the opposite approach for a lot of their a lot of their organizational structures have you seen this sort of this hybrid model applied as sort of a change management approach from the leadership to post merger and have you seen this in any of your other um any any rather business and and what's your what's your take on that and how how could this then be potentially applied going forward uh short answers yes um so that stuff happens all the time my my recommendation would be based on what we're seeing one culture's going to win right so you have to figure that out very quickly my recommendation obviously would be with something like this um versus the traditional you'd have a harder time um re-engineering the the more dynamic culture that you acquired to become a tradition bureaucracy without losing all of your talent right your talent's just going to exit the building if that's the model you go to yeah which is which is the the real risk right so learn from those networks and try to incorporate that some of it into the bigger system would be my advice but more so than anything what what um most mergers don't go so well right that's not that's not new thinking um but it's not because the due diligence wasn't there you have to do that before they'll allow it to happen it's not because the economics don't make sense the people people won't support from an investment standpoint if the if the numbers don't add up it's and it's not because the business doesn't you know isn't needed etc the people look hard at those different verticals it always misses because of culture and leadership right and and that's a very hard one to reverse engineer usually it's an effect of we alienated the the thing we acquired then we lost Bob and Karen and all the people that made it run we lost that red line network we filled their seats with other people but in two years it's just not the same thing we bought right so um and the temptation is just hey like let's just get in line we know how to run this this industry and that's that's where most of the risk comes from in my opinion well we want to thank you Chris for a very very stimulating conversation Chris is more than willing to sign books which let's say are outside thank you for this very much and thank you to the Apostles for coming as well thanks Peter and uh thanks everyone