During the first decade of this century, strategists affiliated with the United States Army began to investigate whether ideas from quantum physics and complexity science might have military applications. They knew the world was changing, the nature of combat situations and enemy tactics were changing, the make-up of the Army itself was changing as, now a volunteer force, many more of its officers, even those holding junior ranks, were well educated. The Army was scouting around for new ideas. But it was the experience of their Special Operations Task Force (the “Green Berets”) while fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq that really focused the need for fresh thinking and led to a radical restructuring inspired by this new science.

I don’t know whether the Army planners and strategists had heard the words “Quantum Management,” and I very much doubt they were aware of Zhang Ruimin’s thinking as he worked on designing the RenDanHedyi management model for Haier. Yet, for the same reasons, and inspired by the same science, the transformation that resulted in the Task Force’s new “Team of Teams” military organizational model employs all the principles and recommendations of Quantum Management, and the command model used to implement is identical to the RenDanHeyi management model designed by Haier. In every way, the Special Operations Task Force’s “Team of Teams” is an example of Quantum Management and RenDanHeyi adapted for the military.

In 2003, General Stanley McCrystal took command of the Army’s Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq. His mission was to defeat the Al Qaeda insurgent forces that had gained a significant hold in the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He expected this to be an easy task. His Task Force troops were “the best of the best.” Though the Task Force itself was founded only in 1984, in response to the Iran hostage crisis, the Green Beret commandos who were its soldiers had long, previous experience in dealing with guerrilla insurgencies in Viet Nam, Africa, and elsewhere. The battalions dispatched to Iraq were disciplined, well-trained, well-organized, well-equipped, well-served with sophisticated communications technology, and thousands strong. By contrast, the Al Qaeda forces were small, dispersed, poorly trained, poorly equipped, and communication between their scattered guerrilla units was done mainly by sending messengers from one to another on foot. Their organization seemed a chaotic mess. Yet despite all this superiority and advantage, the Task Force soldiers found themselves struggling to defeat Al Qaeda’s chaotic forces. Before long, General McCrystal began to realize it was precisely the advantages conferred by that “chaos and mess” that were giving Al Qaeda the edge (Fig. 20.2). He and his fellow officers learned that any hope of success would require forgetting most of their own military wisdom, and in its place, learning from their enemy. “We had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about war,” McCrystal wrote later. “We had to tear down familiar organization structures and rebuild them along completely different lines.”Footnote 1 He summarized the final result of this creative destruction in the following way,

We restricted our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and de-centralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers – the walls and floors of our hierarchies - that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands stretching over three continents. We became what is called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility that are normally limited to small teams.Footnote 2

The story of why and how The Special Operations Task Force got to this is a military version of the similar story behind Haier’s evolution of their RenDanHeyi model.

Traditional twentieth century military organization is built upon Taylor’s Newtonian model that, we have seen, was designed for the radically different conditions and technologies of the Industrial Revolution. It relies on top-down, command-and-control leadership spread down in a bureaucratic way through descending levels of rank and function. Even though the small, special operations combat teams of the Task Force who confronted guerrillas were enabled to adapt and operate independently when “out in the jungle,” they were still operating within all the bureaucratic constraints of the larger command superstructure. On their Iraq mission, the Task Force was also asked to operate in a different way than ever before. Its special commando units were traditionally dispatched individually to “put out fires” in limited trouble spots, now they were asked to fight a war as part of a thousands strong, massive force.

The Task Force that faced Al Qaeda was stratified, and fragmented into isolated operational silos, controlled by orders from above and ignorant of any battle plan they were part of. No one silo shared information with any others, no one silo had any understanding of overall strategic mission, and the highly specialized combat units simply did as they were told. Taylorian management, after all, mandated that communication between sectors and workers in a company should be kept to a minimum. The fear was that the sharing of different opinions between employees could diminish mission focus. And the parts in a machine have no need to understand the machine of which they are a part.

Still stricter communication barriers, and therefore misinformation and a lack of trust and mission coordination, existed between Task Force operatives and those belonging to partner organizations like the CIA, FBI, NSA (National Security Agency) and other, more traditional military units with whom the Task Force sometimes needed to coordinate. Even the off-duty activities and socializing of the various siloed units were fragmented, separating themselves into tribes “of their own kind” for accommodation, using different gym and leisure facilities, roping off their planning areas, only reluctantly sharing resources, and each displaying its own tribal arrogance. McCrystal says, “Our forces lived a proximate but largely parallel existence.”Footnote 3 None had any meaningful sense of belonging to something larger than themselves.

The supreme value driving the entire secretive, centralized, rigid, and thus slow to respond behemoth that is the Taylorian organization is efficiency—getting the most out of the least investment of time, energy, and money. And having your organization function like a well-oiled machine is of course attractive to the traditional military mindset. But McCrystal soon realized it was the wrong match for Al Qaeda’s small, dispersed, highly motivated, and very agile units, stitched together in a chaotic array (Figs. 20.1 and 20.2) and whose leaders were tech savvy children of the Internet generation who knew and mastered the power of boundaryless communication. “Adaptability,” he concluded, “not efficiency, must become our central competency.” That would require radical cultural and structural revolution that would take the Task Force time, and extended tuition from Army strategists who were learning that dealing with complex, rapidly changing, and unpredictable scenarios requires systems thinking. These strategists were learning that organizations handle complexity best when they are themselves functioning like complex adaptive systems, and needed to communicate what becoming a complex adaptive system would mean in military terms.

Fig. 20.1
figure 1

(Adapted from Team of Teams)

US special operation task force hierarchical structure

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Fig. 20.2
figure 2

(Adapted from Team of Teams)

AL Quaeda organization structure

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The Special Operations Task Force had always seen the tactical advantage of small, agile teams that could adapt spontaneously to the immediate, local conditions of a crisis situation. They were its star units. But because these teams were traditionally embedded within the rigid, hierarchical, command-and-control structure of the larger force as a whole, their adaptive skills conferred no overall strategic advantage. Each team simply operated as an individual unit carrying out a specific exercise ordered by central command. Culturally, the Task Force leaders realized they had to change a team mentality that had stressed the individual qualities and achievements of each single operating team to a mentality that prized collective excellence and achievement of groups of teams working together. As General McCrystal expressed it, “We had to replace a ‘They’ culture with a ‘We’ culture.”Footnote 4 Small team members needed to identify with and feel they were part of the larger, thousands strong and globally deployed Task Force as a whole, and its external ecosystem of partnering organizations.

Achieving this cultural shift required a newly structured, “BUD’s” training program that set tasks at which individual small teams could succeed only if they worked out cooperative strategies involving others. As a sense of wider camaraderie and identity evolved, it became more natural for accommodation, social, and leisure activities now to blend members of different Task Force teams and their partnering organizations. The tribal barriers came down, and yet this had to be achieved without losing the great advantage of highly specialized teams that distinguished Task Force capability. As General McCrystal describes this challenge, “Our entire force needed to share a fundamental, holistic understanding of the operational environment and of our own organization, and we also needed to preserve each team’s distinct skill sets.”Footnote 5 He summed this up as a challenge to create the Task-Force wide, “shared consciousness” mentioned above. This would require a further cultural and structural shift.

It had already been discovered, as at Haier, that small teams comprising four to no more than twenty members could work best in a self-organizing way, and now it was realized that the Task Force must combine the specialized skills of these small teams with a much more holistic, general awareness of overall mission purpose, and thus how they could cooperate with other units possessing different specialized capabilities to achieve this. This required the existing culture of secrecy, suspicion, and tight information control to be replaced with a culture of openness, trust, transparency, and information sharing. To create the necessary, holistic, mission awareness and enable the spontaneous collaboration relying on this, everything had to be connected to everything, everyone needed to know what all others knew. Thus all the information barriers previously protecting the knowledge and operational capabilities of siloed ranks, functions, and organizations had to come down. The Task Force had to become as tech savvy as Al Qaeda and their successors and develop sophisticated, integrated, IT information distribution networks accessible by everyone. The whole organization had to recreate the “mess” that made their enemies so agile and adaptive.

Yet, all these deep cultural and structural changes could not deliver the self-organizing adaptability desired without an accompanying shift in leadership culture and structure. The much-loved and traditional, centralized, top-down, command-and-control leadership culture and all the bureaucratic structure that enabled it had to be replaced with hands-off leadership from the top and a loosely structured, distribution of power and tactical decision-making to officers leading local teams who could freely adapt the way they used and shared that power as conditions required. Generals and their senior officer colleagues would now have to see their role as mission guidance, inspiring and motivating troops on the ground to do what was necessary to achieve overall mission strategic objectives, and providing them with required equipment and backup support. Generals accustomed to unquestioned obedience would have to become servant leaders, “quantum leaders.”

Generals are perhaps more reluctant to surrender power than company CEOs. Long-standing military wisdom and tradition has conditioned them to believe their hands on the levers of power are necessary to mission accomplishment. Mess and chaos are anathema to traditional military culture, and centralized control the assumed secret of effective combat operations. How could hands-off, distributed power, and spontaneous self-organization ever get the well-coordinated, large-scale organizational effectiveness required for strategic success? To quell these doubts, their complexity science advisers used the example of beehives to introduce them to the quantum emergence characteristic of complex adaptive systems.

Because the brains of individual bees are too small to account for the very complex, cooperative behavior that underpins the structure and activities of beehives, it was always believed that the Queen Bee coordinated and controlled all activity in the hive by signalling orders to individual bees through a tightly structured system of top-down chemical signalling to worker bees. Beehives, in short, were thought of as small, traditional armies. But scientists studying their organizational behavior have more recently discovered that beehives actually operate as complex adaptive systems. There is no centralizing control from the top. The Queen Bee’s actual role in the hive is simply to produce larvae that will grow into future worker bees, and the whole observed miracle of complex hive activity in fact emerges from relationships between many small, local, cooperative, and self-organizing activities by countless numbers of worker bees sharing chemical information. The resulting holistic unity of the beehive is greater than the sum of its parts.

The message from this to Task Force leaders was that that same emergent holism would result from the agile and adaptive self-organizing activities of a multitude of small teams spontaneously coordinating their capabilities in response to local situation requirements. In a later briefing paper recommending a US Airforce transformation similar to the one undertaken by the Army’s Task Force, Lieutenant Colonel Eric M. Murphy explained, in military terms, the lesson of the beehive: “Force structures and the strategic environments they create are complex adaptive systems. That is, force structures are comprised of diverse, interdependent, adaptive elements inter-acting nonlinearly and exhibiting systemic behaviors including emergence, coevolution, and path dependence across multiple scales.”Footnote 6

The lesson was taken to heart and the Army’s Special Operations Task Force was transformed to operate as a living quantum system. Figure 20.2 illustrates the structural map of the resulting “Team of Teams” organizational model that was adopted to achieve this. Note how similar it is to the Al Qaeda structural map shown in Fig. 20.1, and to the structural map of Haier’s latest RenDanHeyi ecosystem-microenterprise model shown in Fig. 16.1, and its resulting Ecosystem Brand marketing strategy. Quantum Management principles have been implemented in a large military organization as they have been in large corporate organizations.