Through the Looking Glass

“Team, I don’t think we’re going to find what we’re looking for.”

I let my words hang in the air. Some of my leaders squinted quizzically. Others gave slight knowing nods. We were finally getting to the core of our issue–a question of fundamental organizational structure and processes—and not a moment too soon. The war was going poorly. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was growing in numbers and in influence. Iraqi civilians were increasingly intimidated, fearful, and suffering from violence. The fledgling Iraqi government was brittle, at best. My organization’s main goal was to dismantle Al Qaeda in Iraq – and as it metastasized beyond our control, we realized that the enemy simply did not exist in the form that we were looking for.

We were looking for an enemy made in our image. In doing so, we were trying to map the enemy’s hierarchy, drawing out the leaders and subordinates in line-and-block structures that we could dismantle with precision and discipline. But, however much we wanted to find it, such a familiar structure simply did not exist. We faced, instead, a broadly woven network of associations - people connected through shared ideology, common history, familial ties, and hundreds of other variables that took a nuanced understanding to fully appreciate.

When we fought this network as if it were a typical hierarchy, the effects of our operations were unpredictable. It felt like pulling a lever on a familiar machine only to have it react differently than our training and experience had taught us to expect. Rather than destroying the terror network, too often we forced it to reshape, drove it to ground, or at worst, strengthened it. In order to begin understanding this new type of challenge, we would need to re-organize ourselves top-to-bottom and allow our organization to see the world, and our situation, from an entirely new optic. That was the only way out.

Since the moment I described in last week’s blog, I had spent several days in discussions with my key leaders, ultimately coming to the conclusion that we were looking for the wrong thing. In order to truly see our new type of competition; we would need to fundamentally change our structure. We needed to transform how we organized information, shared it amongst ourselves, and leveraged it to create action. I knew the change would be massive, complex, and all consuming. But without it, we simply could not win.

During my military career, I led at many levels, from a young officer in charge of a platoon of 30 soldiers to a four-star general responsible for the 160,000-strong international coalition in Afghanistan. Since my retirement in 2010, I’ve spent significant time working with leaders in industry, and I’ve learned a great deal from their experiences facing equally complex challenges. This exposure across fields and disciplines has left me with the fundamental belief that a large organization is inherently biased to look for its own image within its competition. Organizations, especially successful ones, refine their methodology to such an art that they lose the ability to see the alternative methods and approaches being developed by the competition. Their success makes them prone to miss new solutions to the old questions.

No one was guiltier of this type of groupthink than my own organization before we began to evolve.

In 2004, our Special Operations organization was the best it had ever been, focused and hardened by three years in combat. But we were a hierarchy. I was the commanding general, with other generals and colonels reporting to me. Beneath them were lieutenant colonels, then majors, captains, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted soldiers. We were a beautifully organized machine, easily depicted on a line-and-block chart (much like the one you could sketch for your own organization). You could stare at our organizational chart and easily visualize the flow of information, the wonderfully linear decision processes, and the alluring stability that our design provided. It was the hierarchy all of us had grown up in, and we were utterly comfortable in it.

Indeed, for centuries, soldiers have spent their careers in the same basic hierarchy. Since the dawn of organized militaries, structure and hierarchy have been the guiding principles. The Roman Legions were divided into 80-soldier elements called Centuria, which consisted of ten 8-soldier Contubernium (tent groups). Each soldier had standards to meet: how fast he marched, how much weight he could carry, how quickly he could make and break camp. These skills were meticulously rehearsed. The order and discipline of this mathematic, mechanical model allowed the Romans to apply a level of rigor to the battlefield, and structure to the chaos of war, that surpassed anything their would-be opponents could muster. Having so masterfully outmaneuvered their enemies long before any soldiers took the field, the Roman Legion often won battles before they started.

But when this system encountered Hannibal, a rebel general who challenged the Legions on the field of battle, the Romans met their match. Knowing that he could never match the scale and precision of the Roman Armies, Hannibal refused to fight them symmetrically. He designed his battlefield maneuvers specifically to confuse and disrupt. As a result, Hannibal’s army was only defeated when the Roman’s surrounded and contained his army, slowly breaking it down through a deliberate campaign of attrition, all the while refusing to engage him in direct combat.

The Legions did not adapt, but found a way to leverage their strengths, namely scale and logistics. In Iraq, we had stretched our comparative advantages (superior soldiers, technology, and equipment) to their limit, and we were still losing. Superiority in a traditional sense simply wasn’t enough. We had to retain our capabilities, but also master the enemy’s approach – and surpass them at it.

We needed to become a network, which meant changing everything about how we communicated, made decisions, approved operations, and led our people. And we needed to make that change under the stress of combat without losing momentum.

I walked to the white board in our headquarters, the sound of assault helicopters whirring outside in the dark Iraqi night, and began to draw.

(Photo by Richard73 / Flickr)