the other parallel universe

On March 20, 2003, a “shock and awe” bombing campaign signaled the start of the invasion of the US-led coalition into Iraq. Three weeks later, after twenty-one days of heavy fighting, 180,000 troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland overwhelmed Iraqi forces and brought down the government of Saddam Hussein.

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a giant sign that read, “Mission Accomplished”.

Unfortunately for the president, and the nation, the majority of casualties from the Iraq war, both military and civilian, were yet to come.

Soon after the invasion, Al Qaeda in Iraq (or AQI) began a campaign of suicide-bomber attacks targeting UN representatives, security forces, and Iraqi civilians. As the weeks passed, the insurgency continued to expand, injecting chaos into the parallel universe of the war zone.

The objective of AQI’s ruthless leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to deepen the sectarian conflict that was the heart of the Iraq War.

into the chaos

In September 2003, Major General Stanley McChrystal was assigned command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force (hereafter, the “Task Force”) that was headquartered at the Joint Operations Base in Balad, Iraq.  General McChrystal was given the unenviable job of finding out who was behind the rising tide of violence and putting an end to it. But by early 2004, McChrystal realized that despite its huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training, the Task Force was losing the fight.

Overcoming this involved more than increasing the number of precision Special Forces raids. It required solving a multitude of complex challenges, not the least of which was between the ears of the Task Force members themselves, in the form of the conventional wisdom that had been built up in the US military over the previous hundred years. McChrystal needed to reject that conventional wisdom and find another way to confront this new threat.

The enemy was engaged in modern-day guerrilla warfare. It was made up of small independent teams, attacking quickly and then disappearing into the civilian population. These teams displayed many of the good traits that define small teams: they were agile and adaptable; they shared a common purpose and a common situational awareness. And they were empowered to act.[i] McChrystal knew that to prevail, the Task Force would have to mirror these traits and then use them on the streets of Ramadi and Mosul.

He began to completely remake the Task Force in the midst of the war, to scale the adaptability of the small team up to the enterprise level. To do this he needed to transform it from a team of soldiers and officers into a team of teams.

This new organization would be founded on the concept of transparency, so that everybody would know what was going on all the time. This common situational awareness enabled teams that previously existed in separate silos to be brought together around the same mission, to work collaboratively, to innovate. Decision-making authority was pushed down to the team level, allowing the members to act quickly.

“Individuals and teams closest to the problem armed with unprecedented levels of insights from across the network offered the best ability to decide and act decisively.”[ii]—General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams

Harnessing the power of teams allowed the Task Force to adapt quickly to the rapidly changing environment inside the parallel universe. On the streets of Najaf and Baghdad, the teams worked together to invent solutions and act in the moment, rather than waiting for orders from the top.

The Task Force began to work a process that centered on the daily operations and intelligence briefing. The O&I Briefing was an “all-hands” video conference that started with a detailed report of the current conditions on the battlefield, followed by a summary of the mission objectives and an open discussion of obstacles and unmet needs. If this sounds strangely familiar, that is because it is the format followed during many typical business meetings. But it was much more than that. Like the Duty Team calls at OEM, the O&I Briefing was the glue that held the Task Force together. It set the battle rhythm, pumping out information about the entire scope of the operation to all members of the Task Force and partner agencies and, at the same time, allowing them to contribute their observations and ideas.

the great machine is a team of teams

Team of Teams has become required reading in emergency management agencies across the nation. We see similarities between the parallel universe of the disaster zone and the parallel universe of the war zone. In New York City, the crisis is our AQI, the enemy that seeks to destroy us. And, like General McChrystal, we know that the biggest and best weapon in our arsenal is the Great Machine.

Like the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, our Great Machine is a team of teams. It is composed of people and resources coming together to work a process—fast, flat, and flexible,[iii] combining transparent communication with decentralized decision-making.

Some disasters require dozens of teams focused on different aspects of the disaster—search and rescue, damage assessment, evacuation, sheltering, logistics, debris removal, disaster assistance, fatality management, feeding, and on and on.

Even though every team is empowered to feed and care for itself, for the days and weeks of a big response, the job of the Great Machine is to get them whatever they can’t get for themselves. If a team needs leadership, it assigns it. It solves the problems they can’t solve and moves the obstacles they can’t overcome. It gets them the stuff—from industry experts to specialized vehicles or equipment—they need to do their job. If there is information or orders or approvals they can’t get, it will get them. For new problems for which there is no plan, it gets more people in and creates new teams.

The Great Machine creates trust—trust in the plan and confidence that we will not fail. It doesn’t wait; it anticipates. It creates a collective dynamic that empowers teams to run at, not away from, problems. Our Operational Brief calls, as with the O&I Briefings in Iraq, force them to think: “What is happening? What are we doing? What do we intend to do? What can we do now to get ahead of the curve?”

Finally, the Great Machine tells everybody what is going on: field teams to agency headquarters to city hall to the children and families trapped within the parallel universe. It tells them what life is like within the parallel universe, what we are doing about it, what we are not yet doing, and why.

People think that government has some innate ability to respond to disasters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Governments are slow-moving creatures of habit, ill-suited to the demands of the parallel universe. The Great Machine is the secret sauce, an instant bureaucracy that supercharges the government-led response.

the myth of crisis leadership

Another insight we had at roughly the same time as the Task Force involves conventional wisdom about leadership in crisis.

In Iraq, McChrystal knew that the complexity and scale of modern war fighting would always exceed the ability of any one person to comprehend and direct. His new approach required changing the traditional conception of the crisis leader. Rather than exerting so-called command and control (also known as micromanagement), McChrystal’s leaders had the job of rallying the troops and enabling their clear thinking and execution.

 “The temptation to lead as a Chessmaster controlling each move of the organization must give way to an approach as a gardener enabling rather than directing.”[iv]

During a disaster, the Great Machine communicates a list of clear objectives for every operational period. In New York we call those Incident Objectives. Everyone, at every level of the organization, is empowered to say yes to everything as long as it falls within the boundaries of our Incident Objectives.  The message is, “Do what is right, not what you have a right to do”.[v]

McKinney is the former Deputy Commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and Chief Disaster Officer at the American Red Cross in Greater New York. He is the author of Moment of Truth that was released last year by Post Hill Press

[i] Khalid al-Hammadi, “The Inside Story of al-Qa’ida,” Part 4, Al-Quds al-Arabi, 22 March 2005, accessed at https://www.bookemon.com/asset/reader_1/pagereader_8.5_11.swf: “Al Qaeda’s motto is ‘centralization of decision and decentralization of execution.’”

[ii] General Stanley A. McChrystal, Stanley A, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio/Penguin, 2015, page 219

[iii] Ibid, page 226

[iv] Ibid, page 232

[v] Written on the giant whiteboard behind the podium at the Harris County, Texas, emergency operations center during the Harris County Office of Homeland Security’s and emergency management’s epic response to Hurricane Harvey in August and September 2017.