Lesson from Iraq: It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network“ This is what we look like,” I said, as I drew a line-and-block chart on a whiteboard inside our Balad, Iraq headquarters. It laid out a neat, geometric hierarchy. “So”—I pointed to the same diagram—“this what we’re looking for.” I was referring to the overarching strategy of my Special Operations Task Force and the individual inclinations of the operators that comprised it: We desperately wanted Al Qaeda in Iraq to be organized like we were, so that we could understand it, analyze it, pick it apart, and, ultimately, defeat it. Remove the leadership, some believed, and the organization would crumble. “But I think we’re in agreement that what we’re actually facing looks more like this,” I said, taking the marker and drawing a new structure: my pen jumped around the board, scattering blue circles randomly across the white surface. Between them, I added seemingly arbitrary connections. One circle linked to five others, one of those five connected to three more, and so on. Unlike the comforting, symmetric right angles of the hierarchy, the lines between these nodes were erratic, varying in length, direction, and logic. I had drawn a network, and the randomness of my sketch implied the complex social, familial, tribal, and marital ties that connected our enemy, Al Qaeda. On that day, the actual arrangement of those links remained opaque to us—the dots and lines on the board simply represented an abstraction of what we believed we were facing. With the two images staring at us—one clean, crisp, and familiar; the other random, seemingly chaotic, and alien—I offered a thought to summarize the discussion we’d been having for several weeks. “In this fight, we are not facing an organized army. We all agree that with that structure,” pointing to our standard hierarchical model, “we can outmaneuver any army in the world—but that’s not our challenge here. We need to be able to outmaneuver a network. Our structure can’t do that.” I then pointed to the new sketch—the circles and thicket of lines—and articulated the uncomfortable conclusion that the group of leaders in the room had already reached: “If we’re going to win, we need to become a network.” Shortly after that discussion, a Naval officer on my team offered a piece of advice that would define our organization for the rest of my tenure. “Sir,” he said, “you can’t steer something that isn’t moving.” So we did just that: we began to move, and never stopped. Constant change became the hallmark of our task force. We did not know what the end state would look like, and we took wrong turns along the way. But the task force’s leaders came to recognize that we had to make our culture allergic to complacency. We became obsessed with perfecting our organization’s model for communicating, making decisions, and acting effectively. Most critically, from that point on we continued to adapt in order to make ourselves an increasingly interconnected and effective network. We began as a network of people, then grew into a network of teams, then a network of organizations, and ultimately a network of nations. Throughout, we evaluated the health of our network by how well each node shared a common but ever-evolving understanding of our organization, of our battlefield, of our enemy, and of our strategy to defeat them—what we called ‘shared consciousness and purpose.’ It had taken us some time to do so, but we had identified and visualized the core of the issue: Our organization was designed for a problem that no longer existed; we had brought an industrial age force to an information-age conflict. After several years working with leaders in private industry, I believe this same challenge confronts organizations in every sector of the modern environment. In previous generations, when organizational models resembled the orderly hierarchy I first drew on the whiteboard in Iraq, success depended largely on creating the most efficient bureaucratic model. But in the information age, when our streamlined hierarchy encountered a networked enemy, we found ourselves optimizing for variables that had become irrelevant, and we were immediately outpaced. We’d also realized that as small 2- or 3-person elements had become hyper-empowered in the information age, it made our networked approach all the more necessary. Even small teams of Al Qaeda insurgents in distant, dusty corners of Iraq could access and share information globally, and in near real time. Through posting grisly videos of their suicide bombings online, for example, they magnified their actions in the eyes of the world audience, drummed up recruits and donations from sympathetic spectators, and made themselves all the more terrifying to Iraqis. This power for individuals and small groups to be suddenly, powerfully disruptive was a third dimension of complexity—and is a new variable facing many of today’s industries. In the process of redesigning ourselves, we ultimately accepted that there is no organizational end-state in today’s environment. Twenty-first-century competitors are not constrained by bureaucratic models. They are free, fast, and can be incredibly dangerous. To counter this new challenge, we became an organization that could move and adapt just as rapidly as the environment around us, while maintaining a disciplined focus on our strategic goals. Our evolution was not easy, nor was it chaotic. Without an exact blueprint for what we would look like in the end, we risked creating confusion throughout the organization as we restructured—something we could not afford during the peak window of the war. Any dip in our pressure on Al Qaeda in Iraq meant more car bombs, assassinations, and IEDs, and less hope for the fledgling Iraqi government. Therefore, we approached our change with great rigor, came to guide ourselves by several core principles, and grounded ourselves in constant and transparent communication—all with the long-term vision of creating shared consciousness and common purpose across a globally dispersed organization of thousands.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 08:42:47 +0000
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