Freely Sharing Information

I’m three quarters of my way through a book called Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, a book on leadership, organisational structure, and a way of thinking that’s so insightful I can’t wait to finish reading just so I can start from the beginning again. Other than the Nassim Taleb books I don’t think there’s been another book that’s had as much of an impact on my thinking.

There are tons of interesting insights in the book, many of which I’m sure will crop up in some form or another on this blog in the near future. But there’s one that really stood out and gave me plenty of pause, because it reminded me of a way of thinking that I’d parked because I felt my organisation wasn’t ready for it: that we should seriously consider freely sharing information, across hierarchies, and across teams. But maybe I can change that.

An excerpt from the book, setting the scene for just this need:

The problem is that the logic of “need to know” depends on the assumption that somebody—some manager or algorithm or bureaucracy—actually knows who does and does not need to know which material. In order to say definitively that a SEAL ground force does not need awareness of a particular intelligence source, or that an intel analyst does not need to know precisely what happened on any given mission, the commander must be able to say with confidence that those pieces of knowledge have no bearing on what those teams are attempting to do, nor on the situations the analyst may encounter. Our experience showed us this was never the case. More than once in Iraq we were close to mounting capture/kill operations only to learn at the last hour that the targets were working undercover for another coalition entity. The organizational structures we had developed in the name of secrecy and efficiency actively prevented us from talking to each other and assembling a full picture.