by David Burkus
One of the starkest examples of this division came shortly after he took command of the Task Force. McChrystal was inspecting an intelligence facility located on a base at Baghdad International Airport when he opened the door to a supply closet and found a massive pile of burlap sacks and plastic bags. As he started to ask questions, he learned that the bags in the pile were full of evidence that had been collected by Special Forces and SEAL teams during missions and sent back to base. The teams had hastily put any evidence they discovered into whatever bags they could find, with only small tags or sometimes even just Post-It notes for explanation, before tossing the bags onto whatever transportation was headed back to base. Hours later, the evidence bags would arrive—often with the explanatory notes having fallen off—and intelligence teams would have to decipher not just the evidence but the context for why it was even being sent to them. “The operators [mission teams], adept at their own roles but having little understanding of the nuts and bolts of intel analysis, could not anticipate what sorts of explanations would be meaningful, what sort of context was relevant, or which material had to be turned around instantly and which could wait,” McChrystal explained. The physical and relational distance between these two clusters led to much being lost in translation. “They did not know the analysts personally and saw them as removed and territorial,” McChrystal wrote.23 Because of that, much of the evidence had been left to gather dust in that supply closet.
McChrystal knew immediately that he had work to do. “The unopened bags of evidence were symptomatic of a larger problem,” he wrote.24 When he looked out over the organization he now led, he saw lots of teams operating brilliantly, but they worked independently in an interdependent environment against an interdependent foe. That very evening, McChrystal and his team drew out the organizational chart as it really operated and sought to identify the structural holes that were causing issues. They referred to these holes as “blinks,” and they saw them everywhere. Teams in the Task Force had barely any kind of horizontal relationships. Even when stationed on the same base, teams mostly stayed within their own branch, living and working in different areas and even using different gyms. “The blinks were even worse between the Task Force and our partner organizations,” McChrystal noted.25 While the Task Force relied on intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, its relationships with these agencies were weak. Likewise, there were large gaps between the Task Force and the other military units with which it had to cooperate.
“We needed the SEALs to trust Army Special Forces, and for them to trust the CIA,” McChrystal wrote. “We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team.”26 In other words, McChrystal needed to find a way to span the structural holes in the entire US military, or at least among the military members who were a part of his mission. He didn’t need to make the entire Task Force one giant network cluster, but he did need to find a way to build a relationship between at least one person on each team or cluster and someone else on every other team—and he needed to do this for each and every team he relied on to win. In McChrystal’s words, “We needed to create a team of teams.”27 In Ronald Burt’s words, the Task Force needed to first create brokers.
One of the first ways McChrystal did that was by revamping and reenergizing the brokers who were already supposed to be present. Each military unit and intelligence agency had a role called the liaison officer. On paper, the liaison officers were supposed to be the brokers who connected the different clusters. In practice, however, these roles were usually filled by people who weren’t fitting in with their previous team or who were doing one last tour before their retirement. In other words, the liaison officer position was seen as simply a sort of holding pattern for officers who were on their way out or who needed to be kept away from the action—similar to what Adam Kleinbaum would call an organizational misfit. Few people saw the liaison officer role as an enviable position. As a result, trust wasn’t high and the sharing of information was poor. In many cases, liaison officers were seen by their hosts as scribes, there just to sit in on meetings, transcribe notes, and report back. In some cases, they were even considered spies. The bottom line was that nobody really looked upon liaison officers as being important to the cause.
But McChrystal knew this role was vital to building the lines of communication he needed. So he set about changing the perception of liaison officers. To do that, he started assigning his best soldiers to liaison officer roles. He took them off the front lines, traded their uniforms for business suits, and sent them to the embassies and intelligence agencies where he needed solid relationships. In the beginning, not much changed. Most people hated the idea of taking the best and brightest out of the field, and most of the host agencies didn’t change their behavior just because new bodies were present in the back of the room. But over time, the skills and attitudes of these new officers started winning agencies over.
Perhaps McChrystal’s most controversial action, at least at first, was the embedding program. It worked like an exchange program for military operators. McChrystal would take someone from one team like the Navy SEALs and place him with a unit of Army Special Forces. This idea was met with a lot of resistance at first. Most objectors cited how different the units’ training and operational norms were—so different that these exchanges could create real liabilities. And initially, that may have been true. But over time the exchanged soldiers learned the cultural norms and behaviors of the units they were embedded in. They built positive relationships and gained the perspective on the overall mission that could only been seen from inside that unit. When they returned to their home unit, their positive experience and new perspective would spread to the other members of the team. Likewise, the unit in which those soldiers were embedded would see them as representative of the entire unit from which they came. Over time the relationship ties between units strengthened dramatically, allowing them to operate alongside each other even more impressively. “Bonds of trust began to form,” McChrystal explained. “People from different tribes began to see increasingly familiar faces. Even strangers were now, by extension, part of a familiar and trusted unit.”28
By building and strengthening these brokers and patching up structural holes, the Task Force had the capability and flexibility it needed to outmaneuver AQI. The momentum of the mission started to change, and McChrystal’s new tactics brought them dramatically closer to victory. “To defeat a network, we had become a network,” McChrystal would later write. “We had become a team of teams.”29
Like Jane McGonigal, Sequoyah, and the liaison officers of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, the brokers who span structural holes create tremendous value for themselves and for the networks they serve. This may sound like a counterintuitive strategy compared to the steady kissing up and climbing of the hierarchical ladder that many assume is required of upwardly mobile networkers. But playing in between the clusters and connecting them to each other can provide huge advantages not just for brokers but also for the organizations they work with.
From Science to Practice
The research on structural holes sends a clear signal: there is real value to be captured by bringing two unconnected groups together. You might not always be able to see that value right away, but as you become the broker who fills the structural holes, you will have a greater chance of finding the right opportunity. Given the importance of this role, it’s vital to first know whether or not you are currently a broker in your local network or, if not, who the actual brokers are.30 Here’s a quick exercise to identify whether you’re a broker filling structural holes and who the brokers in your network are:
On a blank sheet of paper, draw three vertical lines to create three columns.
In the left column, list the ten to twenty-five people who have been most influential in your career (by making you aware of job openings, providing guidance or adv
ice, assisting on vital projects, etc.).
In the middle column, next to each name in the left column, list the person who introduced you to that contact—that is, the person who connected you to this influential person.
In the right column, list anyone to whom you have introduced the contact from the left column. If you haven’t introduced them to anyone, leave it blank.
In examining these three columns, pay attention to the recurring names. If one individual’s name appears several times, chances are that person is an important broker in your local network, spanning key structural holes and connecting you to people you would otherwise not know. If most of your right column is blank, then there is a good chance you are not currently operating as a broker. But fortunately for you, you now have a map of the several key connections in your life and career whom you can begin to think about serving via introductions to others.
Practicing Online
If you have concluded that you need to step up your efforts and begin to be more of a broker, there are several ways social media services can help. The most common way is by examining mutual friends. Almost all online services let you see what mutual connections you and each of your contacts share. If you are introducing two people who are already connected to each other, then you are not really filling a structural hole. But you can easily find this out by looking up the connections profile and verifying that before you seek to make an introduction.
More importantly, if you are using your social media profiles to compile your list, you will also start to notice patterns in who is not connected to whom. You might even stumble upon the first structural hole that needs spanning.
For a downloadable template to use when completing this exercise, go to http://davidburkus.com/resources/ and look for networking resources.
—4—
Seek Out Silos
Or
Why You Need to Spend Time in Clusters, but Not Too Much Time
While much of modern business writing warns about the dangers of silos, the truth is more complicated. Research suggests that, indeed, becoming too siloed can be damaging to businesses and careers, but at the same time, not being siloed enough can be just as damaging to growth. The most successful individuals know that they need clusters of similar people who can help them develop and grow, but also that they can’t spend all of their time inside of clusters. They oscillate between being part of a silo and reaching out into the broader network.
IN 1291, THE RESIDENTS of Venice, Italy, grew tired of their glassmakers.1
They didn’t get bored with the product. Blown glass was a unique and beautiful product that had quickly become a lucrative source of revenue for the glassmakers and a source of pride for the city. In addition, Venice’s location as a hub along several trade routes made it possible to distribute the product around the world, enhancing that revenue and the prestige it brought the city. The problem was that glassmaking was a risky endeavor. To mold and shape glass into works of art, these skilled masters needed to keep their ovens around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Not usually a problem—unless your oven is housed in a wooden building, in a neighborhood built mostly from wood and located on top of a series of canals. So while the Venetians were proud of these artisans’ craft, they had grown weary of this craft’s unfortunate tendency to burn down parts of the city.
Eventually, in an attempt to have the best of both worlds, the city government kicked the glassmakers out. They forced them to move across the Venetian Lagoon to Murano, a series of small islands about the size of a small neighborhood. In effect, the craftsmen were forced into a small silo—a tight cluster separated by water from the rest of the city. They could still reach the rest of the community, but their geographic isolation made sure that happened far less often.
Thus far, everything we’ve discovered about clusters suggests that this should have been a crippling blow to Venetian glassmakers. Research on weak ties and the importance of structural holes emphasizes the importance of building bridges between communities, silos, or clusters in order to create innovative ideas and generate value. Modern literature, especially business literature, is filled with warnings to avoid the damaging effects of creating silos in business and in industry.
In April 2014, General Motors’ new CEO, Mary Barra, sat in a congressional oversight committee hearing to answer questions about the recent recall of 800,000 automobiles and the much less recent discovery of the failed ignition switch that had triggered it.2 The technical problem was that, because of a weak spring, a small amount of force applied to the key when it was in the ignition—even an accidental nudge—was enough to move the car from the “run” position to the “accessory” position, which meant that safety measures like airbags would not engage in a crash. That malfunction had cost over 100 lives, many of whom were teenagers, as the inexpensive cars that used that ignition switch were a frequent choice for a first car.3
“There were silos of information,” said Barra in her testimony. “So people had bits and pieces and didn’t come forward with the information or didn’t act with a sense of urgency, and it was simply unacceptable.”4 Barra herself was not informed about the issue until January 2014, the same month she took office, but GM employees, in one capacity or another, had known about the issue for nearly ten years. That is, as early as 2002, GM engineers were aware of the ignition switch problem. But the engineers working on the ignition system weren’t the same employees who were working on airbags. The ignition system people didn’t know that such a shutoff would keep airbags from deploying. In their small, self-contained silo, they simply saw it as a nonsafety issue and hence not a priority to fix.
GM’s error is not unique to businesses. After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, investigators sought answers as to why the vast network of intelligence services in the United States had failed to properly assess and respond to the threat of Al Qaeda. They found that the attacks would have been preventable, but that silos among the intelligence departments had kept the threat from being detected.5 Two years prior to the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had been monitoring two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, as part of ongoing counterterrorism investigations in California. At the same time, the CIA knew about connections between the two men and terrorist organizations.
But the CIA never shared that information with the FBI. If it had, then tracking both men in San Diego as they planned and prepared would have been the best chance to undermine their plan and prevent the attacks. But the CIA silo isn’t entirely to blame. The investigators also found that the National Security Agency had intercepted communications from both men and flagged them for their extremist content. In other words, had the FBI, CIA, and NSA not been so siloed—had there been a better system to fill structural holes—it’s likely that the attacks could have been prevented.
Given these examples, and what we know about the importance of structural holes, it’s tempting to look back at the Venetian government’s forced relocation and assume that the siloed glassmakers would suffer on Murano.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, the art of glassmaking flourished in its new home. While the glassmakers were technically competitors, their unique trade (and the tendency among their families to intermarry) led them to share information and ideas. Techniques were refined, and creativity flourished. Innovations in the craft became commonplace, and the creativity of their artwork exploded.
It was on Murano that glassmakers found a way to make optically clear glass, as well as glass with threads of gold running through it. It was on Murano that glassmakers discovered how to make chandeliers, as well as fake gemstones made from glass. Murano, and by extension Venice, quickly developed a monopoly on glassmaking as Murano glass became a status symbol throughout Europe. The glassmakers themselves were elevated to a place of high prestige and became (or saw their daughters marry) the most prominent citizens of the city. The island of Murano even became known as the Isle of Glass.
And Murano
isn’t unique. For every example of the damaging and isolating effects of silos there’s an example of how clusters in a social network help unleash creative new ideas or make individuals and teams more efficient and productive.
In 1921, Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris, his suitcase full of letters from his friend and fellow author Sherwood Anderson.6 The letters weren’t for Hemingway to read during his trip. Instead, they were introductory letters to prominent writers living in the city. Anderson had assured Hemingway that Paris would be a great place to refine his writing skills by joining the cluster of artists and writers who had gathered there. It was through Anderson that Hemingway met Gertrude Stein, and through Stein that Hemingway found himself interacting with writers like Ezra Pound and James Joyce and artists such as Pablo Picasso.
Stein had been hosting salons of expatriate creatives who gathered to drink, socialize, discuss their work, and often drink some more. Before Hemingway left for Paris, he had shown promise as a talented writer, but mostly wrote for magazines and newspapers. It was during the Paris years that he found the collaboration and mentorship that propelled his skills. Through this unique social cluster, he also made the connections he needed to find a publisher for his novels. Without the help of Stein’s community, Hemingway’s work would likely only be found in archived periodicals, and not inside of nearly every high school English classroom.
