Military Strategies For Dealing With Risk - General Stanley McChrystal | Modern Wisdom Podcast 381

1. 0:00 – 1:29

   Intro

   1. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal0:00

      You're always got a percentage possibility, even in the least risky, of something going badly. And yet, often when something goes badly, we take it as a violation of the laws of nature. But if you go by probability, if something's got a 90% probability of success, 10% of the time it's going to go very badly, and we shouldn't be surprised, we shouldn't be upset. That should be in our mindset, but we don't do that very well. You know, if it's 70% chance of good weather, we don't carry an umbrella because... And yet, if I said, "Chris, it's 30% chance of rain today." You'd probably go back in the house, get your umbrella and a raincoat.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:35

      (wind blowing) General Stanley McChrystal, welcome to the show.

   3. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal0:40

      Well, Chris, thanks for having me and please call me Stan.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:43

      I was going to say, it's, it's kind of difficult to work out what to say. Calling a four star general "Stan" feels oddly informal.

   5. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal0:51

      I've been called a lot worse, Chris, so Stan would be great.

   6. CWChris Williamson0:53

      What, what does, what's the four stars mean? What does that mean in a general, for the non-initiates amongst us?

   7. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal0:59

      Sure. There are four levels of being a general. A brigadier general is one star, a major general is two stars, a lieutenant general is three stars, and then a plain general is four stars. And then, only occasionally in American history, we created a general of the army, which is five stars, but the last one was during the second World War.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:20

      All right, okay. So only in times of real necessity does anyone get above that?

   9. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal1:24

      Exactly.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:25

       Right. So that's a lot of pressure on your shoulders, then.

   11. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal1:27

       (laughs)

2. 1:29 – 6:13

   Stan's Feelings on Afghanistan

   1. CWChris Williamson1:29

      Given the fact that you spent so much time in Afghanistan, and the last few weeks and months we've seen some pretty crazy imagery coming out of there, what's it been like watching that from the sidelines having invested so much time in it?

   2. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal1:42

      Well, it's difficult. Not just because of the investment, but more because I got very close to the Afghan people. I believed very much that they had the ability and the, um, all the things necessary to pull their society forward. And the fact that it, it has now been at least put on hold is disappointing.

   3. CWChris Williamson2:04

      Mm. Yeah, it's, uh, I heard you speaking a while ago, I think it was at a live event where the Trump midterm elections were going on, and someone brought up Afghanistan and the withdrawal, and you identified the sort of prisoner's dilemma that's going to happen, that if any president decides to do it and then you have Taliban and ISIS retaking control, it's sort of this, this odd game of chicken that they're playing, and it seems like that kind of played out.

   4. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal2:33

      I think it did. And to review that, generally every president had the opportunity to do more, do less, or do the same, and there was political risk to do more, domestic resistance, and there was real risk in doing less, i.e. pulling out, because if Al-Qaeda or ISIS establishes a safe haven again, then any decision-maker connected to that will be criticized. Which meant that in the middle was typically the safe. It didn't make it the wrong option, but it made it the safe one. So, I've got a lot of sympathy for decision-makers. You know, we all sit on the sidelines and we criticize this decision-maker for doing that and this decision-maker for doing something else, but unless you've been down on the field making those decisions, I think we've got to be a little bit more forgiving.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:21

      That's the word of the day, "risk," that you just mentioned there. Why are you so interested in it?

   6. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal3:26

      Well, because I don't think we think about risk well. I went through a lifetime dealing with risk, talking about risk, sometimes trying to measure risk, and I came away with the conclusion we don't do it very well, and that the sort of frustrating reality is that the greatest risk to us is us. And let me explain. Most of us think about risk in terms of probability and consequences. If I, if I climb up on the roof, what's the likelihood I'll fall off? And if I do fall off, what's the likelihood I'll get badly hurt? And if both are low, you don't worry too much. If both are up, you do worry. But I'd ask you to think about risk instead like a mathematical equation. Threat times vulnerability equals risk. And I'm not good at math, but stay with me. If the threats out there are zero, if you can make all the threats to you go away, then you've got no risk, because anything times zero is zero. But we can't do that, at least I've never been in that situation. And we really can't even control the threats. We don't predict them very well, we're not exactly sure what form they'll take. But we do control our vulnerabilities. We have greater control. And so that's the place we probably can't drive them to zero, but what we can do is make ourselves and our organizations much stronger and more resilient. And so, while people spend a lot of time obsessing about what's around the corner or over the hill or coming from outer space, what we should be doing is standing in the mirror, individually, and getting our organizations together, how do we become the most resilient teams possible, so no matter what comes up, we're going to be able to deal with it?

   7. CWChris Williamson5:13

      What do you mean by "vulnerability" and "resilience" in this context?

   8. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal5:17

      Well, vulnerabilities are those weaknesses in an organization. They might be blind spots, they might be things you don't do well, your inability inside the organization to communicate, or poor leadership, or lack of diverse perspectives, any number of those things. And when you have those weaknesses, they become vulnerabilities, and so they add to risk. So, for example, if I've got a very cohesive team that communicates well, it's superbly led, we overcome inertia, make decisions, all of the good things we want, when suddenly the unexpected threat comes up, we're not knocked off our feet. We, we can step back, we can assess it, we can deal with it, and we can move forward. However, if we're not-... if we're sort of flawed, every time a wave goes over the deck, it causes the boat to get more unstable and if you got holes in the bottom of the boat, you get big problems.

   9. CWChris Williamson6:12

      I guess

3. 6:13 – 12:33

   Dealing With Risk

   1. CWChris Williamson6:13

      that through your career back ho- back history, risk was turned up to 11, that it's grave, it's mortal, right? It's as high of a externality as you can get.

   2. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal6:25

      It was but the reality is, it didn't mean we dealt with it better because it's hard to deal with. It's first hard to get your mind around, it's hard to communicate it. I remember I spent most of my career in special operations and we would do an operation that was high risk and we would be going to communicate to political leaders who had to approve the operation and they'd say, "Now how risky is it?" And you'd say, "High risk." And you could look them in the eye and that didn't have any meaning to them. They'd seen the movie Black Hawk Down and Zero Dark Thirty so they knew what movie's high risk but they had a level of confidence that even though it was high risk, that was our business, so really, it wasn't very risky. And we had one operation when I had left special operations, I came back to the Pentagon and this operation had gone across the border into Pakistan and ended up into a firefight. And this guy called me just distraught and he said, "Aah, it's terrible. How could that happen?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And he goes, "Who screwed it up?" I said, "I was in the briefing. What about high risk did you not understand?" You're always got a percentage possibility even in the, the least risky of something going badly and yet often when something goes badly, we take it as a violation of the laws of nature, you know? But if you go by probability, if something's got a 90% probability of success, 10% of the time it's going to go very badly and we shouldn't be surprised, we shouldn't be upset. That should be in our mindset but we don't do that very well. You know, if it's 70% chance of good weather, we don't carry an umbrella because... And yet, if I said, "Chris, it's 30% chance of rain today." You'd probably go back in the house, get your umbrella and a raincoat.

   3. CWChris Williamson8:18

      Yeah, so framing is important then.

   4. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal8:20

      Yeah, it's really important.

   5. CWChris Williamson8:22

      What's the goal with risk analysis? Is it to never fail? Is it to be able to see the world more accurately?

   6. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal8:30

      It's a great question. Uh, it depends on who's describing that to you. Sometimes people say the idea of risk analysis is to avoid risk completely or to mitigate risk, i.e., plug up every potential way that that risk could come home and I don't think that's what it is. I think risk analysis is to give you a sense of the level of risk and the probability of success or failure. It's to give you a realistic basis for judging on whether you want to do something. Almost everything in life has a level of risk but if you think about it, some things aren't worth accepting much risk for because the payoff is fairly low but if the payoff is higher, the key thing is understanding what the real level of risk is. We go back to things like the financial crisis of 2008. One of the challenges was they had lost clarity on what the actual risks were. They could no longer assess them effectively and so risk analysis had failed.

   7. CWChris Williamson9:32

      Yeah, the payoffs were incredibly high but the risks were somehow even higher.

   8. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal9:37

      Exactly.

   9. CWChris Williamson9:38

      Yeah. It's, I like the way that you've split off risk into threats and vulnerabilities because I think one of the easy criticisms around risk analysis would be to say that you're spending a lot of time trying to control things that you can't control. All of these externalities over which you don't have any bearing on how they're going to behave but what we're talking about here is look, that's there, background risk is going to exist. What can you do to prepare yourself moving forward?

   10. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal10:03

       Uh, if you take it down to a very individual level, if you're going to walk down a street and someone says it's a pretty risky place, you make that decision to walk down, crime or whatever, and if you do nothing to prepare yourself, if any of that risk comes to fruition, you're probably in trouble. But if you make yourself physically more capable, maybe wear body armor, whatever's appropriate in the moment, you then control that and so the risks which will inevitably, with a certain level of probability arise, you can deal with them and that's the key. That's where we have agency. We can control that. We have responsibility and I would argue that our societies and many of our organizations focus on the outside and we take a pass on doing those things which we should responsibly do to be more prepared internally.

   11. CWChris Williamson10:56

       Who was Major General John Sedgwick?

   12. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal11:01

       John Sedgwick was a, a hero. He went to the United States Military Academy where I ended up going, he graduated in 1837 and he had this distinguished career before the American Civil War. He'd been in a series of wars, the Mexican War, wars on the, the frontiers and then during the Civil War he becomes a distinguished commander. Unfortunately, he is often remembered for two things. There's a statue of him at West Point and if you are failing a course, legend says that if you sneak out at night wearing your full dress uniform carrying your weapon and you go to the statue and you spin the rowels, that's, uh, the, uh, the spikes on the back of the spurs, they were round, if you spin those, you'll pass the course. Now you could study but this is easier, just go out at midnight and solve your problem. Um, but he's also well known for a quote that is attributed to him. He was at the Battle of Spotsylvania and he gets up to a position where he can see the fighting going on and he's observing this and some of his leaders come to him and say, "General, you got to get back."... it is too dangerous up here. And he points at the Confederates and he says, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." And in a moment, he gets hit and he's dead. And so, wonderful guy, and unfortunately he is almost with a tongue-in-cheek memory from how he died.

   13. CWChris Williamson12:26

       What do you think, looking back on your time in the Armed Forces and, and risk, what were some of the things that they got right about

4. 12:33 – 20:29

   What the Military Taught Stan

   1. CWChris Williamson12:33

      the way that they judged risk?

   2. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal12:35

      Yeah. I think when organizations were designed to deal with risk, they were most effective when they die- designed themselves to be very adaptable. In the early years of special operations, we started doing things related to counterterrorist operations. And you've probably seen in movies where commandos will go in a building and the first guy will go left, the next guy will go right, and everybody goes as though it's a ballet that's been rehearsed a hundred times. They throw things up in the air, next guy catches it and they move around like that.

   3. CWChris Williamson13:06

      Yeah, that's how it goes, right?

   4. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal13:07

      Yeah. (laughs) I, I assume it does in movies anyway. I never saw an op like that. And so when I first got into special operations, that stuff was kind of popular and you'd sometimes see demonstrations put on by commandos for outsiders and people would just be in awe. We learned that you don't actually train that way. What you have to do is train so that always goes badly. You have the first guy go in and you designate him as a casualty to fall down and then you make the organization deal with that unexpected reality. And so the more you make them able to adapt to whatever happens, the lights go on, lights go off, flood, you know, any number of things, they become problem solvers in a constantly changing set of unknowns. Then they become resilient, they become confident, they become used to adapting. They aren't, uh, thrown off their game by that. And so the best organizations build that into their DNA. It doesn't come naturally, because doctrine and procedures are designed to get everything lined up. If you're a, a senior officer and you come up with a plan, you put together a battle plan, you brief it to everybody, and you have some ridiculous belief that that's what's actually going to happen. It never does. As they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Once you're in contact, the plan goes to hell. But the planning can give you the confidence and the ability to know what your options are, to know how to, what we call, you know, react to the unexpected.

   5. CWChris Williamson14:42

      What about communication then? It seems like that's the first step to get right. If you can't communicate any plan, no matter how awry things go, no one knows what they're supposed to do.

   6. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal14:53

      Yeah. And it, and it goes on various levels. If I say communication, you might say, well, you and I are communicating now, but there are actually four parts or four tests to communication. The first is, do you have the physical, technical ability to communicate? And if you're not close together, it usually involves some kind of radio or phone or something. Does that work? The second is, as the communicator, am I willing to communicate? If I know 10 things, am I willing to communicate those to you? And in many cases, we find people are not for a host of reasons. They hold information close, they don't trust you. And so information is flawed simply because I won't send it. Then there's a question of, is the information I'm sending correct and timely? So is what I'm sending, even if it's unintentional on my part, am I sending you crap? And then the final one is your ability to understand and digest it. Your ability to, if I'm speaking one language and you speak another, it may be of no use to you. Or if I'm from one background, even if we're speaking the same language, the terminology and whatnot gives you no contextual ability. So first you got to have communication that actually gets, uh, from one place to another and is understood. And then you've got to communicate a si- a number of things. You've got to communicate a situation, you've got to communicate what the intent is, what are we trying to do? And you've got to have constant ability to update so people have a two-way communication so we know what's happening and we can adapt in real time. Um, that was, of course, one of the, the great stories from the First World War used to be that they would start these big offensive on- offensives on the Western front, and they would be connected from the front line of trenches back to headquarters with wire because that was, there was initial radio, but it wasn't very good. So they'd go back to wire. So they would put together this great plan but as once, as soon as the troops came out of the trenches, moved forward, they were essentially out of communication because the wire only went to the forward trench. Then you're trying to do this carefully timed operation to have artillery go right in front of them to, to coordinate different arms, and it would go to pieces because the communication capability just wasn't flexible enough. And how many times do we see in organizations where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing for any number of reasons?

   7. CWChris Williamson17:17

      The technological issue has been removed largely now, you know, in most organizations you've got frictionless communication that's instant. In fact, if anything, in the space of 100 years we've gone from a scarcity of communication to a surplus of communication. And yeah, I think it's the nuances a lot more now that people are battling with.

   8. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal17:38

      Yeah, that's true. I mean, we, we haven't completely solved the technical part but we've mostly solved it and we can communicate... Now we've got new problems. We've got too much communication so you've got too much noise and you can't focus on the signal. And then we've got the, the insidious problems of misinformation and then even worse disinformation, intentional, uh, misrepresentation of facts. And so you corrupt this system with information that actually, you know, draws wrong conclusions.

   9. CWChris Williamson18:09

      It's benefited from the frictionlessness of the communication mediums, right? That's what's permitted misinformation and disinformation to propagate so quickly. It's the fact that it is so easy and free and shareable and limbically hijacked, that's what's giving it its power. That's what motivates it and pushes it forward.

   10. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal18:27

       Yeah. The communication- the cost of communication's driven almost to zero now.

   11. CWChris Williamson18:32

       Yeah.

   12. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal18:32

       And the other problem is it's so convenient. I tell people, "We can communicate faster than we can think." And I think Twitter is a great representation of that. People hear something and they will tweet about it before they've sat back and said, "Now what do I really think about that? What do I really want to say?" And it's not just Twitter. It's, it's other things as well. If we were only allowed to communicate a certain amount each day, and we had to stop and think, "What are the most important things I want to send out to friends or to wider elements?" we might do better. During the Civil War, Ulysses Grant, as did most generals, would send their orders out handwritten. And so General Grant would sit down with a pencil and a little orders book, little pages you could tear out, and he would hand-write instructions to general officers. Well, when you're handwriting, particularly in the dark and you're tired, you tend to be succinct. You tend to get to the point. And if you know that they're tired and they're probably in the dark and could be reading by candlelight, you don't want to waste a lot of words. So you do it ... Just word processing now allows us to take a document and keep expanding it until people don't have time to read it. And so if we had to hand-write stuff, we would probably get to the point far faster than we do.

   13. CWChris Williamson19:53

       Wasn't it Napoleon who used to take two weeks to respond to orders? Have I got this right? I'm pretty sure that he used to leave messages on his desk for two weeks and his justification for that was that usually within the space of two weeks, things had either sorted themselves out or it was so important that someone had sent something better than a letter to come and tell him about it.

   14. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal20:13

       (laughs) I hadn't heard that, but I believe it. I've known some other people who used to always sit on everything they've got and they said, "If it's really important, they'll call me." Now, I think that probably doesn't work in-

   15. CWChris Williamson20:26

       That's the extreme solution. Yeah.

   16. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal20:27

       Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

5. 20:29 – 33:02

   Lessons From Coordinating Agencies

   1. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal20:29

   2. CWChris Williamson20:29

      Um, thinking about when you first arrived at your job, the, the last job that you had in the Armed Forces, you had to coordinate an awful lot of different agencies. What are some of the lessons and stories that you got from that? I imagine that that was just a catastrophe.

   3. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal20:45

      It was hard. A- and I would say, first, my last job in Afghanistan, there were 46 nations in the coalition. So you start with 46 nationalities all trying to align on a military strategy for which I am the, the commander. They're all good people, they all want to do well, but they've got different instructions from their home country. Some of these countries that had a very small force were getting daily calls from the President down to some lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan's getting from his head of state. So, you know, I'm trying to compete with that. Then there's the cultural changes because they all come with a different perspective historically and culturally. So what I say to them is going to go through a filter both from me and theirs. Then you've got different organizations that aren't military, Department of State, intelligence organizations, United Nations, uh, NATO, all these different entities that have different equities, they have different objectives. They, they don't stand up and say they're different, but they're slightly enough different so that everything will be interpreted through that lens, or in some cases it will be resisted based upon that. And then the last one is, in many cases, there are big personalities who just don't want to deal with another big personality. And so how do you get this tower of Babel to communicate and to align on something? The danger, of course, is superficially it's easy. You get everybody in a room and you say, "Do we want to solve climate change?" And everybody goes, "Of course we do." That, that's a good thing. "Well, everybody sign up to helping with climate change." "Absolutely." "Okay, now we're going to do some specific things." And then you've lost them. They go, "Oh, wait a minute. Not gonna do that, not gonna do this, not gonna do ..." you know, depending upon their equities. And we found out in the military, uh, campaign as well, people could philosophically agree and give you the illusion of unity, and then when you got to execution, you learned that it was going to be much harder than that. And it wasn't because they were evil. It was because everybody comes to it with slightly different equities and perspectives and instructions in many cases.

   4. CWChris Williamson23:01

      This is something that you talk about in your new book about the, the challenge of moving from intention to action and how important it is to actually find a, a place where the rubber meets the road and to start to act on things. What are some of the principles that you relied on to try and get that over the line from armchair philosophy to, uh, on-the-ground action?

   5. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal23:23

      Yeah. We're talking about overcoming inertia. And of course, inertia says an object at rest remains at rest, or an object in motion remains in motion in the same direction and velocity unless changed. So you gotta first understand that it is extraordinarily powerful. Inertia is always the easiest option. People are very rarely criticized for doing nothing, or they can at least find a way to dodge criticism for doing nothing. They'll say, "I didn't have enough information. I-" you know, this, this, this. But if you do something, you're sort of hanging out there. And so what we found is you've got to be very specific. You have got to set requirements, sometimes deadlines, sometimes very specific actions that must be taken. And of course, you have to start by getting people committed to the idea that action was going to happen. You know, not just a head nod. You've got to actually get people believing that something is going to happen. And, and that can be hard. The second thing is you've got to do very concrete things that says...We are going to do this in accordance with this timeline and you are responsible for this part of it. You personally are accountable. You know, a friend of mine has a great quote that I use all the time. It says, "If three people are tasked to feed the dog, the dog's gonna starve." And he's, he's actually right. Because on the surface you say, "Well, three people, hey, the, the dog's gonna be good to go." No. As soon as somebody doesn't know that they are ultimately responsible for something happening, they will rationalize that, well, somebody else is gonna do it. And so you've got to take that, uh, ability away from them. You've got to sweep away all the fact that they can hide from accountability.

   6. CWChris Williamson25:15

      Diseconomies of scale in that way are one of the main reasons why you see... Look at small startups. Look at the, these tiny companies that have got less than 100 employees and are worth billions and billions of dollars. Why? Well, it's because they're agile, because the diseconomies of scale, many of which come with communication, they haven't kicked in yet. You've got like Bird and Lime, these scooter companies that are just annihilate... There was a period when I was in America where every month that I was there... I think I was in your country for like t- two months. Month one to month two, they 10X their value, and month two to month three, they 10X their value. So I'd left and these companies were massive. I couldn't believe it. And I thought, right, okay, what's going on here? And it's the fact that they're so agile, they're able to move and change as they need, the communication's frictionless. And on top of that, you have direct accountability. When your entire marketing department is like John and Mary and this other guy over there, like there's three people that you need to speak to and each of them has a very, very defined task. Okay, John there looking after paid, and Mary, you do copywriting and whatever. Like, that's it. So I think one of the things that I've found that's very useful, uh, tying communication in with this, when I've a, a phone call, especially a group call with a bunch of my guys, so let's say that me and a couple of the other directors are talking about our nightlife business. And at the end of the call, I'll always summarize and say, "All right, man, so I'm going to go away and I'm going to do this and this and this. And Dave, you need to ring this person and we need to check on the pricing for this and blah, blah. And Darren, you've got this, this, and this." And it just, especially with non-written communication, that lack of a record gives enough slippage for people to, "I don't remember... I don't seem to recall. Stan, you mentioned... I don't seem to remember you saying that in the meeting." And yeah, that's a nice way to do it, I think, providing that summary, keeping everything as agile as possible, uh, yeah, those are two tactics that I've used that I think work well.

   7. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal27:10

      Chris, I think those are very good. The one I'd add to that is start the next meeting with the list of things you said were gonna get done. And, and look to each person and say, "Did it get done? Did it get done? Did it get done?" And a cou- after a couple of times people will go, "I can't walk away and let it... hope that everybody will forget it."

   8. CWChris Williamson27:28

      What about structure? That's something that we're kind of talking about here. Big companies or small companies, what's an optimal way to structure a... to, uh, mitigate risk?

   9. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal27:37

      I know it sounds terrible, but it depends. Um, the first thing about risk is, or structure, is that we create these big comfortable structures and as you said, unfortunately they can give us this illusion of stability. And so if you work for a big, massive company and you don't do your job very well, that massive company is gonna survive, or at least you believe it is. You can do something or not do something and you know it's gonna be okay, because you just don't have enough responsibility to move the needle by your negligence or whatever. So that's one thing. But the problem with structure, or that, that's one problem with structure. The other problem is it creates pathways, it creates expectations that can be very tortured. You know, you can have to go to your boss and your boss's boss and your boss's boss's boss and your boss's boss's boss to get approval for something. And on paper that makes sense because it gives people at every level visibility and oversight and wisdom and all this stuff, but the reality is it makes it so slow or it's such a filtering process that a certain time you just don't bother. You say, "I'm not gonna do it." And it's not that you sit down where you are and innovate and drive the company. You tend to say, "Well, you know, there's just no point in, in working that hard to do it." So structure can create a lack of communication, it can create a lack of accountability, although interestingly, structures were designed to make accountability clear. So its structure itself is not evil, but structure that becomes overburdened or not executed correctly is. And then understanding that when a structure exists and it gets damaged and the organization is structure-based, then suddenly when that structure is atomized, the organization has a very difficult time operating. Think of what bl-

   10. CWChris Williamson29:28

       What's an example of that?

   11. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal29:30

       Well, blitzkrieg, for example, the German tactic in World War II, and others have used it as well, was not to destroy the enemy forces, it was to go in, disrupt the communications. And once you disrupted the comm- com- communications, your enemy is atomized. Now they can't coherently synchronize or coordinate their activities. We sometimes atomize our own organizations just by how we structure them, how we do communications in them. You know, research and development doesn't talk to marketing who doesn't talk to supply chain people who doesn't talk... you know. And so as a consequence, we get the wrong product delivered to the wrong place with the wrong requirement. And so, and people all go, "Well, how did that happen?" And that happened because we let our structure limit us. We let our structure put us in silos or put us in lanes that inhibited... Communication's the most obvious part, but it inhibited the ability to get things done.

   12. CWChris Williamson30:29

       It seems like the obvious solution to that is more meetings.

   13. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal30:32

       (laughs) You know, it can feel like it. You know, there's a time ... 'Cause one things meetings do is they, they put out information. Another is they make leaders feel comfortable. How many times you been to a meeting where a leader gets a briefing just so that they think, "Okay. I'm sure everybody's rowing."

   14. CWChris Williamson30:50

       We did that-

   15. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal30:51

       And-

   16. CWChris Williamson30:51

       ... for years we did it every week. So, we run night clubs and every single week, remembering that everyone's been out drinking the night before, but me and my business partner would have it at 11:00 AM which we figured was ... it was late enough that people would be sober, but not so late that the hangover would have kicked in super badly. That was, we'd kind of tried to find a Goldilocks zone.

   17. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal31:09

       (laughs)

   18. CWChris Williamson31:09

       And, um, and we'd sit down and every single week we'd have the same conversation. "Right. So-and-so, you, your team hasn't performed very well, and yours has, and blah, blah, blah," and everyone's on the same page. And you're right. A big part of that was, it was like this public display from us to the managers and to ourselves, "Look, I am doing my job. Everyone is here. If they're suffering through their hangover with everybody else, at least, at least we've got this bit right even if the nights didn't go well." Um, so yeah, what's a, what's a better solution?

   19. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal31:39

       Well, I think the first is meetings are not all evil. And I'll, I'll circle back to that. But we now have information technology where we can get feeds and create dashboards, so many of the things that we cover in meetings you can already have. You can be tracking those in real time, sales numbers, so-and-so, so-and-so, et cetera, so that when you go into the meeting you're not rehashing information. You're not just laying data out. What you're doing is you're saying, "Okay, what are we going to do about the parts of this that are not the way we want them to be?" And I think that gets you very focused. Now, the other part though, is understand that the goodness of meetings, if they're done correctly, is creating trust and cohesion. You're starting to communicate with people. If everybody stays in their home or in their cubicle and they just have their data go and they don't build the links that, that trust requires, you don't have it. And so sometimes having meetings, particularly with video teleconference capability, just lets me see the other person. And I can say, "Yeah, I know Chris. He's, he's working hard. I like him. I empathize with him." Where if you're just at the top of an email or something like that, it doesn't happen. So, I would tell leaders, be intentional about what the purpose of the meeting is and try to, to wring as much value out of it as you can.

   20. CWChris Williamson33:01

       What about bias

6. 33:02 – 38:25

   How to Increase Diversity

   1. CWChris Williamson33:02

      and diversity? Those are two elements, I think, that are quite, uh, they're en vogue at the moment. There's talking about trying to get different voices into the workplace. But it can seem like virtue signaling. It can seem like it's being done simply for the sake of it. And bias-

   2. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal33:16

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson33:16

      ... comes with a, a pretty sort of loaded set of assumptions as well. So, what's a, what's a better way to think about diversity and bias?

   4. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal33:23

      Yeah. I, I'll swing around to bias in a moment. But diversity, I think we think incorrectly about it. You know, we use in, in our book, we talk about a lack of diversity and we take the Bay of Pigs in 1961, brand new administration under President John F. Kennedy takes over. He gets a bunch of old white guys around and they have this plan briefed to him to invade Cuba. Wasn't a very good plan on any level, wasn't a good idea, and it wasn't planned very well, and then it wasn't executed very well. But what we point out is although many of them were veterans from World War II and they now were civilians in government, it wasn't the problem that they were old white guys. That was the nature of government in those days. The problem was that you didn't have diversity of perspectives in the room. You didn't have people with different viewpoints. And so the term groupthink actually came out of a study of the Bay of Pigs. A guy named Janis came up with it when he studied it and the, the dynamics of groupthink. Go forward 18 months and you have the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy is a little bit more seasoned as a, a president now. He has this really big crisis, potential nuclear war, and who does he assemble? Bunch of old white guys. And you go, "Now, wait a minute. Why did he do that?" Well, again, nature of 1962 government. But he did it differently because this time the old white guys were not lacking diversity. He brought in people intentionally with different viewpoints and he set up a process which required them to surface those differences. He teased out the differences to give him more options to choose from. 'Cause on day one of the crisis, they came in and they said, "Bomb Cuba, invade," you know, et cetera. And that was their, like, the course of action. But he teased it out. So, the point I make on diversity is we, we walk in a room and we see all men or all women or all something, we go, "It's not diverse." Or we walk in a room and we see different races, different genders, and we say, "It is diverse." That's not the right measure. The measure is different perspectives, different backgrounds, different expertise, different experiences. And so if we think of diversity as a moral imperative, I said we're thinking wrong. Equality of opportunity is a moral imperative. That's something we should do and we should fight for. Diversity is an operational imperative. We don't do it because it's right. We do it because it's smart and because it works. And we gotta separate the two. Now often, you know, diversity will look like diversity i- in our minds, but sometimes it won't. It's really important that we understand what we're doing here. Then you circle around to bias and you say, "Well we ha-"

   5. CWChris Williamson36:12

      One second. On that-

   6. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal36:13

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson36:13

      ... on that stand. The-

   8. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal36:15

      Please.

   9. CWChris Williamson36:15

      ... the problem that you have with diversity is that by having less diversity you have more cohesive, uh, communication, more cohesion and coherence within the group, right? That there's less likelihood for friction because everyone's coming out from the same perspective. There's no reason for us to, to, uh, disagree with each other. So, how can you balance...... the desire for diversity with the requirement for a cohesive communication structure?

   10. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal36:44

       Yeah, that's a great one. I think there are a couple of things. The first is, you've got to have diversity or you're never going to get that voice that reminds you that what the group thinks may not be right. So even though it's painful, you've got to bring the outside voices into the room. I was put on a couple of boards of directors, I was one at Deutsche Bank USA, because I was a non-banker, because I didn't understand banking. But I would ask stupid questions that occasionally were helpful. You know, I'd go, "I... This sounds stupid." And a banker would look at me and they'd go, "Yeah, you know, actually, it is stupid."

   11. CWChris Williamson37:17

       It is stupid, yeah.

   12. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal37:18

       So, so that is one of the key things. Now, you do have to have a dynamic that says, I, I think of it in phases. There's a phase in which you get everybody's information and opinions, then a decision is made, and there's an execution phase. Now unless something changes, when you go into the execution phase, all the naysayers should essentially shut up. They should get on board, because unless the organization unites to execute, you'll never be effective. It's not effective to just always be the person in the back of the room saying, "Well, you know, um, I didn't think this was a good idea. We shouldn't do it." You got to get on board. And, you know, it's- it's- it's a careful line. If- if something criminal or whatever, you shouldn't get on board. But if it's a basic decision, you have your say, you have the argument, and then- then you move forward with that. But too often leaders want to surround themselves with a Greek chorus of people who will say, you know, "You are a handsome man, you're a powerful man. Your decisions are great." And that's- that's not, in the end, helpful.

   13. CWChris Williamson38:24

       What

7. 38:25 – 47:51

   Communication in Military Hierarchies

   1. CWChris Williamson38:25

      was that like in the army? Because for me, on the outside looking in, it's quite rigid, you think about hierarchy, you think about structure. And not a dictatorship, but there's people that have degrees of superiority and they're supposed to speak down. What's the feedback loop like in the Armed Forces?

   2. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal38:44

      Yeah, it's interesting. It varies by unit. But the reality is, you have to work really hard to get candid communication up. Because everyone wears their position on their uniform. Not only are you, do they know you're the boss, it says it on your uniform with your rank and whatnot. And so there's this seniority, there's this experience, and there's this rank. And junior people are very reticent to step up and say something is stupid. So there are a couple of techniques you use. One is in what they call a council of war, but in any meeting, you've got something you're proposing, an experienced commander, when they ask people their opinions, they'll start with the most junior person and they'll go in reverse order so that that person, each person isn't tainted by more senior people.

   3. CWChris Williamson39:32

      Mm-hmm.

   4. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal39:33

      The second is the art of asking questions. If I go out and I ask junior people, and I'm the general, and I say, "How's my strategy working?" You know they're going to say, "Sir, it's brilliant." You know, what else are they going to say? They know it's my strategy and they know that I'd like to hear it's working. Instead, you have to ask leading questions that say, "Okay, what would you do differently?" I used to ask a question sort of famously, I'd say, "If I told you you can't leave Afghanistan until we win, what would you do differently?" And it worked very well because they'd kind of laugh, wondering if I could actually keep them there forever. And, but then they would get very thoughtful in their responses and they'd go, "Hey, sir, you know, I know what we're saying, but down here, I'll tell you, here's what you have to do if you want to solve the problem." And then you start to get more honest feedback. But- but it's ha- it's still hard. You have to create the environment, you have to listen. If you ask a junior person their opinion, you have to laser focus on them, because as soon as you look over your shoulder and act like you're thinking about something else, you've signaled you didn't really want their opinion. And so, every organization has this challenge. In the military, it's just very overt.

   5. CWChris Williamson40:51

      Yeah, I read, uh ... I can't remember the author's name, but it was a biography of John Boyd, the fighter pilot.

   6. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal40:58

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson40:58

      And he didn't care much for seniority, it sounded like, based on what I read there. But what did come through was the challenges of this rigid structure, the fact that you do have some people, some senior people within any organization who aren't used to that, who aren't used to having somebody that pushes back against their ideas. And one of the things that keeps coming up that we haven't spoken about is creativity, is the fact that if you have poor communication, that limits your creativity. If you have insufficient diversity and if the structure's wrong as well, if you have too many checks and balances all the way up and all the way down, creativity gets limited because someone can't be bothered because they know it's got to be certified 55 times or whatever it might be. And, um, yeah, I think that's the, that feels like one of the most difficult challenges that leaders have at the moment, is to balance between allowing people to communicate freely and openly within a group and allowing everyone to know what's going on, not losing everybody in this overwhelm of information, creating enough structure to keep people moving and keep that momentum going, but not having so much structure that it's con- uh, confines people in and restrictive, and stops creativity. Like, it's no surprise that leadership and the work that you do and coaching companies and stuff like that, it's no surprise that it's needed, 'cause it's really, really hard.

   8. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal42:18

      Yeah, amazingly so. And one of the points you were making is, iconoclasts or rebels who often have something really good to say often also have really abrasive personalities. So it's one thing to tell the people above, "We should do it differently." It's another thing to start it with, "You're fools. You," you know, "you shouldn't have your jobs." You- you're going to cut off reception.... and Billy Mitchell and other leaders in, in history have run into that problem. And so while they may have been pushing something that was very right, sometimes the messenger becomes as much of a problem as the receptor. And so it's a, it's a pretty interesting dynamic. It's creating an organization though that welcomes that. And I'd go back to your creativity point. I think it's key. One of the things I learned in special operations with very mature people is don't give them tasks. If you give them a task that's fairly narrow, you say, "Okay, I want you to go here, do X," they, they will do that. Step back and give them broad missions and say, "This is the problem and this is, this is the kind of solution we want to get to." Now the task may end up being very obvious and they may have to do it that way, but in other cases they will step back and they'll say, "Okay, what are we really trying to do?" You've opened the door. You've almost challenged them to be creative. And, and every once in a while I would get with the really good ones and I'd have a difficult problem and I'd say, "I don't think this is solvable. I don't think there's a way to, to do that, but will you guys look at it?" And of course they immediately puffed themselves up and they go, I've just challenged their manhood and, and so they come and they come back with some amazing stuff.

   9. CWChris Williamson44:00

      I remember seeing something that you put about the difference between dictating a task for someone to complete and allowing them to be the creator of the solution to it, and the difference in terms of buy-in that you get with that is, yeah, it's worlds apart.

   10. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal44:16

       It's complete. I mean, you know, if you tell them what to do and it goes poorly, they'll just say, "Hey boss, made a bad decision." But if you say, "I want you to solve the problem, figure out what it is and tell me what you did. Don't come for information, just do it," they own it then, and you see this completely different level of commitment.

   11. CWChris Williamson44:34

       What about bias?

   12. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal44:36

       Well, bias is interesting because we think of bias as evil. We think if someone's a racist or they're... whatever bias they've got. Bias is logical, meaning it comes from your position. I describe in the book that, uh, Southerners in the pre-Civil War United States, even for a cent- uh, century after that, everybody says they were racists. And the answer is, were they racist? Yeah, but they were racists for a reason because their economy was built on free or slave labor. You couldn't have slaves unless you bought into the idea that they were inferior. So it was in your interest to have slaves economically, therefore it was in your interest to convince yourself that they are inferior and worthy of being slaves. And so I'm convinced they could pass a lie detector test that they believed all that because of course they would. If we look at other perspectives now, instead of people just being evil, look at why they believe something. Look at the reason behind it. And getting people to change their biases is not always impossible, but it's extraordinarily hard. In my experience, you're more likely just gonna have to understand those biases and factor them in, to include your own.

   13. CWChris Williamson46:00

       Yeah, it's an interesting one to think about. The vast majority of people with whom you disagree are convinced of their position.

   14. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal46:10

       Yes.

   15. CWChris Williamson46:10

       Most people aren't disagreeing with you with the information that you have in your head and then willfully deciding to get rid of that and then just take some opposite point of view. No, they're convinced. Of course they are. If you had what they had in their heads, you would be convinced of it as well.

   16. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal46:28

       Exactly. You know, I've told people many times we were fighting against Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Had I had their life journey, I'd think exactly what they think and I'd be on their side of the table. So again, they're not irrational. It's just from a different perspective.

   17. CWChris Williamson46:46

       This is why we need to be incredibly careful about judging the actions of people, especially from the past. There's a lot of retrospective shaming that we're doing at the moment on social media and you need to think, man, like can you judge the actions of yesterday by the standards of today? No. No. Anybody-

   18. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal47:04

       Not probably that.

   19. CWChris Williamson47:04

       Anybody that spends even a minute thinking about that realizes that that's not an effective route to go down. Does that mean that you sh- should still propagate those ideas today? No, absolutely not. There are some things that need to, you know, they need to be lost to the winds of time. But they were there, and you can't call people evil. Like throwing terms around like evil. People... John Peterson talks about this. He says people presume that if they lived in World War II Germany, that they wouldn't have been one of the Nazis. It's like, no, of course you would. Like you would have had to have been an unbelievably unique human for that to have not been the case.

   20. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal47:38

       Exactly right. And one of the beauties though is the people in the past who are dead can't fight back. So we can rip their names off buildings, knock down their statues, criticize them all day long because they're not here to defend themselves.

8. 47:51 – 56:30

   Power of Adaptability

   1. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal47:51

   2. CWChris Williamson47:51

      What about adaptability?

   3. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal47:53

      If we don't adapt, we lose. And yet... And we all think we're adaptable. We, you know, we all say, "Well, I adapt to whatever," but the reality is adaptation requires a couple of things. It requires some reason to adapt, some... Either what's, you have isn't working, and then the ability to adapt. You got to have enough maneuver space to adapt. In the book, we talk about Dick Fosbury, who changed the way people did high jumping. And he did that after trying every other technique for years to be a high jumper and not being competitive, but he came up with the idea you could throw yourself over backwards. But he could only do that because they changed the landing areas. They used to just use sand. You, you did the high jump, literally land on a little bit of sand. If you landed back on your, your neck, you'd break your neck. So they didn't. By the time he... In eight- in 1968 they had these big thick crash pads.So it's actually a different sport. It's a different challenge because he can do things that would have been suicidal 10 years before. And so you've got to understand when the requirement to adapt is there and the ability to adapt, enough freedom, uh, of action to adapt. And then, of course, we've got to be mentally w- willing to adapt because it gets back to inertia. Many times we won't adapt just because we're used to what we're doing, or because we're scared to adapt, or we haven't thought about it. There's any number of reasons. We don't adapt naturally. And, like, we think we do, but I think we only adapt when, you know, it's kind of forced upon us.

   4. CWChris Williamson49:30

      Can you tell the story of how you left the army? Because that seems to me to be a story of adaptability.

   5. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal49:37

      Yeah. I, I was in the army for 34 years. I graduated from West Point, and then a little bit over 34 years. And in my, uh, near the end of my first year in Afghanistan as the commander of ISAF, there was a reporter who came and did a story on our team and he, he produced this story in Rolling Stone magazine. Now, I thought the story was inaccurate. You know, I thought it was a depiction that was not a fair depiction. But it didn't matter because when it came out, it came out at a politically charged period and it put the president in a very difficult position. And so, you know, generals aren't supposed to put their commander-in-chief in a difficult position. So I offered my resignation to President Obama with no ill feelings. I said, you know, that the story happened, I didn't, uh, I didn't think it was fair, but it doesn't matter, and he, he accepted my resignation. Well, clearly, in a second, I went from being a soldier my whole life from age 17 on to not being a soldier. And in the short term, of course I'm on the news, disgraced general, all the things that go with it, so you've got the, the challenge of dealing with that. But longer term, you have the challenge of being something different and you have to decide how you're going to live. You've got to decide who you are because I'd spent a lifetime self-identifying as a soldier, and now I can't and shouldn't do that. And so I made a decision then, and it wasn't a conscious decision why I went out in the desert and sat for 40 days, I... my wife helped me with it. We didn't really talk about it very much. But very quickly, we made the decision that we weren't going to try to relitigate the past. We weren't going to argue what happened in the past. We weren't going to be bitter because you could spend a lifetime being a bitter former general, and a lot of people would have you out to lunch for that. But, but what, what's the point? So I decided at that point that I was going to live my life going forward, I was going to be something different. I started a business, I started teaching, I started writing, uh, but I made the decision that those things about me that were very important to me and those were the values that I thought I represented and that I held and the relationship I had with a number of people whose affection I, and respect, I care deeply about, that I was going to conduct myself in a way that they would not feel like I wasn't the person that they had believed in, that they were going to decide, "No, Stan is what he said he was and is what he acted like, that the article's an aberration, and he still is." And so, sort of every day, I've tried to be that going forward. And you ask, "Well, does it ever hurt? Do you ever get angry at..." you know. And the answer is, does it hurt? Sure. Um, do I get angry? No. Because what's the point? You know, there, there's nothing to be... there's nobody or anything to be angry at. All you can do is pick up and say, "How can I make my life and my contribution as good as it can be?" And that's worked really well because I've, I've ended up with a great place in life, I've ended up with an amazing set of friends, opportunities I'd never would have had otherwise. And so out of everything that I would not have chosen to have happen, uh, I've got an extraordinary number of, of wonderful outcomes.

   6. CWChris Williamson53:04

      It's interesting that the fundamental you came back to there is values. It's something grounding that even in a turmoil of public disgrace or humiliation or, or just a, a disadvantageous situation. It's interesting that that's the thing that you come back to and I, I, I don't know, I think that what we're seeing at the moment is the upending of a lot of people's values. You know, tradition is baby, bathwater, and bath all being thrown out of the window, and it doesn't give people a very firm place to stand. And then when you do come up against something that requires a bit more resilience, what are you holding on to?

   7. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal53:40

      Yeah. There's a great article, The World of Epictetus, and it was Admiral Stockdale who won the Medal of Honor from being a prisoner of war in Hanoi for seven years during the Vietnam War, and what he comes back to is, he didn't control his physical surroundings, he was tortured, he was broken, but he held on to his values. He had a set of values based in philosophy and religion and just his personal being. And no matter what else happened, those were what he was able to cling to. And I would say that that's what I think. What I... as you mentioned now, I think there are a lot of people who are mortgaging their values for short-term gain, and they're going to hit a point in their life when they look in the mirror or their grandchildren look at them, and they'll kind of go, "Grandmama or Granddaddy, why did you do that?" And it's going to be a very painful time. Um, and, and I almost wish that if they got the chance to step back and think about it, they could make another calculation.

   8. CWChris Williamson54:41

      If you sell your integrity, you can't buy it back.

   9. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal54:43

      No.

   10. CWChris Williamson54:43

       And when it comes to even a more... a less esoteric and a more-... trendy equivalent of it. You can't out-hustle being uncool. So we see this with content creators online, that someone will do a thing. They'll find that their, uh, their message resonates with a particular audience and they'll lean into it, and lean into it, and lean into it. And they'll increase their blind spots and their biases to the point where you go, "Dude, you're just a, you're just a puppet for that particular audience. You're not even a person anymore. You're just this caricature of yourself giving these people this gray sludge that is exactly what they expected." And I had a comedian on the show, Ryan Long, and he said, "Man, the only thing that I want when I look back on my career is to have a, a body of work that I think is cool, that I look back on and I think, 'That's cool. I'm proud of that. I'll show that to people and not be embarrassed about it.'" It's like, if you start with that end in mind, it's a pretty good place to go. But I wonder how many people-

   11. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal55:38

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson55:38

       ... that we're seeing operate at the moment could look back on the things that they're putting out into the world and say, "Yeah, I'm really glad that I tweeted that, had that meeting, spent that time with that family member, had that discussion, treated my partner in that way." I don't think that, I don't think that a lot of people would say they did.

   13. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal55:55

       Yeah, I think you've nailed it. And it's one of the things, going back to when I said, we can communicate faster than we can think. And also the power of applause or positive reaction to something. You say something ridiculous or outrageous and people cheer, and that's hypnotic. And you start to, or, you know, you want more of that, but it's really dangerous.

   14. CWChris Williamson56:18

       There's a term for it in the creator community. It's called audience capture. And audience capture is a hell of a drug, man. Uh, all right, so we've, we've spoken about some of the challenges around risk. What about some of the solutions? There must be a

9. 56:30 – 1:00:04

   Strategies for Managing Risk

   1. CWChris Williamson56:30

      tactic or two that people could implement so that they can actually get out ahead of these vulnerabilities.

   2. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal56:35

      Yeah, absolutely. The first is understand that you have responsibility for it, you, your organization. It's not something that is done to you. You do it. Think in terms of the human immune system. We've got this miracle system that detects threats to us, assesses them as dangerous or not, responds to them, and then learns. We've got the equivalent in our organizations, a risk immune system. It's the number of factors like communication, narrative, bias, diversity, timing. If we strengthen those, then we are ready for those threats, no matter what they are. There are a number of things you can do. We talked about some of the techniques to get, uh, more open communication. There's one I'd throw out. It's red teaming, and that is you've got a plan or a strategy to do something in your company or organization, and you fall in love with it because it's yours and you've worked on it a long time. So necessarily, you become a bit blind. If you bring in a small team, they can be part of your organization but they should be a step away from the, the plan itself, and task them to muck it out. Say, "What could you do as a competitor or as customers or as problem creators, what could you do to do it?" And what they're really doing is pressure testing your plan. They'll find the gaps and seams and weaknesses. And it's really upsetting because you will have created this wonderful thing and they will come and clever little people will crush it and it'll make you look stupid. And if you're human, like too many people are, you will say, "No, I, you know, I, uh, reject that." Then you lose. If you're smart, you look and say, "Let me find all these holes, patch them up, make it better, and iterate again." It's that willingness to give people the opportunity to find your blind spots, and that's a, a short-term mental idea and it's actually a, a formal construct organizations can do with great, uh, success.

   3. CWChris Williamson58:33

      What's a gap analysis?

   4. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal58:36

      A gap analysis is the difference between what you're doing and what you should be doing. And it sounds self, uh, evident, but in many cases, you, you're doing a bunch of things in your organization and then you look at what actually has to be done, or what need, and you'll find a gap. And sometimes people won't have raised it up and, and it will find the ability to say, "Okay, we've got to address that gap. We've got to put more people here, more effort, change the plan," et cetera.

   5. CWChris Williamson59:07

      Yeah, it's an interesting one. The, the war gaming thing, is that similar to red team?

   6. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal59:13

      No. War gaming is... It, it can help do the same. War gaming is a more formal process where you lay out your plan and then you go through the execution of your strategy in step by step. And the military will do a big war game where you'll go through a, the unfolding of a plan, and you'll have an opponent.

   7. CWChris Williamson59:31

      Do you still have little, little models that you push around with, like, a broom handle, or is it more sophisticated than that now?

   8. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal59:38

      It's, it's more computerized now. But when I was a junior officer, we still had those and we would push tanks around and it was-

   9. CWChris Williamson59:44

      That's much cooler. That's much cooler.

   10. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal59:46

       It was great fun.

   11. CWChris Williamson59:46

       Yeah.

   12. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal59:47

       Yeah. But what it does is it puts your plan through when your plan starts to get under pressure and fall apart. You have to keep fighting it. And so as you keep fighting it, you learn where the weaknesses are and you also just get practice in doing it.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:00:02

       Yeah.

   14. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal1:00:02

       Really powerful.

10. 1:00:04 – 1:00:40

    Where to Find General McChrystal

    1. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal1:00:04

    2. CWChris Williamson1:00:04

       General Stanley McChrystal, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming on today. If people want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go?

    3. GMGeneral Stanley McChrystal1:00:12

       McChrystalgroup.com. So just one word, McChrystalgroup.com. They can get to speeches, they can get to books, they can get to anything that might interest them.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:00:22

       Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:00:40