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

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Stanley McChrystal is a retired four-star general, the former commander of the US and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan, a CEO and an author. Risk is a constant throughout life. It's permanently shaping our individual and organisational behaviour but humans are inherently bad at judging and adapting to risk. After 34 years of dealing with mortal risk in the field of combat, Stanley has a good insight into a better approach. Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy Risk - https://amzn.to/3kQ6K49  Check out Stanley's website - https://www.mcchrystalgroup.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everyone, welcome back to the show my guest today is General Stanley McChrystal and we are talking about the military strategies for dealing with risk. Stanley McChrystal is a retired four-star general, the former commander of the US and international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, a CEO and an author. Risk is a constant throughout life, It's permanently shaping our individual and organizational behaviour, but humans are inherently bad at judging and adapting to risk. After 34 years of dealing with mortal risk in the field of combat, Stanley has a good insight into a better approach. I feel like whenever I speak to people who have really forged their ideas in stressful situations,

in really, really intense environments, the difference of insight is pretty palpable. It makes me feel like such an armchair philosopher just sitting back and discussing ideas when Stanley was trying to coordinate thousands and thousands of troops from 34 nations in Afghanistan and that he was the point man trying to put it all together. Yeah, tons of lessons to take away from today, especially if you're involved in organizing a business or any sort of community. Yeah, there's an awful lot to learn here.

Before we get on to other news, me and video guide Dean have been thinking about kickstarting our Patreon. and video guide Dean have been thinking about kickstarting our patreon so stay tuned for updates about that there will be cool cool things live streams and q&a's behind the scenes stuff happening there so yes keep your ears peeled but now it's time for general Stanley McChrystal General Stanley McChrystal, welcome to the show Well Chris, thanks for having me, please call me Stan I was going to say it's kind of difficult to work out what is it calling a four star general Stan feels oddly informal. I've been called a lot worse Chris so Stan would be great.

What does the four stars mean? What does that mean in a general for the non-initiates amongst us? 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 plane 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. All right, okay. So only in times of real necessity does anyone get above that?

Exactly. Right, so that's a lot of pressure on your shoulders then. Ha ha ha. 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 that, what's it been like watching that from the sidelines having invested so much time in it?

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 all the things necessary to pull their society forward. And the fact that it is now, but at least put on hold, is disappointing. Yeah, 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 prisoners 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 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, IE pulling out because if alkydot 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. That's the word of the day. risk that you just mentioned there. Why are you so interested in it? 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 a conclusion, we don't do 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 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. 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 do 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.

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. What do you mean by vulnerability and resilience in this context? Well, vulnerabilities of those weaknesses in an organization, there 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 can step back, we can assess it, we can deal with it, and we can move forward. However, if we're not 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 I Guess that through your career back back history risk was Turned up to 11 that it's grave. It's mortal, right? It's as high of a externalities you can get. 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, 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 in Zero Dark 30. 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 that came back to the Pentagon,

and this operation had gone across the border in Pakistan and ended up into a firefight. And this guy called me just to strut, and he said, ah, 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 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 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 probably go back and house, get your umbrella in a raincoat. Yeah. So, framing is important then. Yeah, it's really important. What's the goal with risk analysis? Is it to never fail? Is it to be able to see the world more accurately? It's a great question.

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 pay off is fairly low. But if the pay off 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. Yeah, the payoffs were incredibly high, but the risk was somehow even higher. Exactly. 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? Hey, 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. 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. Who was major general John Sedgwick? John Sedgwick was a hero.

He went to the United States Military academy where I ended up going. He graduated in 1837. And they had this distinguished career before the American Civil War. He'd been in a series of wars, a Mexican war, wars on 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 rouls, that's 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 of midnight and solve your problems.

But he's also well known for a quote that is attributed to him. He was at the Battle of Spotsovania, 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 Vania 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.

What do you think looking back on your time in the Armed Forces and risk? What was some of the things that they got right about the way that they judged risk? Yeah, I think when organizations were designed to deal with risk, they were most effective when they designed themselves to be very adaptable. In the early years of special operations, we started doing things related to counter-terrorist operations. And you've probably seen in movies

where commanders will go in a building and the first guy will go left, the next guy will go right. And everybody goes, is though it's a ballet, it's been rehearsed a hundred times, they throw things up in the air, next guy catches it and they move around like that. Yeah, that's how it goes, right? Yeah, I assume it doesn't move. It's anyway, I never saw an app like that. And so when I first got into special operation, 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 and a constantly changing set of unknowns. Then they become resilient, they become confident,

they become used to adapting. They aren't 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, it's get everything lined up. If you're a senior officer and you come up with a plan, you put it together, a battle plan, you brief it to everybody,

and you have some ridiculous belief that that's what's actually 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. What about communication then? It seems like that's the first step to the unexpected. 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 a rye things go, no one knows what they're supposed to do. Yeah, and it goes on various levels. If I say communication, you might say, where 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 ten 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 tonally?

So is what I'm sending, even if it's unintentional, my part of my 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 what not, gives you no contextual ability. So first, you've got to have communication that actually gets gives you no contextual ability. So first you got to have communication that actually gets from one place to another and is understood. And then you've got to communicate 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 a constant ability to update. So people have a two-way communication. So we know what's happening and we can adapt in

real time. That was of course one of the great stories from the First World War used to be that they would start these big offensive 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 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 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 an organization where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing for any number of reasons? The technological issue has been removed largely now, you know, in most organizations you've got frictionless communication that's instant, in fact, if now, 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. Yeah, that's true. I mean, we haven't completely solved the technical part, but we've mostly solved it. We can communicate. Now we've mostly solved it. 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 insidious problems of misinformation and then even worse disinformation, intentional misrepresentation of facts. And so you corrupt the system with information that actually draws wrong conclusions. It's benefited from the frictionlessness of the communication mediums. That's what 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. Yeah, the communication, the cost of communications driven almost to zero now. 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, and what do I really think about that? What do I really want to say? And it's not just Twitter, 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 order's 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 you'll be reading it 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 handwrite stuff, we would probably get to the point far faster than we do. 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.

I hadn't heard that, but I believe it. I've known some other people who used to always sit on everything they've gotten. They said, if it's really important, they'll call me. Now, I think that probably doesn't work. That's an extreme solution, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking about when you first arrived at your job, 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. It was hard. 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 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 historically and culturally. So what I say to them is gonna 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, NATO, all these different entities that have different equities, they have different objectives. They don't stand up and, they have different objectives. 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.

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 a buddy in a room and you say, do we want to solve climate change? And everybody goes, of course we do.

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, wait a minute. Not going to do that. Not going to do this. Not going to, you know, depending upon their equities. And we found out in the military campaign as well. pain 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 the cases. This is something that you talk about in your new book about the challenge of moving from intention to action and how important it is to actually find 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 on the ground action? Yeah, we're talking about overcoming inertia. And of course, inertia says an object at rest remains at rest. When object in motion remains in motion and same direction and velocity unless changed. So, you've got to first understand that it is extraordinarily powerful. And 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 don't 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 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 your list of timeline and you are responsible for this part of it. You personally are accountable. 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 going to starve. And he's actually right. Because on the surface, you say, well, three people,

hey, the dog's going to be good to go. Now, as soon as somebody doesn't know that they are ultimately responsible for something happening, they will rationalize that with somebody else that's going to do it. And so you've got to take that ability away from them. You got to sweep away all the fact that they can hide from accountability. This economies of scale in that way are one of the main reasons why you see look at small startups, look at these tiny companies that have got less

than a hundred employees and a 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 got like the bird and lime, these scooter companies that are just annihilating, there was a period when I was in America where every month that I was, I think I was in your country for like 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. 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 communications 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, there's three people that you need to speak to

and each of them has a very, very defined task. Okay, John, no, look enough to pay it and Mary, you do copywriting and whatever. Like, that's it. So I think one of the things that I found it's very useful Time communication in with this when I have 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 that summary, keeping everything

as agile as possible. Yeah, those are two tactics that I've used that I think work well. 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 we're going to get done. And look to each person, say, did it get done? Did it get done? Did it get done?

And after a couple of times, people will go, I can't walk away and let it hope that everybody will forget it. What about structure? That's something that we're kind of talking about here. Big companies are small companies. What's an optimal way to structure to mitigate risk? I know it sounds terrible, but it depends. 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 going to survive, or at least you believe it is, you can do something or not do something. And you know, it's going to 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 of 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 is boss and your boss is boss and your boss is boss is 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 at a certain time you just don't bother. You say, I'm not going to 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 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 is a-based. Then suddenly, when that structure is atomized, the organization has a very difficult time operating. Well, it's an example of that.

Well, let's create, 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've disrupted the 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. Research and development doesn't talk to marketing, it doesn't talk to supply chain people, it doesn't talk, you know. And so as a consequence, we get the wrong product to deliver 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 Communications the most obvious part, but it inhibited the ability to get things done It seems like the obvious solution to that is more meetings You know it can feel like it You know, there's a time because one thing's meetings do is they put out information Another is they make leaders feel comfortable.

How many times you've been to a meeting where a leader gets a briefing just so that they think, okay, I'm sure everybody's rolling. We did that for years, we did it every week. So we run nightclubs 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 a.m., 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. And we'd sit down in every single week we'd have the same conversation, right? So and so, your team hasn't performed very well in 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 that hangover with everybody else, at least we've got this

bit right, even if the night didn't go well. So yeah, what's a better solution? Well, I think the first is meetings are not all evil and 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, sales, or so on, so, etc. 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. 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 trust requires, you know, have them. 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 working hard. I like him. I empathize with it 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 ring as much value as you can. What about bias and diversity? Those are two elements, I think,

that are quite invoked at the moment, as 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 comes with a pretty loaded set of assumptions as well. So what's a better way to think about diversity and bias? Yeah, I'll swing around to bias in a moment, but diversity, I think we think

incorrectly about it. You know, we use 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 plan 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 all 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 group think actually came out of a study of the Bay of Pigs. The guy named Janice came up with it when he studied it and the dynamics of group thing. Go forward 18 months and you have the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy is a little bit more seasoned as a president now. He has this really big crisis,

potential nuclear war, and who's the assemble? Lots of O'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.

Because on day one of the crisis that came in and they said, bomb Cuba, invade, et cetera. And that was like the course of action. But he teased it out. So the point I make on diversity is 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've got to separate the two.

Now often, you know, diversity will look like diversity in our minds, but sometimes it won't. It's really important that we understand what we're doing here. Then you circled around the bias. One second, on that, on that stand, the problem that you have with diversity is that by having less diversity, you have more cohesive that by having less diversity, you have more cohesive communication, more cohesion and coherence within the group, right? There's less likelihood for friction because everyone's coming out from the same perspective. There's no reason for us to disagree with each other. So how can you balance the desire for diversity with the requirement for a cohesive communication structure? Yeah, that's a great one. I think there are a couple things. The first is you've got to diversity with the requirement for a cohesive communication structure.

Yeah, that's a great one. I think there are a couple 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 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 go I this sounds stupid and a banker would look at me and go yeah, you know actually it is stupid so

So that is one of the key things now you do have to have a dynamic that says, I think of it in faces. 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, I didn't think this was a good idea. We shouldn't do it. You got to get on board. And it's a careful line. If something criminal or whatever, you shouldn't get on board. But if it's a basic decision, 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 you move forward with that. But too often leaders want to surround themselves

with a Greek chorus of people who will say, you are a handsome man, you're a powerful man, your decisions are great, and that's not in the end helpful. What was that like in the army? Because for me, in 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? 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 I'll start with the most junior person and

They'll go in reverse order so that that person each person is intended by more senior people 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 people, and I'm the general, and I say, how is my strategy working? You know, they're gonna say, sir, it's brilliant. You know, what else are they gonna 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 kind of laughed wondering if I could actually keep them there forever. And but then they would get very thoughtful

in their responses and they 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 hot. It's still hard. You have to create the environment You have to listen if you ask a junior person or a pending 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. Yeah, I read a, I can't remember the author's name,

but it was a biography of John Boyd, the fighter pilot, 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 yeah, I think 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 confined 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 because it's really, really hard. Yeah, amazingly. So in one of the points you were making is a conoclass 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 your fools, you know, you shouldn't have your jobs. You're going to cut off reception and Billy Mitchell and other leaders 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 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 will do that. Step back and give them broad missions and say this is the problem and this is this 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 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 do that, but we you guys look at it. And of course they immediately puffed themselves up and they go, I've just challenged their manhood. And so they come and they come back with some amazing stuff. 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 buying that you get with that is, yeah, it's worlds apart. 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. What about bias? Well, bias is interesting because we think of biases evil. We think of someone's erases or whatever bias they've got. Bias is logical, meaning it comes

from your position. I describe in the book that southerners in the pre-civil war United States, even for a century after that, everybody says they were racists, and the answer is where they racist, yeah, but they were racist 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 going to have to understand those biases and factor them in to include your own.

Yeah, it's an interesting one to think about the vast majority of people with whom you disagree are convinced of their position. Yes. 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. If you know they're convinced, of course they are. If you had what they had in their heads, you would be convinced of it as well. 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 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. 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 that spends even a minute thinking about that realizes that that's not an effective route to go down. Does that mean you 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. It's 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. What about adaptability? 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 you have as it working, and then the ability to adapt. You got even 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, 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 did the high jump literally land a little bit of sand. If you landed back on your neck, you'd break your neck. So they didn't. By the time he, 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 of action to adapt. And then of course we got to be mentally 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. I like, we think we do, but I think we only adapt when, you know, it's kind of forced upon us. Can you tell the story of how you left the army? Because that seems to me to be a story of adaptability. Yeah, I was in the army for 34 years. I graduated from West Point and then a little bit over 34 years. And near the end of my first year in Afghanistan is the commander, ISAF.

There was a reporter who came and did a story on our team and he produced this story in Rolling Stone magazine. And I thought the story was inaccurate. 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

think it was fair, but it doesn't matter. And 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, disgrace, general, all the things that go with it. So you've got 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 spend 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. 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 really get 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 the out-of-the-lunch for that. But 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, 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 have with a number of people whose affection 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 stand is what

he said he was and is what he acted like, that the articles and 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 the virtue? Do I get angry? No, because what's the point? You know, 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? That's worked really well because 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. So out of everything that I would not have chosen to have happened, I've got an extraordinary number of wonderful outcomes.

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 just a disadvantageous situation. It's interesting that that's the thing that you come back to. And I don't know, I think that what we're seeing at the moment is the upending of a lot of people's values.

Tradition is baby, bathwater and bath all being thrown out of the window. It doesn't give people a very firm place to stand. Then when you do come up against something that requires a bit more resilience, what are you holding on to? Yeah, there's a great article, the world of epictetus, and it was Admiral Stockdale, who won the Medal of Honor from being a prison 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 claim 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. And I almost wish that if they got the chance to step back and think about it, they can make another calculation. If you sell your integrity, you can't buy it back. 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 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 to, you're just to pop it 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 body of work that I think is cool. That I look back on, 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 that were seeing operate at the moment could look back on the things that they're putting out into the world and say yeah 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 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 throughout Regis and people cheer, and that's hypnotic. And you start to, or you know, you want more of that, but it's really dangerous. 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. All right. So we've spoken about some of the challenges around risk. What about some of the solutions? It must be a tactic or two that people can implement so that they can actually get out ahead of these vulnerabilities. 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 learns. We've got the equivalent organizations of risk immune system. It's the number of factors like communication, narrative, bias, diversity, time. 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 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 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 plan itself and test them to muck it up. Say, what could you do as a competitor or as customers or as problem creators? What could you do to do it? 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 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 get people the opportunity to find your blind spots. And that's a short-term, mental idea. And it's actually a formal construct organizations can do with great success. What's a gap analysis? A gap analysis is the difference between what you're doing and what you should be doing. And it sounds self-evident, but in many cases, 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 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, etc. Yeah, it's an interesting one. The the wall gaming thing, is that similar to red team? No, wall gaming is, 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 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 go through the unfolding of a plan and you'll have an opponent. Do you still have little, little models that you push around with like a broom handle? Or is it more sophisticated than that now? It's, it's more computerized now, but when I was a junior officer, we still had those. And we would push tanks around. That's much cooler. That's much cooler.

It was great fun. 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. Yeah. Really powerful. 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?

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