The Mosaic and the Phalanx

Living in Greenwich Village in September 2001, I watched the Twin Towers fall from my Carmine Street rooftop. For much of the rest of that academic year, I tried to make sense of what had happened on that Tuesday morning, for myself and my NYU students. During the same period, both the organizational management and security studies communities were already theorizing the changes to their core subjects under the pressure of the unprecedented event.

In the spring of 2003, I attended an early “Un-Conference” in New York and encountered a non-traditional format that was itself a performance of the decentralized principles being discussed. I was also not entirely surprised when a presenter proposed, with genuine intellectual seriousness, that Al Qaeda’s organizational design pointed toward the future of network design. I recall the room went quiet in the way rooms only go quiet when something is simultaneously obvious and unspeakable (at least not yet, not there).

The argument was not a moral endorsement; rather, it was a structural observation, drawing on the recent, pre-9/11 work of RAND analysts (2001), that argued how a leaderless, cellular, “all-channel” network could absorb devastating strikes to its center and continue to function (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001). Although several people walked out, others stayed and argued well beyond the session’s scheduled ending with no one fully agreeing, but no one entirely dismissing the argument either. That tension between the efficiency of hierarchy and the resilience of modularity has persisted over my succeeding two decades of work with leaders and organizations. And now, twenty-three years on, it is being foregrounded, in blood and fire, on two entirely different continents.

 1. Beyond Resilience

Traditional organizations are arguably built like a phalanx, with disciplined ranks and interlocked functions, made to be formidable when advancing on familiar terrain. As American classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, the classical Greek and Macedonian phalanx was one of history’s most effective systems of coordinated force, being nearly unbreakable from the front, capable of shattering almost anything in its path on level ground (Hanson, 2000). From an organizational perspective, its structural logic arguably passed into the first generation of modern management articulated by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The early twentieth century engineer and pioneering management thinker’s Principles of Scientific Management standardized every movement of every worker on the same principle of disciplined collective execution, substituting central design for local variation and concentrating power through tight coordination (Taylor, 1911).

The flaw in both systems, as the ancient Greek historian Polybius identified when analyzing Rome’s defeat of the Macedonian phalanx at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, was structural. He understood that the phalanx suffered from flanking exposure and terrain dependence and risked cascading collapse wherever the formation broke (Polybius, 1926). What proved true of the Spartan line has proven equally true of many bureaucratic firms, that the same tight integration that concentrated frontal power made the whole formation vulnerable to an adversary willing to engage from an unexpected angle.

The standard approach to overcoming this flaw has been advanced by the former U.S. Army general in charge of fighting the Taliban and Al Queda in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal (and his colleagues), in Team of Teams (McChrystal et al., 2015). His response was to build the capacity of the military system to absorb shocks and return to prior form – resilience– through distributed communication and shared awareness and knowledge. That prescription, sound as far as it goes, has since become something close to a leadership cliché, appearing in everything from annual reports to social media posts, often with diminishing analytical content.

Polymath and writer Nassim Taleb’s has explored a harder concept that is also worth noting here. In Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Taleb drew a sharp line between systems that merely survive disorder and systems that actually gain from it and emerge from the shock stronger and more capable than before (Taleb, 2012). Resilience, in his account, represents a lower bar, which means you bounce back to where you started. Anti-fragility means the disruption becomes an input to improvement, the way muscles grow through stress or immune systems sharpen through exposure.

The distinction has a clear correlate in business leadership and organizations. Netflix’s Chaos Engineering program deliberately injects system failures, through an aptly named “Chaos Monkey” tool, into production infrastructure to force engineers to build services that improve rather than merely survive disruption (Basiri et al., 2016). The company does not hope its systems will withstand failures; instead, the program engineers internalize processes and operations to improvebecause of those failures. For organizational designers, the distinction matters enormously, because what looks like resilience is sometimes just concealed rigidity, and what looks like vulnerability can, under the right structural conditions, turn out to be something altogether more generative.

 2. Two Doctrines, One Logic

Considering resilience in light of the current conflict in the Gulf, this is where the story becomes (at least for me) both unexpected and instructive. Two deeply opposed military and political traditions have, through entirely separate reasoning, arrived at the same doctrinal and design conclusion.

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