Stan McChrystal
CEO and Chairman of the McChrystal Group
COVID Command
In 2020, cities across the country tapped former 4-star General Stan McChrystal and his team, the McChrystal Group, to help them create a more effective COVID-19 response. Using techniques from national security and counterterrorism, McChrystal helped leaders initiate a “team of teams” model, which, at its core, is about ensuring there is one decision-maker (e.g., a governor or a mayor) with access to all the information necessary to make a decision as rapidly and effectively as possible in a crisis.
Applying Crisis Coordination Principles to a Public Health Emergency
Stan McChrystal: “We didn’t know where we fit into the COVID-19 response because it was a medical crisis, a pandemic. We asked ourselves: what do we know about pandemics? But, in our experience COVID was not a medical problem.
COVID was an organizational challenge. There were cultural aspects, but it came down to whether we could get organized, whether we could make clear decisions and implement those decisions across communities.”
Stan McChrystal: The “team of teams” model came out of the counterterrorist fight. The military was invested in this concept as part of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which I commanded. But, in reality, the concept went across the Department of State, Department of Treasury, the CIA, Defense Intelligence, and other departments and agencies.
“Prior to implementing the “team of teams” approach, everybody had some responsibility, but nobody had full ownership – nobody had full responsibility. As a consequence, everybody could do their part and feel good about it, and the entire endeavor could fail and nobody felt guilty about it. I used to tell people: below the level of the Presidency, no one had the authority to task. Everything below that was essentially up to the individuals and the organizations involved. So, the “team of teams” became a centering concept for pulling different entities together.”
The McChrystal Group became involved with the COVID-19 response through its work with the City of Boston, where Tim Lynch, a McChrystal Group Partner, helped advise Mayor Marty Walsh and his team.
Tim Lynch: In Boston, we had planned to build this brilliant ecosystem on paper that outlined ‘Who is in charge?’ and ‘What’s going to happen?’ Our team got on the ground at 5:00 PM on a Sunday, worked through the night, and reported to the mayor at 8:00 AM Monday morning. What we ultimately told the Mayor and his team was that there was no time for this paper plan. We said there were a bunch of policies with multiple stakeholders claiming to be in charge in this type of scenario. They are policies, and by definition, they are not plans, which means they’re not executable. Instead, they’re general guidance for how government should work.
“We told him that, instead of another plan, what we are going to do is very rapidly figure out the 8 key priorities you have that are cross-functional in nature, against which we are going to start executing.”
Maximizing Single Points of Decision-Making; Eliminating Single Points of Failure
To execute a whole-of-government response to the pandemic, the City of Boston first needed a way to integrate input from different data streams and rapidly inform the mayor and his team so they could make decisions in real-time.
Tim Lynch, Partner, McChrystal Group: “This is not a situation in which the McChrystal Group showed up and saved the day. Rather, it’s a story told through the lens of our execution. In about 72 hours, we built a Crisis Response Forum (CRF), which took a whole-of-government approach.”
“During the pandemic, the daily heartbeat of the response was the Crisis Response Forum, which included a Medical Intelligence Center (MIC) built on different data streams. Some people participated in-person, some people participated remotely, and we partnered with the private sector…so that we had a number of different partners in the greater Boston area, contributing information and perspective to the MIC. That laid out an intelligence picture on which we based operations. The MIC was used to set the scene on issues like hospital bed availability, to help determine the outlook in different demographics and different scenarios – the overall medical intelligence picture.”
“Fundamentally, there were three major objectives for our system. First, we had to figure out who had what piece of the puzzle. Second, we had to determine how they fit together. And third, we needed to know what the aggregated picture looked like so that we could help identify and then resolve challenges in real time.
“If you could solve all three of them with a call, great. If not, the issue was taken offline, and you had 23 hours to then solve for that problem, and then the solutions were aligned and coordinated into execution across the entire city.
“For example, you can imagine that any decisions the Department of Health and Human Services made on social distancing or masking had a direct impact on Boston’s public schools. And, it necessarily had an impact on dining and on the Department of Economic Development. There wasn’t a single move that the city could make that didn’t have first and second and often tertiary orders of effect.”
“The goal of this approach was to synchronize the “information-to-action” cycle and to compress that cycle down to a 24-hour operating cycle. That cycle resulted in a cumulative impact because every morning we had a call from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and that cumulative knowledge allowed people to work more effectively together and build a common operating picture for the COVID-19 response.”
The Mayor and his Mom
Tim Lynch: We made sure that we brought the priorities for the city together, and I think one of the success stories in this is Boston Mayor Marty Walsh…The city of Boston is 770,000 people. It doubles in size Monday through Friday during the workweek. To connect with people throughout the city Mayor Walsh would talk about what he was going through, and he would make it very personal. He has a surviving mother who is an immigrant from Ireland. He would talk about the impact of the pandemic on his mother. He knows the communities inside of Boston, so he could talk about what was happening throughout communities and neighborhoods.
“Mayor Walsh did a good job of building this very personal narrative for the city of Boston, explaining the impacts, explaining the trade-offs and the reasoning behind his decisions, which I think ultimately made it very successful and bridged some of that tension between the science, how it was evolving, and the impact on economics and our society. It is a wicked problem. There’s no perfect answer.”
Stan McChrystal: The fact is that connections matter. It’s not about having the right answer; it’s about connecting people, because somewhere in that group the right answer is there, or at least there will be consensus to do something of value.
A New American Health Emergency System – Stat!
The McChrystal Group worked with state and local leaders and became a champion for the STAT Public Health network. Founded and philanthropically funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, STAT began as an ad-hoc group of state and local operational health leaders who came together to coordinate on testing supply chains, solve problems, and share best COVID practices. Competing for supplies and eager to troubleshoot implementation, STAT became a vital problem-solving hub and innovate idea exchange.
Ryan Flynn, Partner, McChrystal Group: We worked very closely with the STAT Public Health network, and what worked with STAT was reliance on people. What our experience showed us consistently is that it was better to have the right person with the right, the right mindset, the right relationship and willingness to engage than it was to have the right title. With STAT, in some cases we had high ranking health officials like Kody Kinsley from North Carolina, but we also had others, from different levels and perspectives, who heard about STAT and joined. Both were valuable…and that was sort of what worked. But it was hard, it was very manual.
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It was very reliant on relationships and individual connectivity, and that was a big part that McChrystal Group played – being that central connector, activator, energizer. We had an understanding that, in a dispersed group like the STAT network where you had red, blue, and purple states – where you had people who were operational, focused on testing and masking in schools, and where you had state health officials in the same conversation. It was important to understand where people were and to work toward and guide that. That was a very challenging cycle requiring a more-than-full-time team for almost a year.
“The right people need to have the mindset and the willingness to subordinate their career or specific role to achieve a shared mission. As you look at applying these lessons going forward, that’s the biggest challenge. COVID was a crisis, right? It’s very rare to hear that people don’t collaborate when there’s an active wildfire, but as we look at these more extendable crises…it is harder to subordinate individual priorities and individual aspirations.”
We had Executive Sponsors, who were senior experts and validators that were well-respected across networks and with decision-makers, and that catalyzed our ability to make connections across States and across networks and to connect senior level officials at the White House. We brought in people like Dr. Atul Gawande who was able to blast information quickly to everybody on the team.” – Barrett Moorhouse, Senior Principal, McChrystal Group
“In this way, we created a more refined understanding about the evolving crisis for our network, so that folks making policy at the federal and senior state levels could get that feedback from the people that actually had to implement it. Having that executive level sponsorship is what catalyzed our ability to do that in a meaningful and relevant convening.”
“We worked to connect states working on hard problems so they could learn from each other. For example, when Ohio and a couple of other states were working to implement vaccine lotteries over a one-to-three-week period, we were able to help them copy and paste each other’s homework on how to do it right. Our key role was to be connectors for information and resources, spreading as far and as flat as we could. We couldn’t direct anybody to “turn left” or “turn right,” but we could give them the tools to do that if that’s what they wanted to do.”
Stan McChrystal: “The challenge was how to deal with the ‘Who died and left you in charge?’ argument — and you always get that question, even in a crisis. If the crisis is bad enough, it minimizes the argument. But you always get it unless people think that they’re going to lose if there’s failure.
The way you get around that — it’s leadership. It takes really energetic. thoughtful leadership to get people
to shift.