Hierarchies And Networks

e decentralized decision-making authority and created a flat management structure to quickly respond to changes in his operating environment. He overcame turf battles by creating an overarching sense of mission and doctrine. He used the Internet, the globalization of news and the revolution in telecommunications to advance his organization's goals worldwide. He developed a complex organizational network in which information gets only to the right people at the right times. In his network, connections between individuals and groups are activated at key times to get work done and severed when they are no longer necessary. To terrorize America, Osama bin Laden adopted many of the management and leadership strategies that U.S. corporate leaders have embraced over the past decade-strategies that are gaining ground among U.S. military reformers and among leaders in the government's civilian bureaucracies. The strategies stem from a theory-being validated by American corporations, social activist groups and international terrorists-that in the information age, successful organizations behave more like computer networks than assembly lines and look more like Chinese Checkers boards than pyramids.

In the fight against Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network-as well as in struggles to deal with domestic problems-some military and government leaders have decided that hierarchies developed in the 19th century are no match for the networks of the 21st century. Federal, state and local responders to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks learned that their hierarchical, turf-based organizations had widely different ways of handling operations, communications and logistics, compounding the chaos of rescue and recovery efforts. Agencies charged with securing the homeland, ranging from the FBI to the Treasury Department to the Coast Guard, are learning that information trapped in one bureaucracy needs to find its way to other bureaucracies; otherwise, criminals and terrorists will slip by. On the battlefield, the military is finding that gathering data about the enemy and issuing orders from a central command isn't effective when dealing with stealthy and speedy targets such as al Qaeda bands moving through the Afghan mountains.

To thinkers in fields ranging from national security to sociology, from computing to human resources, the world has become a network of networks, filled with actors who behave in increasingly interconnected ways and with wide-reaching and rapid consequences. Federal officials accustomed to passing paper up and down chains of command must now learn to quickly disseminate information across organizational boundaries. That means letting low-level working groups move swiftly without higher-level approval to create strong relationships among offices within agencies, between agencies and with other governments, businesses, nonprofit organizations and individuals with key skills and knowledge. In other words, federal agencies and managers must break out of their bureaucratic cocoons and become social butterflies.

And they have to think like Osama bin Laden.

New World Order

Susan Hovecar, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., says bureaucracies can ensure that opposing voices are heard and considered in fair, consistent ways. She points out that bureaucracies are charged with making sure their employees are technically qualified to carry out their duties. "Bureaucracy is not necessarily a bad word," she says.

At the same time, Hovecar and other experts on organizational structure say bureaucracies have their share of drawbacks. One disadvantage is their inability to respond swiftly to change. Just look at how long it took the Internal Revenue Service (and its congressional overseers) to figure out how to deal with divorcees. It wasn't until 1998-long after divorce became common in America-that legislation was passed to help innocent spouses avoid paying for their ex-spouses' tax liabilities.

Another problem is lack of coordination-segments of bureaucracies rarely work well together because of tensions built into their competing organizational or functional goals. Lastly, bureaucracy deals well with problems on a macro level, but on an individual level it can steamroll over people, both inside and outside the organization.

Bureaucracies work in stable, clearly segmented, homogenous environments. But none of those adjectives seems true of the environment that is developing in the 21st century. The speed of communications around the world has led to instability. Globalization and the increasing complexity of the modern world have blurred the boundaries between foreign and domestic jurisdictions, private and public, local and national. Increases in personal freedom, a bucking of societal norms and the massive movement of people around the world in the past few decades have made America's citizenry more heterogeneous than ever.

Advances in communications and technology have given rise to network organizations, according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, analysts at the RAND think tank. In their recent book for the Defense Department, Networks and Netwars (RAND, 2001), the authors argue that conflicts will increasingly be "netwars," or clashes involving networks rather than traditional, hierarchical adversaries. The definition of network organizations is not well-developed-some analysts even question whether networks can be described as a type of organization. Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue that they are.

Structurally, a pure network organization-what Arquilla and Ronfeldt call an "all-channel network"-moves all the boxes on a hierarchical organizational chart to one level and then connects each box to every other box. "Pictorially, an all-channel network actor resembles a geodesic 'Bucky ball' [named for scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller]; it does not look like a pyramid," the authors write. "The network as a whole has little to no hierarchy; there may be multiple leaders. Decision-making and operations are decentralized, allowing for local initiative and autonomy. Thus the design may sometimes appear acephalous (headless) and at other times polycephalous (Hydra-headed)."

Because a network is not as formally structured as a hierarchy, it needs a compelling story that explains to its members why the network exists. The members also need doctrine-principles or practices that guide their actions-since all-channel networks don't rely on top-down directives or strict written procedures. Rather, they tend to rely on strong personal ties among their members. They use technology to enhance communication and rapidly exchange information.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt have found network organizations among social activists, as well as criminals and terrorists. The International Committee to Ban Landmines is one network organization that has had some success in advancing its mission around the world. Osama bin Laden's is another.

"Governments that want to defend against netwar may have to adopt organizational designs and strategies like those of their adversaries," the authors say. "This does not mean mirroring the adversary, but rather learning to draw on the same design principles that [they have] already learned about the rise of network forms in the information age. These principles depend to some extent on technological innovation, but mainly on a willingness to innovate organizationally and doctrinally, perhaps especially by building new mechanisms for interagency and multijurisdictional cooperation."

Military Transformation

To understand what that means, think of the changes in personal technology over the past decade. Suppose, in 1990, you wanted to read an electronic document from a friend who used WordPerfect for DOS. He would have had to give the file to you on a disk, and if you had only Microsoft Word, you wouldn't have been able to read it.

In 2002, you and your friend would presumably have access to the Internet. He could simply e-mail the WordPerfect document to you. You'd be able to open it in Word.

Over the past 12 years, you and your friend experienced the shift from platform-centric computing to network-centric computing, from the days when you had to be using the same software on the same operating system to work together to the days when anyone on the Internet can exchange information with others regardless of the kind of software they use. The computing industry made the transition to networks over several decades, with a rapid shift during the 1990s.

Military strategists like Cebrowski covet the computing industry's transformation. They see a parallel in the way U.S. forces fight battles today and the way computing worked in the 1980s. Just as you and your friend worked on incompatible operating systems and software, the military operates on independent weapons platforms. Carrier groups are platforms, as are M1A2 tanks and F-18 aircraft, each operating with their own standards. And just as you and your friend wasted time trying to coordinate your different platforms, military experiments have found that platform-centric warfare takes twice as long to destroy 50 percent fewer targets than does network-centric warfare.

One major component of network-centric warfare is speed. Using sensors to gather data about the battlefield-including satellites, drones, cameras and ground troops-along with fast networks, forces can quickly disrupt enemy activity. For example, a speedy, coordinated attack against an enemy's surface-to-air missile sites, destroying half of the sites, could prevent the enemy from continuing a war. "The payoff is in the initial very high rate of change," Cebrowski and co-author John Garstka, a technical adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the January 1998 issue of the Naval Institute's Proceedings journal. "When 50 percent of something important to the enemy is destroyed at the outset, so is his strategy. That stops wars-which is what network-centric warfare is all about."

Another key concept is self-synchronization. Military actions are now coordinated out of central commands, with information flowing up and orders flowing back down. Under self-synchronization, military units would be given overarching goals and rules of engagement by central commands, and then would carry out the mission by coordinating battlefield information in real time with other units. That kind of self-synchronization has happened to some extent in Afghanistan. In one case, a Northern Alliance commander suggested bombing Taliban positions near an on-the-ground Air Force air control specialist. Nineteen minutes later, the Taliban positions were bombed.

Retired Marine Corps Col. Gary Anderson, executive director of the National Center for Unconventional Thought, says deciding whether to shoot at a target from a central command has been an unfortunate trend of improved communications. "A lot of people, me included, would say that's not a very efficient approach to shoot at a fleeting target," Anderson says. "We should give the decision to the sensor operator."

That view is gaining ground in the military. Cebrowski, now retired from the Navy, has become Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's director of force transformation. The Defense Department's Command and Control Research Program is taking the concepts of network-centric warfare and exploring practical strategies to make them real. Rumsfeld endorsed network-centric warfare principles in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington on Jan. 31. "We need rapidly deployable, fully integrated joint forces, capable of reaching distant theaters quickly and working with our air and sea forces to strike adversaries swiftly, successfully and with devastating effect," Rumsfeld said.

Checking Your Ego

Emergency personnel often say disaster response is an exercise in controlled chaos. To leaders at the Pentagon and World Trade Center sites, the chaos was uncontrolled until everyone was cleared out and then allowed to return in a methodical fashion. The main causes of the uncontrolled chaos were the lack of standard procedures and the dearth of strong relationships among response agencies. Had emergency agencies been more networked and less stovepiped prior to Sept. 11, the response might have gone more smoothly. Networks are all about connections. Sociologists who chart the connections among people in communities say the most powerful people are the ones with the most social capital-the strongest connections to most of the other people. In computing, networks grow exponentially more valuable as more people connect to them, says Bob Metcalfe, founder of computer networking firm 3Com. Metcalfe invented Ethernet, one of the most widely used computer networking technologies. If no one else was on the Internet, why would you use it? If you can connect to everyone you know, and they can each connect to you, then you will use it.

Similar theories could be applied to organizations-the more connected people are within an organization, the more productive they can be. The more organizations connect to each other, the more they can work together to address problems that cross jurisdictional lines. Arquilla and Ronfeldt say criminal and terrorist networks "operate in the seams" of jurisdictional boundaries, making it difficult for leaders to put any one agency in charge of efforts to combat them.

The Sept. 11 terrorists operated in the seams in part by taking advantage of the poor communication among foreign, federal, state and local law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Some of them had been identified by agencies as terrorist suspects, but those agencies didn't share the information with others that the terrorists later came into contact with.

The agencies that responded to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks are taking the lessons of Sept. 11 to heart, working on standard operating procedures and establishing closer ties with one another. The neighboring Arlington, Fairfax and Alexandria, Va., fire departments are coming up with common operating principles, so any one of them could respond to a fire in any jurisdiction. Lt. Col. Robert Domenici, who commands a National Guard civil support team that responded to the World Trade Center attack, has been traveling throughout New York state to establish formal and informal relationships with local government officials.

Act Like A Network

One concept is swarming. If you've ever seen the defense of the National Football League's St. Louis Rams in action, you've seen swarming. The defensive players start each play by performing their expected functions, from rushing the quarterback to covering wide receivers. But as soon as any member of the other team starts running with the ball, they all descend upon the runner. Soon you have a pile of Rams on top of the runner, with more Rams down the field in case the runner escapes the mob. Rams coaches review game films and grade players on how well they execute this strategy.

In the world of warfare, "swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions," Arquilla and Ronfeldt say.

Anti-World Trade Organization protesters shut down the organization's November 1999 meeting in Seattle by swarming from all directions at the meeting site and overwhelming the police. Osama bin Laden's terrorist network swarms by declaring American interests as targets and then focusing his forces on them.

The federal government is now engaged in a form of swarming against the terrorist network by striking militarily, financially and by using law enforcement and intelligence networks in the United States and abroad. It has declared war against terrorist sanctuaries. "One strength of an organization like al Qaeda is the ability to decentralize and be secretive, but a weakness is that if you break up their linkages, you keep them on the run," Anderson says. "America has served notice to the whole world that there are not going to be any sanctuaries. . . . My feeling is the world has changed for these people."

Another network theory that has promise for government is redundancy. In a networked computing environment, "you don't want to rely on a central source for all of your information security," says Jeff Babcock, vice president of sales for Cary, N.C.-based technology firm SAS. Agencies that had off-site backups of information housed in the World Trade Center complex found their recovery job much easier than those that stored all of their information on site.

A Hybrid Organization

Erik Jansen, an organizational theory expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, says decisions about organizational design are based on factors such as mission, an organization's relationship to the environment, technology and the talent available to leaders. "One of the jokes we have in organizational theory is that when people ask us a question, the answer is always, 'It all depends,' " Jansen says. One way to combine the power of networks and hierarchies is to view existing functional or specialist offices as centers of excellence, where engineers or investigators or policy experts can hone their skills. Specialists can be pulled frequently from those centers of excellence to work on interagency or interdisciplinary teams without losing their focus or their sense of belonging. "Everybody just can't be muddling about without any kind of division of labor," Jansen says.

The key to making that kind of system work, says RAND's Ronfeldt, is to instill an overarching sense of mission and doctrine among the participants. "You can't go in the network direction simply by putting everyone on speedy computers that are highly networked. That's not going to do it," Ronfeldt says. "The driver is getting people to think in new organizational and doctrinal ways."