When we understand the characteristics of an intelligence system, as distinct from a planning system—accurate, real-time data, distributed broadly and quickly, and presented in detail so that team members can see and react to patterns in deciding for themselves what to do—we begin to see them everywhere. The Battle of Britain Bunker was an early example of what, today, we’d call a war room, a name that has grown from its literal roots to encompass more metaphorical uses.

What all of these things have in common is that they move information across an organization as fast as possible, and do so to empower immediate and responsive action. Their underlying assumption is that people are wise, and that if you can present them with accurate, real-time, reliable data about the real world in front of them, they’ll invariably make smart decisions. It’s not true that the best plan wins. It is true that the best intelligence wins.

What can you do as a team leader to create such an intelligence system for your team? First, liberate as much information as you possibly can. Think about all the sources of information you have, and make as many of them as possible available to your team, on demand. Planning systems constrain information to those who “need to know.” Intelligence systems don’t— they liberate as much information as possible, as fast as possible. So don’t worry too much at first about whether your team will understand the data or be able to make use of it. If you think the information will help your people gain a better understanding of their real world in real time, share it. ...

Second, watch carefully to see which data your people find useful. Don’t worry too much about making all this data simple or easy to consume, or about packaging it for people, or weaving it together to form a coherent story. The biggest challenge with data today isn’t making sense of it—most of us deal with complexity all the time, and are pretty good at figuring out what we need to know and where to find it. No, the biggest challenge with data today is making it accurate—sorting the signal from the noise. This is much harder, and much more valuable for our teams. So be extremely vigilant about accuracy; watch which information your people naturally gravitate toward; and then, over time, increase the volume, depth, and speed of precisely that sort of data.

Third, trust your people to make sense of the data. Planning systems take the interpretation of the data away from those on the front lines, and hand it off to a select few, who analyze it and decipher its patterns, and then construct and communicate the plan. Intelligence systems do precisely the opposite—because the “intelligence” in an intelligence system lies not in the select few, but instead in the emergent interpretive powers of all front-line team members. You are not the best sense maker. They are.

As a leader, you are trying to unlock the judgment, the choices, the insight, and the creativity of your people. But, as we’ve seen in the last two chapters, the way we go about this doesn’t make much sense. We cloister information in our planning systems, and we cascade directives in our goal-setting systems. Instead, we should unlock information through intelligence systems, and cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories. We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to make a contribution. They will invariably make better and more authentic decisions than those derived from any planning system that cascades goals from on high.

What this means is that when you have to think about connections between parts, rather than just counting the individual parts of a system, the number of possibilities grows very rapidly; the potential combinations multiply, rather than just adding up. Very quickly, they multiply up to astronomically huge numbers, spelling absolute death to any hope of knowing the entire state of the system.

In fact, knowing only a few of the feedback circuits can be actively misleading, if you rely too greatly on your partial information. It is a sobering thought, for example, that despite employing some of the best and brightest* analysts in the world, the advice given by the US State Department over the last fifty years could comfortably have been outperformed by a parrot that had been trained to repeat the phrase, ‘Don’t start a war.’ The repeated failures of the State Department are not the consequence of ignorance; they are the consequence of having very good and deep — but not total — knowledge of an extremely complicated situation, in which facts outside of that information set turned out to be crucial. Knowing a great deal of detail about a subset of a system has a habit of increasing your confidence in your opinions disproportionately from their reliability.

*The phrase ‘the best and brightest’ is often used by people who don’t know that its original context was ironic. It entered the language as the title of David Halberstam’s book about the policy mistakes of the Vietnam War.