Después de 10 años con el blog, me he dado cuenta de algo bastante básico: no tenía una forma clara de seguirlo. Es decir, podías entrar, leer… pero no había una manera sencilla de recibir las entradas nuevas.
He estado investigando y, con ayuda, he conseguido añadir un botón para suscribirse por correo. No ha sido especialmente intuitivo y, siendo sincera, todavía estoy haciendo retoques para que funcione perfectamente y se vea bien.
Si te interesa lo que escribo y quieres recibir las publicaciones directamente, puedes probar a suscribirte, recibiras las nuevas entradas en tu correo sin tener que entrar al blog cada vez.
Para suscribirte, usa el cuadro blanco de "Suscripción al Blog" que verás arriba a la izquierda. Pon tu email, dale al botón verde y, cuando te llegue un correo de confirmación, dale a "Aceptar". ¡No hace falta configurar nada más en la web que se abre!
Antonio Cánova, profesor del posgrado de Derecho Público de la Universidad Francisco Marroquín, explica por qué Venezuela podría tener una oportunidad histórica: la destrucción ha sido tan intensa que incluso el 88% de los venezolanos ya asocia el socialismo con muerte, miseria, violencia y destrucción.
Pero la clave no es el diagnóstico: es el momento. Las mafias siguen en el poder y la transición puede salir bien… o torcerse. Por eso el mensaje es claro: no bajar la guardia y empujar ahora si se quiere pasar del régimen a una democracia liberal real.
¿Sientes que tu carrera está estancada? No hay salida… o eso crees. Descubre cómo reinventarte y encontrar nuevas oportunidades profesionales. #carrera #reinventarse #trabajo #motivacion #desarrolloprofesional
Últimamente todo lo que leo, veo y escribo conduce al mismo sitio: el miedo. Hoy me he encontrado este clip de Brené Brown. A Brené la tengo en cuarentena como a todos los gurús de la autoayuda: se han hecho de oro -merecidamente algunos- pero verlos como mesías es exagerado. Ella ha hecho que el mundo entero hable de la vulnerabilidad, por ejemplo, lo cual no ha venido mal.
En el clip viene a decir que no pasa nada por tener miedo, es humano y todo el mundo lo tiene. Pero hay que identificar los escudos a los que recurrimos cuando algo nos da miedo, y saber que podemos prescindir de ellos. Porque nos perdemos mucho de la vida por culpa de esos escudos.
Esto me ha llevado a pensar en las death doulas, esa figura que acompaña a algunas personas en su lecho de muerte. Y que cuentan que lo que más lamentan en sus últimas horas siempre tiene que ver con las emociones y las personas, nunca con lo material. Seguro que, fuese lo que fuese, en su día no lo hicieron por miedo.
En el universo de Dan Brown, la atención consciente vale millones. ¿Y tú? ¿Cuántas veces al día la regalas gratis? Reflexiona sobre el activo más valioso que posees. #AtencionConsciente #ValorDeLaAtencion #DesarrolloPersonal #Mindfulness
¿Todavía queda algo que salvar en Europa? En el episodio anterior analizamos la parálisis de sus líderes ante el avance de China, pero hoy no vengo solo a criticar.
Me habéis pedido propuestas y, aunque mi filosofía es la de un superviviente que intenta vivir «a pesar» de la política, aquí va mi hoja de ruta (probablemente irrealizable) para que este continente deje de vivir de rentas y empiece a competir de verdad.
El médico psicoterapeuta José Luis Marín plantea una idea que desafía gran parte de lo que hoy entendemos por psicología y psiquiatría: la salud mental no existe; lo que existe es la salud. Según el Dr. Marín, la medicina contemporánea ha fragmentado el sufrimiento humano en etiquetas, tratando muchas veces diagnósticos y síntomas, pero no a las personas ni al problema de fondo que los origina.
En este capítulo de Roca Project, José Luis Marín pone en el punto de mira a la psiquiatría moderna y explica por qué la salud debería entenderse siempre como una realidad biopsicosocial, donde lo físico, lo emocional y lo relacional forman parte del mismo proceso. Esto explicaría que muchos trastornos que hoy etiquetamos como depresión o la ansiedad pueden ser en realidad manifestaciones del sufrimiento humano que no se comprenden si solo se atienden los síntomas, tapados siempre a base de pastillas desde una Medicina que parece entender mucho de enfermedades pero poco de relaciones.
Uno de los ejes más profundos del episodio gira en torno a la mirada y la identidad. Según Marín, necesitamos ser mirados, reconocidos y validados desde la infancia. Cuando esa mirada social hacia el individuo falta, aparecen conductas, síntomas y formas de reclamar atención. A raíz de esto analizamos fenómenos actuales como los therian, entendidos no desde la burla o el juicio social, sino como una posible forma de reclamar mirada, reconocimiento e identidad dentro de la sociedad. También abordamos un problema cada vez más visible: la falta de escucha en la medicina actual dentro de un sistema sanitario donde el tiempo es escaso y la relación médico-paciente se deteriora, y por qué muchas personas terminan buscando respuestas fuera del sistema sanitario cuando sienten que no han sido comprendidas.
Si alguna vez te has preguntado por qué la medicina trata diagnósticos más que personas o qué hay realmente detrás de los problemas problemas de “salud mental”, este episodio abre una reflexión profunda sobre la forma en que hoy entendemos la salud, el sufrimiento humano y la relación entre mente, cuerpo y biografía.+
► ÍNDICE DE CAPÍTULOS: 00:00 Introducción 3:37 El fenómeno de los Therian 12:37 Cómo se debería abarcar la salud mental desde la medicina 23:36 El problema de salud de Carlos Roca 35:17 Cuándo es el momento de ir a terapia 41:06 Qué es la depresión y cuándo comienza 46:01 La industria farmacéutica y alimentaria 51:43 La Regla 3-30-300 para mejorar tu salud 57:34 La salud individual y colectiva 1:00:55 Crítica al sistema sanitario 1:09:01 La fractura del brazo de Carlos Roca que le marcó la vida 1:15:44 Importancia del lenguaje para salir de la depresión 1:26:04 El poder del sentido del humor 1:31:01 ¿La espiritualidad mejora la salud? 1:34:23 Preguntas finales y regalo
Seyed Mohammad Marandi argues that Iran has declared economic war after the US and Israel attacked South Pars, the world's largest gas field. Marandi is a professor at Tehran University and a former advisor to Iran's Nuclear Negotiation Team.
Ese mensaje que llevas días evitando no es falta de valor, es falta de herramientas. En este vídeo te enseño cómo afrontar conversaciones difíciles sin destruir la relación en el intento. Olvídate de “ganar” la discusión: cuando entras como fiscal, el otro se pone a la defensiva y la conversación muere antes de empezar. Aquí trabajamos otra lógica: regular tu estado emocional, hablar desde lo que sientes en lugar de acusar, y separar los hechos de las interpretaciones que construyes en tu cabeza. Es comunicación emocional aplicada, basada en psicología y neurociencia básica.
A lo largo del vídeo verás una estructura clara para comunicarte mejor: describir lo ocurrido sin juicio, expresar cómo te afectó, pedir algo concreto y abrir espacio a la otra persona. Aprenderás a escuchar de verdad, sin preparar tu respuesta mientras el otro habla, y a entender cuándo una conversación no arregla la relación, pero sí te deja íntegro. Si quieres mejorar tus relaciones, gestionar conflictos sin ansiedad y decir lo que llevas tiempo callando, este vídeo es para ti. Porque evitar el conflicto tiene un precio, y suele ser más alto de lo que imaginas.
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone says he’s trying to push the web back toward an earlier social contract of rewarding publishers in exchange for traffic and creating an ecosystem where everyone wins.
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Todos tenemos un compañero de oficina que parece un influencer… y que nadie soporta. Aprende a lidiar con él sin perder tu tiempo ni tu cordura. #oficina #humor #trabajo #liderazgo #productividad
Se ha anunciado en España la puesta en marcha de una herramienta que pretende medir la “huella del odio” en redes sociales. La intención puede parecer buena, pero plantea una pregunta inquietante: ¿quién decide qué es odio? Reflexiono sobre la tentación de controlarlo todo… y sobre por qué la verdadera solución empieza en la educación.
What if you could combine the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization?
When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment and training – but none of the enemy’s speed and flexibility.
McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom to create a ‘team of teams’ that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. Faster, flatter and more flexible, the task force beat back al-Qaeda.
In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to any leader. Through compelling examples, the authors demonstrate that the ‘team of teams’ strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA and has the potential to transform organizations large and small.
Stanley McChrystal retired from the US Army as a four-star general after more than thirty-four years of service. His last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He is currently a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm.
Tantum Collins and Chris Fussell are his colleagues at the McChrystal Group, while David Silverman is the founder and CEO of CrossLead.
Estimated reading time: 62 minutes.
This book objectives:
This book is an indispensable guide to the organizational change and deep appreciation of teamwork that are essential in today’s fast-moving environment.
The genesis of this story lies in the transformation of an elite military organization, the Joint Special Operations Task Force in the midst of a war.
It was an experiment that could only come into true focus when we had the opportunity to deconstruct and study it afterward, enabling us to draw valid conclusions. That’s where this book comes in.
This book is the work of four very different individuals, three of whom shared wartime experiences, and a fourth who shares our fascination and passion for the subject.
This isn’t a war story, although our experience in the fight against Al Qaeda weaves through the book.
We hope to help the reader understand what’s different in today’s world, and what we must do about it.
Why were we unable to defeat an under-resourced insurgency? Why were we losing? That question, the answers we found, and their implications for the world beyond our Task Force form the basis of this book.
Main ideas:
Most of us would consider it unwise to do something before we are fully prepared.
Although lavishly resourced and exquisitely trained, we found ourselves losing to an enemy that, by traditional calculus, we should have dominated.
Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.
Big Data will offer no respire from the unrelenting demand for continual adaptability.
An organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.
Our limiting factor lay in the mundane art of management.
Though we know far more about everything in it, the world has in many respects become less predictable.
Complex systems fluctuate extremely and exhibit unpredictability.
New technologies have created an unprecedented proliferation of opportunities for small, historically disenfranchised actors to have a butterfly effect.
Even a resilient system can be broken when too much comes at it too fast.
SEAL teams accomplish remarkable feats not simply because of the individual qualifications of their members, but because those members coalesce into a single organism.
Teams whose members know one another deeply perform better. Such a group can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.
Their structure, not their plan, was their strategy.
On a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a relationship with every other individual; instead, the relationships between the constituent teams need to resemble those between individuals on a given team. And that could be effectively accomplished through representation.
We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team.
Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.
One of our most controversial moves was our embedding program, an exchange system we began in late 2003 in which we would take an individual from one team and assign him to a different part of our force for six months.
Liaisons are institutionalized ambassadors who server to connect organizations.
A big piece of why we lagged AQI lay in our need to relay decisions up and down the chain of command.
Our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.
As our environment erupts with too many possibilities to plan for effectively, we must become comfortable sharing power.
Eventually a rule of thumb emerged: «If something supports our effort, as long as it is not immoral or illegal», you could do it.
More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority further down, the quality of decisions actually went up.
Experience had taught me that nothing was heard until it had been said several times.
«If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win, what would you do differently?».
Simple honesty shows, and earns, respect.
As the world becomes more complex, the importante of leaders will only increase.
We had learned that «if it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid».
Trust was critical.
Shared consciousness is a carefully maintained set of centralized forums for bringing people together.
Empowered execution is a radically decentralized system for pushing authority out to the edges of the organization.
When we urge people to think «outside of the box», we are generally asking them to discard mental models.
Comments extracted from the book, they could be right or wrong, you decide for yourself:
Foreword by Walter Isaacson.
Whether in business or in war, the ability to react quickly and adapt is critical, and it’s becoming even more so as technology and disruptive forces increase the pace of change. That requires new ways to communicate and work together.
In today’s world, creativity is a collaborative endeavor. Innovation is a team effort.
The greatest innovation have not come from a lone inventor or from solving problems in a top-down, command-and-control style. Instead, the great successes come from a «team of teams» working together in pursuit of a common goal.
The creations Steve Jobs was most proud of, he said, were the teams he had produced, starting with the original Macintosh team working under a pirate flag in the early 1980s and the remarkable team he had assembled by the time he stepped down from Apple in 2011.
The necessity of real-time innovation and problem-solving requires integrative and transparent leadership that empowers individual team members.
Efficiency is necessary but no longer sufficient to be a successful organization. It worked in the twentieth century, but it is now quickly overwhelmed by the speed and exaggerated impact of small players, such as terrorists, start-ups, and viral trends.
Management models based on planning and predicting instead of resilience adaption to changing circumstances are no longer suited to today’s challenges.
The role of the leader becomes creating the broader environment instead of command-and-control micromanaging.
Whatever field you’re in, at whatever stage of leadership, these insights and skills will prove necessary to learn.
This book is an indispensable guide to the organizational change and deep appreciation of teamwork that are essential in today’s fast-moving environment.
Most of us would consider it unwise to do something before we are fully prepared; before the equipment is optimally in place and our workers well trained. But as the reader will discover, that’s the situation we found ourselves in. And in researching this book, we discovered that that is the situation leaders and organizations far from any battlefield face every day.
The genesis of this story lies in the transformation of an elite military organization, the Joint Special Operations Task Force in the midst of a war.
The Task Force hadn’t chosen to change; we were driven by necessity. Although lavishly resourced and exquisitely trained, we found ourselves losing to an enemy that, by traditional calculus, we should have dominated. Over time we came to realize that more than our foe, we were actually struggling to cope with an environment that was fundamentally different from anything we’d planned or trained for. Little of our transformation was planned. Few of the plans that we did develop unfolded as envisioned. Instead, we evolved in rapid iterations, changing-assessing-changing again. Intuition and hard-own experience became the beacons that guided us through the fog and friction. Over time we realized that we were not in search of the perfect solution, none existed.
For a soldier trained at West Point as an engineer, the idea that a problem has different solutions on different days was fundamentally disturbing. Yet that was the case.
In the early 2000s we morphed, and morphed again, in a bitter struggle to first contain, and then reduce, the threat posed by Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
It was an experiment that could only come into true focus when we had the opportunity to deconstruct and study it afterward, enabling us to draw valid conclusions. That’s where this book comes in.
This book is the work of four very different individuals, three of whom shared wartime experiences, and a fourth who shares our fascination and passion for the subject.
Honestly assessed, Al Qaeda was not a collection of superman forged into a devilishly ingenious organization by brilliant masterminds. They were tough, flexible, and resilient, but more often than not they were poorly trained and underresourced. They were also dogmatic and offensively extreme in their conduct and views. Their strengths and capabilities were multiplied by a convergence of twenty-first-century factors, of which AQI was simply the lucky beneficiary.
We’re not lazier or less intelligent than our parents or grandparents, but what worked for them simply won’t do the trick for us now. Understanding and adapting to these factors isn’t optional; it will be what differentiates success from failure in the years ahead.
We founded CrossLead to work with civilians firms facing the challenge of adapting in complex, rapidly changing environments. For many successful organizations, things that once worked superbly now seem ineffective.
This isn’t a war story, although our experience in the fight against Al Qaeda weaves through the book. Far beyond soldiers, it is a story about big guys and little guys, butterflies, gardeners, and chess masters.
We hope to help the reader understand what’s different in today’s world, and what we must do about it. We will argue that the familiar pursuit of efficiency must change course. Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.
We do not offer here a series of checklists or a «how to» manual. Instead, in five parts, the reader will journey from problem to solution.
We’ll find, much to our disappointment, that Big Data will offer no respire from the unrelenting demand for continual adaptability.
Game theory will illustrate how the simple concept of trust is, in large organizations, anything but simple to create.
The constantly changing, entirely unforgiving environment in which we all now operate denies the satisfaction of any permanent fix.
The organization we crafted, the processes we refined, and the relationships we forged and nurtured are no more enduring that the physical conditioning that kept our soldiers fit: an organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be. Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.
This was not a war of planning and discipline; it was one of agility and innovation.
Information technology meant that news of the operation could reach global audiences almost instantly.
We had a large, well-trained, superbly equipped force, while AQI had to recruit locals and smuggle in foreign fighters one by one through dangerous, unreliable ratlines. We enjoyed robust communication technology, while they were often dependent on face-to-face meetings and letters delivered by courier to minimize the risk of detection.
We also had to ask a deeper, more troubling question: If we were the best of the best, why were such attacks not disappearing, but in fact increasing? Why were we unable to defeat an underresourced insurgency? Why were we losing? That question, the answers we found, and their implications for the world beyond our Task Force form the basis of this book.
With AQI, we faced a fundamentally new kind of threat, bred by a fundamentally new find of environment. The war we had to wage was not only different from fighting a nation state; it was different from any kind of war waged in the twentieth century. Insurgency, terrorism, an radicalization are as old as conflict itself, but by 2004 those phenomena had been coupled with new technological variables to create an entirely new problem set.
AQI was an organization native to the information-rich, densely interconnected world of the twenty-first century. It operated in ways that diverged radically from those we thought of as «correct» and «effective». But it worked.
In the course of the fight, we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how are (and the world) worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines.
We restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we called «shared consciousness») and decentralized decision-making authority ( «empowered execution» ).
We became what we called «a team of teams»: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.
Being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.
We were struggling to understand an enemy that had no fixed location, no uniforms, and identities as immaterial and immeasurable as the cyberspace within which they recruited and deployed propaganda.
Even Al Qaeda grew uncomfortable with Zarqawi’s extremism. If they wanted to exert influence in Iraq, they would have to work with him. In October 2004, Zarqawi swore bay’ah, allegiance, to Osama bin Laden, and in return the world’s most famous terrorist formally lent his brand to the man who had once been Ahmad, the good-for-nothing from Zarqa, AQI was born.
Ideas are cheap; plenty of armchair generals have proposals for winning wars, some of them quite clever, but only those who can actually shape and manage a force capable of doing the job ultimately succeed.
The fact that Zarqawi was able to forge a small group of dedicated individuals into a cohesive terrorist organization was not surprising, but his ability to leverage that relatively minuscule group, propagating a distastefully nihilist narrative, into a broadly supported and strategically effective insurgency demanded deeper explanation.
Maps are sacred to a soldier. In military headquarters, maps are mounted and maintained with almost religious reverence. For most of history, war was about terrain, territory held, and geographic goals, and a map was the quintessential tool for seeing the problem and creating solutions.
As we gathered intelligence, we would diagram the relationships between members of the organization. But in place of the straight lines and right angles of a military command, we found ourselves drawing tangled networks that did not resemble any organizational structure we had ever seen.
AQI’s adroit use of information technology had multiplied the effectiveness of tactics employed by guerrilla and terrorist groups for decades. AQI was a daunting foe becase it could transform itself at will.
Not only did they have no standard modus operandi, they had no standard hierarchy. Every time we thought we had landed a debilitating blow to the organization as a whole, removing a ranking leader whose loss should have derailed them, they bounced back.
John Arquilla, network theorist and military analyst: «We killed about 20 of Al Qaeda’s ‘number threes’ over the past decade, but everyone in a network is number three».
AQI should have evolved into internal anarchy. But it didn’t. It continued to function as persistently and implacably as ever, demonstrating a coherence of purpose and strategy. We saw no evidence that this inexplicable structure was the product of deliberate design; it seemed instead to have evolved through ongoing adaptation.
The world has become «flatter» and faster. People are more connected, more mobile, and move faster than ever before. By lowering what economists call the «barriers to entry» (prohibitive costs associated with entering a market) these changes have ushered in a universe of new possibilities for players operating outside the conventional systems.
Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence: the garage band, the dorm-room start-up, the viral blogger, and the terrorist cell.
Though more agile than most forces, we were still a veritable leviathan in comparison with AQI. How do you train a leviathan to improvise?
We realized that of all the unexpected and blindingly obvious things, our limiting factor (limfac) lay in the mundane art of management.
To win we had to change. Surprisingly, that change was less about tactics or new technology than it was about the internal architecture and culture of our force, in other words, our approach to management.
The pursuit of predictability (carefully delineated instructions, easily replicable procedures, fastidious standardization, and a tireless focus on efficiency) is foundational to the military’s struggle against the chaos always threatening to engulf combat operations. Historically, this quest for order has produced impressive results. However, we were learning in 2004 that efficiency was no longer enough.
To achieve efficiency and predictability, armies have long dressed, drilled, and disciplined men into becoming interchangeable parts of a military machine.
It has certainly earned the term «military discipline» a reputation as shorthand for any arbitrary exercise in crushing individuality.
Taylor created a clockwork factory, systematically eliminating variation, studying all labor until he understood it inside and out, honing it to peak efficiency, and ensuring that those precise procedures were followed at scale. Because he could study and predict, he could control. He dubbed his doctrine «scientific management». Taylor became the world’s first management guru. Reductionism lay at the heart of this drive for efficiency. Only the managers had to understand how everything came together.
Taylor’s ideas inspired many military leaders to find fresh ways to create a more efficient fighting force.
When America entered World War I, the country turned to reductionist systems to raise production of guns, bombs, and boots to unprecedented levels.
Peter Drucker, the sage of modern management, argued that without Taylor’s innovations, America would have been unable to defeat the Nazis.
Taylor’s foundational belief (the notion that an effective enterprise is created by commitment to efficiency, and that the role of the manager is to break things apart and plan «the one best way») remains relatively unchallenged.
We still think of organizational leaders as planners, synchronizers, and coordinators, chess-player strategists responsible for overseeing interlocking troop movements, marketing initiatives, or global supply chains.
Historians attribute to Taylorism the advent of modern time consciousness, the transformation of leisure from unstructured free time to organized recreation, and the approach to managing the federal bureaucrazy championed by the Reagan administration.
Peter Drucker argued that Taylor, more than Karl Marx, deserves a place in the pantheon of modern intellectual thought alongside Darwin and Freud.
In order to win, we would have to set aside many of the lessons that millennia of military procedure and a century of optimized efficiencies had taught us.
Today, the Maginot Line is often used as a metaphor for stupidity, but the reality is complicated. Arguably, had the line not been built, the Germans might have taken a more direct route into France and achieved victory even more swiftly. But despite its formidability, André Maginot’s creation was insufficient for a new environment of tanks, airplanes, and an enemy command that chose not to play by the rules. Instead of deterring a German attack, it helped stimulate a new type of war. Like the proverbial general always fighting the last war, the French had crafted a solution to avoid the pain of World War I.
Though we know far more about everything in it, the world has in many respects become less predictable.
Things that are complex (living organisms, ecosystems, national economies) have a diverse array of connected elements that interact frequently. Because of this density of linkages, complex systems fluctuate extremely and exhibit unpredictability.
Being complex is different from being complicated. Things that are complicated may have many parts, but those parts are joined, one to the next, in relatively simple ways: one cog turns, causing the next one to turn as well, and so on. They ultimately can be broken down into a series of neat and tidy deterministic relationships; by the end, you will be able to predict with relative certainty what will happen when one part of the device is activated or altered. Complexity, on the other hand, occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically.
Because of these dense interactions, complex systems exhibit nonlinear change. Linear phenomena are those whose output is proportional to input. Human minds feel at home with linear functions. Nonlinear functions, on the other hand, make us uncomfortable. They come in many forms, including exponential functions, and they quickly defy our intuitive understandings of growth and scale. Initial differences in the base or slight increases or decreases in x have massive consequences.
If every butterfly’s fluttering always led to a hurricane halfway across the world two days later, weather would be predictable. The butterfly’s fluttering leads to a storm only if thousands of other minor conditions are just right. And those conditions are so precise as to be practically immeasurable, rendering the outcome unpredictable.
There are causes for the events in a complex system, but there are so many causes and so many events linked to one another through so many direct and indirect paths that the outcome is practically unpredictable, even if it is theoretically deterministic.
The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually imposible to know which will turn out to be the case.
Products, events, nations, phenomena, and individuals have become more connected to, dependent on, and influenced by one another than ever before.
An operation in one city would lead almost instantly to a chain reaction of AQI actions and civilian responses across the country. The tiniest rumors (sometimes true, sometimes not) would spread like wildfire through online forums.
Speed and interdependence together mean that any given action in any given time frame is now linked to vastly more potential outcomes than the same action a century or even a few decades ago: endeavors that were once akin to a two- or three-ball pool problem now involve hundreds of collisions.
In Iraq, we encountered unprecedented levels of disruption. An operation on one side of the country would spontaneously incite reactions from a cell on the other that we did not even know existed.
New technologies have created an unprecedented proliferation of opportunities for small, historically disenfranchised actors to have a butterfly effect. Some of this has positive consequences, like entrepreneurial success. Other manifestations are devastating.
When hackers infiltrated the Associated Press’s Twitter account in 2013 and sent out a message claiming the White House had been hit by two explosions and President Obama was injured, the Down Jones fell 143 points in a brief but widespread market panic. The tweet was deleted as soon as it appeared, but its momentary presence was enough to trigger both impulsive human behavior and the high-frequency trading algorithms now used throughout the markets, which «read» the news and perform trades in response in mere nanoseconds.
Some systems are essentially complex (like the human brain, or society), whereas other systems (like a big machine, or a factory) might appear complex because they a lot of moving parts, but are essentially complicated.
Attempts to control complex systems by using the kind of mechanical, reductionist thinking championed by thinkers from Newton to Taylor (breaking everything down into component parts, or optimizing individual elements) tend to be pointless at best or destructive at worst.
Frederick Taylor’s managerial solutions were unequivocally designed for complicated problems rather than complex ones.
In Iraq, we were using complicated solutions to attack a complex problem.
By 2004, the world had outpaced us. In the time it took us to move a plan from creation to approval, the battlefield for which the plan had been devised would have changed. By the time it could be implemented, the plan (however ingenious in its initial design) was often irrelevant. We could not predict where the enemy would strike, and we could not respond fast enough when they did.
It is hard, if not impossible, to draw a firm line separating the complicated from the complex.
For our purposes, the ability to predict is the most relevant criterion, and determining exactly when things become unpredictable is tricky.
It is relevant not only that things have become more interconnected, but also that processes have become faster. These two variables combined mean that the amount of interactive complexity previously contained in many months of, say, local conversations and letter exchange might now be squeezed into a few hours of explosive social media escalation.
In Iraq was the first war in which we could see all of our operations unfolding in real time. While this profusion of information proved of great value, it was never very useful for prediction.
Data-rich records can be wonderful for explaining how complex phenomena happened and how they might happen, but they can’t tell us when and where they will happen. Gaining understanding is not always the same as predicting.
Data on the spread of a virus can provide an insight into how contagion patterns look in our networked world, but that is very different from knowing exactly where the next outbreak will occur, who precisely will end up getting sick, and where they will go next.
A hallmark of complexity is that small, occasional deviations can have massive impact.
We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.
Like most organizations, our Task Force understood very little of this in 2004. So we kept trying to predict and plan better because that is what we had learned «good management» to be.
This is evidenced by the increasingly shorter lifespan of firms, fifty years ago, a Fortune 500 firm was expected to last around seventy-five years.Today this life expectancy is less than fifteen years and is constantly declining. The churn has been so incredible that the companies on the list in 1955 would be unrecognizable to readers today.
Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: «Setting oneself on a predetermined course in unknown waters is the perfect way to sail straight into an iceberg».
We were stronger, more efficient, more robust. But AQI was agile and resilient. In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.
Predictive design is fine in complicated environments, but often dangerous in complex ones.
An expert at a major storm surge facility: «If you fight nature, nature is going to strike back. Water needs space». Floods are inevitable, representing a shift in mentality from making the Netherlands floodproof to making if flood resilient.
In a resilience unpredicted paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again.
Resilience thinkers argue that we have inadvertently «fragilized» many of the systems that surround us. Our urge to specialize, reap efficiencies, and impose our demands for unnatural predictability has, like the rerouting of the Rhine, created new threats and damaged our ability to bounce back.
David Salt and Brian Walker, environmentalists, Resilience Thinking: «the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience. A drive for efficiency optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances».
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Resilience thinking is the inverse of predictive hubris. It is based in a humble willingness to «know that we don’t know» and «expect the unexpected», old tropes that often receive lip service but are usually disregarded in favor of optimization.
Most of the time, our instinct is to protect ourselves through prediction and by massing strength against the predicted threat.
A coral reef survives hurricanes not by being robust, but through resilience. Storms will destroy a certain proportion of coral, but if the reef is at a healthy size, it will regenerate in short order.
Even a resilient system can be broken when too much comes at it too fast.
All the efficiency in the world has no value if it remains static in a volatile environment.
When we realized that AQI was outrunning us, we did what most large organizations do when they find themselves falling behind the competition: we worked harder. We deployed more resources, we put more people to work, and we strove to create ever-greater efficiency within the existing operating model.
Peter Drucker: «Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing». If you have enough foresight to know with certainty what the «right thing» is in advance, then efficiency is an apt proxy for effectiveness. The Task Force had built systems that were very good at doing things right, but too inflexible to do the right thing.
In 2004, we did not have an efficiency problem; we had an adaptability problem. Like the Dutch hydroengineers, our Task Force needed to recover some of the old wisdom that had been cast aside in the quest for efficiency.
We had to find a way to create adaptability while preserving many of our traditional strengths. This would prove difficult, many of the practices that are most efficient directly limited adaptability.
In battle, refusal or hesitation to follow orders can spell disaster. But at the same time, the rigid hierarchy and absolute power of officers slows down execution and stifles rapid adaptation by the soldiers closest to the fight. When a subordinate must spend time seeking detailed guidance from a distant officer in order to respond to a rapidly evolving opportunity, the price for traditional order and discipline becomes too high.
Speed and interdependence had rendered our environment in Iraq incompatible with the vertical and horizontal stratification that had maintained military order for centuries. The chains of command that once guaranteed reliability now constrained our pace.
Interdependence meant that silos were no longer an accurate reflection of the environment: events happening all over were now relevant to everyone. Cordoning off separate institutional entities works only if their operating theaters are not inextricably linked.
AQI learned to live and operate in the gaps of our system.
Soon our whiteboard bore the observation «It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network». With that, we took the first step toward an entirely new conversation.
«Navy SEAL» has become shorthand for a superhuman combination of strength, bravery, and skill, but the remarkable quality of SEAL teams has less to do with individual talent than most people think.
SEAL teams accomplish remarkable feats not simply because of the individual qualifications of their members, but because those members coalesce into a single organism. Such oneness is not inevitable, nor is it a fortunate coincidence. The SEALs forge it methodically and deliberately.
The purpose of BUD/S is not to produce supersoldiers. It is to build superteams. The first step of this is constructing a strong lattice of trusting relationships.
At BUD/S, few tasks are tackled alone.
The formation of SEAL teams is less about preparing people to follow precise orders than it is about developing trust and the ability to adapt within a small group. To that end, BUD/S instructors have constructed a training course that is impossible to survive by executing orders individually.
From the program’s start, trainees must travel with a «swim buddy», even if they are just going to the dining hall. Swim buddies often become lifelong friends.
Teams whose members know one another deeply perform better. Any coach knows that these sorts of relationships are vital for success. Such a group can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.
Groups like SEAL teams and flight crews operate in truly complex environments, where adaptive precision is key. Such situations outpace a single leader’s ability to predict, monitor, and control. As a result, team members cannot simply depend on orders; teamwork is a process of reevaluation, negotiation, and adjustment; players are constantly sending messages to, and taking cues from, their teammates, and those players must be able to read one another’s every move and intent.
Team members tackling complex environments must all grasp the team’s situation and overarching purpose. Only if each of t hem understands the goal of a mission and the strategic context in which it fits can the team members evaluate risks on the fly and know how to behave in relation to their teammates.
The Navy needs to know that operators can make the right call in dangerous, high-risk settings where plans are changing constantly.
The physical hardship of BUD/S is a test, not of strength, but of commitment. «We could tell from interviews who would drop», Ruiz says. «It was the ones who were in it for themselves. I want to try BUD/S. I think I’ll enjoy the challenge». Nobody enjoys BUD/S, it’s hell. The successful ones, he explained, «were the guys who said: ‘I wanna be on the SEAL teams. I wanna fight overseas’. It seems like a small difference, but it means everything».
Team members placing their lives at risk want to server alongside committed patriots, not bodybuilders who signed up because they saw an opportunity for personal growth.
By the time trainees reach Third Phase, they are intimately familiar with their teammates’ combat styles and trust one another with their lives. They have developed a fluency with their teammates that allows them to reconfigure, adapt, and deliver.
Through this combination of dense connectivity (trust) and their understanding of the situation and commitment to an outcome (purpose) teams like the SEALs can tackle threats more complex than any leader can foresee.
Our operators’ most useful preparation lay in the trust they had built, shared hardship by shared hardship, over years of service. It is often said that trust is learned on the battlefield. But for groups like the SEALs, the oneness imbued by trust and purpose is prerequisite to deployment. Entering the battlefield as a group of individuals without hose characteristics would be like walking into a firefight without wearing body armor.
Their structure, not their plan, was their strategy.
The myth is that the sophisticated structure of ant colonies is the result of the architectural and managerial brilliance of the colony’s queen. We envision an insect hierarchy, at the head of which sits the queen, organizing the labor of her minions and directing battles with rival populations. The truth is that the queen is a larva factory. Her sole job is to produce new ants, a critical role, but not a managerial role. The myth survives because of our assumption that order is always directed from the top down. The colony’s structure emerges from the aggregation of individual instinctive behaviors triggered by primitive communication, ants recognize patterns in the pheromone trails left by other ants.
The field of «emergence» examines how complex patterns and forms can arise from a multiplicity of simple, low-level interactions. Emergence has been used as a paradigm for exploring everything from the crystal-line beauty of a snowflake, to the explosive development of cities, to the capricious behavior of economic markets.
Steven Johnson describes emergence as producing «unpredictable creativity», and identifies the ingredients necessary to unleash such creativity as «connectedness and organization». In other words, order can emerge from the bottom up, as opposed to being directed, with a plan, from the top down.
This is not to say that simply throwing more computers or Navy SEALs at a problem is the answer; the key lies not in the number of elements but in the nature of their integration, the wiring of trust and purpose. Programs like BUD/S are designed to foster emergent intelligence that can thrive in the absence of a plan.
The report found that fatalities were increasing not in spite of recent technological advances, but because of them. Something that was once merely complicated had passed the threshold of complexity. For crews trained in checklist-based efficiency, minor deviations from the plan led to unnecessary deaths. Technology had changed in such a way that management had become a limiting factor.
The solution, which came to be known as Crew Resource Management (CRM), was developed in consultation with social psychologists, sociologists, and other experts, and focused on group dynamics, leadership, interpersonal communications, and decision making. CRM increased aviation safety. We now live in a world where risk exists everywhere, but we have never been safer.
In medicine as in aviation, technology had outpaced the capacity of any individual practitioner to be on top of it all; once this was recognized, there was a movement toward «cross-functional trauma teams», with more even distribution of authority and leadership. Research showed that these changes cut average times for complete resuscitation in half, from 122 to 56 minutes.
None of AQI’s individual elements was better than ours, but that did not matter; a team, unlike a conventional command, is not the sum of its parts. Even if their nodes were weak, their network was strong. Our challenge, now that we understood it, was to find a way to reshape our structure to create teamlike oneness across an organization of thousands.
The connectivity of trust and purpose imbues teams with an ability to solve problems that could never be foreseen by a single manager, their solutions often emerge as the bottom-up result of interactions, rather than from top-down orders.
The specialization that allowed for breathtaking efficiency became a liability in the face of the unpredictability of the real world.
The team is better off with the cohesive ability to improvise as a unit, relying on both specialization (goalies mostly stay in goal; forwards mostly don’t) and overlapping responsibilities (each can do some of the others’ jobs in a pinch), as well as such familiarity with one another’s habits and responses that they can anticipate instinctively one another’s responses.
The best teams know their coach (or commander or boss) trusts them to trust each other.
Trust and purpose are inefficient: getting to know your colleagues intimately and acquiring a whole-system overview are big time sinks; the sharing of responsibilities generates redundancy. But RBT457534Z5467this overlap and redundancy (these inefficiencies) are precisely what imbues teams with high-level adaptability and efficacy. Great teams are less like «awesome machines» than awesome organisms.
Like ripe fruit left in the sun, intelligence spoils quickly. By the time the bags were opened, most of it was worthless: AQI cells would have moved or changed their plans.
Stratification and silos were hardwired throughout the Task Force. Although all our units resided on the same compound, most lived with their «kind», some used different gyms, units controlled access to their planning areas, and each tribe had its own brand of standoffish superiority complex. Resources were shared reluctantly. Our forces lived a proximate but largely parallel existence.
The larger an organization gets, the harder it is for it to think and act as one.
SEAL squads contain between sixteen and twenty people. Beyond such numbers, teams being to lose the «oneness» that makes them adaptable. As the proverbial kitchen fills up, communication and trust break down, egos come into conflict, and the chemistry that fueled innovation and agility becomes destructive. In many cases, this loss of adaptability dooms the enterprise.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcom Gladwell as the «Rule of 150» in this book Outliers).
J. Richard hackman, a Harvard sociology professor: «[It’s a] fallacy that bigger teams are better than smaller ones because they have more resources to draw on. As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate».
On a team of teams, every individual does not have to have a relationship with every other individual; instead, the relationships between the constituent teams need to resemble those between individuals on a given team. We needed the SEALs to trust Arm Special Forces, and for them to trust the CIA, and for them all to be bound by a sense of common purpose: winning the war, rather than outperforming the other unit. And that could be effectively accomplished through representation.
We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that banked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly f ace rather than a competitive rival.
We didn’tRBT457534Z5467 need everybody to follow every single operation in real time (something just as impossible as building lifelong friendships with seven thousand people). We needed to enable a team operating in an interdependent environment to understand the butterfly-effect ramifications of their work and make them aware of the other teams with whom they would have to cooperate in order to achieve strategic (not just tactical) success.
«As a CIA analyst, he was not authorized to answer FBI questions regarding CIA information».
SEAL commander: «We came from a background where if you were losing, you just weren’t trying hard enough».
There were geographical blinks and technological ones: the distance between Washington and Baghdad could slow decisions, and occasionally bandwidth problems obstructed the transfer of data. More often, though, the blinks were social. Cultural differences between the Task Force’s different tribes got in the way of communicating. Overcoming this would require completely rethinking the conventional organizational approach to distributing information.
Given the overwhelming volume of, and myriad sensitivities around, information, the default is not to share.
As technology has grown more sophisticated and processes more dispersed, the way component parts of a process come together has become far less intuitive.
As growing volumes of data flood institutions divided into increasingly specialized departments, the systems for keeping information safe have become more and more complicated. More protocols have to be satisfied, more tests have to be conducted, more badges have to be swiped before information can be shared.
Continuing to function under the illusion that we can understand and foresee exactly what will be relevant to whom is hubris. It might feel safe, but it is the opposite. Functioning safely in an interdependent environment requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work.
What George Mueller instituted was known as «systems engineering» or «systems management», an approach built on the foundation of «systems thinking». This approach, contrary to reductionism, believes that one cannot understand a part of a system without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the whole. It was the organizational manifestation of this insight that imbued NASA with the adaptive, emergent intelligence it needed to put a man on the moon.
In the two years after Mueller was brought on, Apollo transformed a group of loosely organized research teams into a tightly run development organization.
The systems management put in place at NASA became a core process of aerospace research and development, essential to everything from the International Space Station to the Boeing 777.
NASA’s success showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of «interface failures». It also proved that the cognitive «oneness» (the emergent intelligence) that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information.
Some of NASA’s innovations sound incredibly simple: take off the blinders and have people talk to each other. The basic concept requires only the unlearning of fundamentalist approaches to efficiency, but the implementation requires constant maintenance: making sure that everybody has constantly updated, holistic awareness became a full-time job for many, and required commitment and time from everyone.
Systems thinking has been used to understand everything from the functioning of a city to the internal dynamics of a skin cell, and plays a key role in deciphering interdependence.
Medical school is education, first aid is training. Education requires fundamental understanding, which can be used to grasp and respond to a nearly infinite variety of threats; training involves singular actions, which are useful only against anticipated challenges. Education is resilient, training is robust.
People cooperate only if they can see the interdependent reality of their environment.
Diverse specialized abilities are essential. We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise. Our entire force needed to share a fundamental, holistic, understanding of the operating environment and of our own organization, and we also needed to preserve each team’s distinct skill sets. We dubbed this goal (this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence) shared consciousness, and it became the cornerstone of our transformation.
We would have to dismantle our deeply rooted system of secrecy, clearances, and interforce rivalries, and in its place establish an environment of such transparency that every man and woman in our command understood his or her role within the complex system that represented all of our undertakings. This ran against the grain of the distinct specializations that we had spent the last century developing.
In the private sector also, physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization.
Management historian Alfred Chandler observed that the role of the merchant, which once embraced «exporter, wholesaler, importer, retailer, shipowner, banker and insurer», split (lie Adam Smith’s pin production) into multiple specialized businesses in the late 1800s.
How we organize physical space says a lot about how we think people behave; but how people behave is often a by-product of how we set up physical space.
The cultivated chaos of the open office encourages interaction between employees distant from one another on the org chart.
The appreciation for serendipitous encounters embodied by Bloomberg’s bullpen and Silicon Valley’s open plans is way of saying, «We don’t know what connections and conversations will prove valuable».
A new layout with an old culture can deliver the worst of both worlds; countless managers, eager to adopt the new trend that promises innovation but reluctant to abandon the org chart, have done away with cubicles only to produce a noisier, more distracting environment that is neither efficient nor effective.
The cubicle itself is a good example of management space gone wrong. Originally created by the visionary inventor Robert Propst to free worker from isolation, the cubicle has become a symbol of the impersonal culture it aimed to reform.
Cultures are more resistant to designed change than bricks and mortar.
Shared consciousness demanded the adoption of extreme transparency throughout our force and with our partner forces. We needed transparency that provided every team with an unobstructed, constantly up-to-date view of the rest of the organization. It is the type of transparency that those of us raised in the comfort of bureaucratic silos find uncomfortable. But it would be absolutely critical to our ability to coalesce and succeed as a team of teams.
We had to acknowledge that we often could not predict who would and would not benefit from access to certain information.
No group could be useful if it did not understand the full context.
Since the 9/11 Commission Report famously concluded that the U.S. intelligence community had all the pieces of the puzzle but had failed to put them together and protect the country, the national security community has seen a gradual but undeniable paradigm shift toward greater information sharing.
Massive leaks are not an inevitable consequence of the current level of information sharing, but even if they were, the benefits vastly outweigh the potential costs. We should not let the fact that the benefits are usually invisible (whereas the leaks make front-page news) blind our assessment.
Achieving teamlike levels of shared consciousness would take more than just sharing information.
We needed true, not theoretical, collaboration, transparency, and trust. The stronger the ties between our teams the highest the likelihood we would achieve the level of cooperation we needed.
Intelligence agencies wanted to build networks of understanding ground truth, through human sources or information or technical collection means. Diplomatic agencies wanted to create long-term institutions and stability. Our counterterrorism forces wanted to solve the real-time problems they saw on the battlefield night after night. Each of these perspectives had value, but none could succeed in isolation. Showing them abstractly was not enough. In order to achieve cross-functionality, our bonds with our partner organizations had to become as strong as those between the individuals on our operational teams. Too often we viewed our partners solely in terms of what we could get and give.
If we could develop that kind of understanding between partners, then one day down the line in a particularly urgent moment, one side might be able to urge the other, «trust me here», and have it work out.
One of our most controversial moves was our embedding program, an exchange system we began in late 2003 in which we would take an individual from one team and assign him to a different part of our force for six months. Our hope was that, by allowing our operators to see how the war looked form inside other groups, and by building personal relationships, we could build between teams some of the fluency that traditionally exists within teams.
Although it was a «forced» initiative, once the mandate was in place, elite units were naturally incentivized to send their best operators and leaders. These individuals would be representing their organization, so unit pride would drive them to select the best examples from an already highly selective sample set. Many of these top-of-the-pack personalities were also the types that had a natural ability to connect with others, especially in an environment where leadership and one’s capability as an operator were a critical measuring stick among peers.
As an added bonus, each unit wouldn’t see the exchanged operator as a one-off example; rather, they would see their newfound friend as representative of the entire unit which he came, and their feelings of trust and understanding would expand to the other unit, even if they’d only really gotten to know a single operator. This connective tissue grew stronger. When these operators returned to their home unit, their positive comments on the rival unit would spread, deepening the ties between teams.
Liaisons are institutionalized ambassadors who server to connect organizations.
Receiving a talentless functionary frequently meant that his home agency was planning to stonewall; a superstar showed they were eager to engage.
Previously, the world outside of a commander’s domain looked like a black box; once an asset left, it was just gone. Once they could see why and how their assets were being used, however, and once they knew and respected the other individuals handling these tools, things changed.
Movement over long distances was done during the daylight hours, since AQI knew that our night vision and overnight reconnaissance assets gave us an advantage over them in the dark.
No single supervisor had planned or even dictated in the operation in real time; the solution emerged from a dense knot of interactions at the ground level. My role in these situations was usually that of spectator. Only with deep, empathetic familiarity could these different units function so seamlessly together, put their lives on the line for one another.
Looking at very large data sets, Sandy Pentland, an MIT professor, has found that sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities. His research suggests that the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members, and much more to do with the connection between them.
The two major determinants of idea flow, Pentland has found, are «engagement» within a small group like a team, a department, or a neighborhood, and «exploration», frequent contact with other units. In other words: a team of teams.
The worst-performing groups Pentland analyzed were those that were dominated by one or two hotshots.
As we would soon find, keeping pace with the speed of our environment and enemy would require something else as well: decentralized control. Creating it would be just as taxing, radical, and necessary as shared consciousness. This next step (which we called «empowered execution») would transform the way we thought about power and leadership.
Being woken to make life-or-death decisions confirmed my role as a leader, and made me feel important and needed, something most manager yearn for. I had no illusions that my judgment was markedly superior to that of the people with whom I worked. As much as I would like to think otherwise, I only rarely had some groundbreaking insight. Most of the time I would simply trust the recommendation made by those who came to get me, as they knew the most about the issue. My inclusion was a rubber stamp that slowed the process, and sometimes caused us to miss fleeting opportunities.
A big piece of why we lagged AQI lay in our need to relay decisions up and down the chain of command. Decisions that senior leaders a few decades prior would have been unable to oversee now required senior approval.
The requirement to consult me for strikes was symptomatic of a bureaucracy that, over the years, had grown slower and more convoluted as the world around it had become faster.
Communications may have been instantaneous but decisions never were. The aggregate effects were crippling.
In 1852, Commodore Perry set out from Virginia, empowered by President Fillmore with an authority that would be unheard of today.
Carl Builder, a military expert at RAND, summarized Perry’s broad authority, writing: «Perry, halfway around the globe and months away from Washington, acted as presidential emissary, ambassador, commander in chief, secretary of state, and trade commissioner, all under the guns of his ships, as he threatened war and negotiated treaties with feudal Japan».
The inability to communicate with a far-off fleet demanded that Perry be given levels of autonomy he would never have realized as a commander of land forces.
Taylor’s contemporary Henri Fayol enumerated the «five functions of management» as «planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling». The last three become much easier to attend to when you have more information, creating a cycle of seeking ways to gather and centralize more information in order to push more and more efficient directives to the organization. The function of workers is to feed this cycle and await the next commands.
In Iraq, we could see that our sharing of information was an effective tool. But the centralization of control that came with such access to tactical data was another question entirely.
I began to reconsider the nature of my role as a leader. The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant. I communicated across the command my thought process on decisions like airstrikes, and told them to make the call. Whoever made the decision, I was always ultimately responsible, and more often that not those below me reached the same conclusion I would have, but this way our team would be empowered to do what was needed.
We concluded that we would be better served by accepting the 70 percent solution today, rather than satisfying protocol and getting the 90 percent solution tomorrow, in the military you learn that you will never have time for the 100 percent solution.
Today, even the most clockwork of tasks (like factory floor labor and other mechanical tasks) can benefit from some degree of innovation and creative thinking.
With raising interdependence and unpredictability, the costs of micromanagement are increasing.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School: «The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate». In other words, as our environment erupts with too many possibilities to plan for effectively, we must become comfortable sharing power.
We accepted that divergences from plan were inevitable, we wanted to improve our ability to respond to them. We needed to empower our teams to take action on their own.
They had always taken things seriously, but now they acquired a gravitas that they had not had before. It is one thing to look at a situation and make a recommendation to a senior leader about whether or not to authorize a strike. Psychologically, it is an entirely different experience to be charged with making that decision.
Eventually a rule of thumb emerged: «If something supports our effort, as long as it is not immoral or illegal», you could do it.
Soon, I found that the question I most often asked my force was «What do you need?».
On the whole, our initiative, which we call «empowered execution», met with tremendous success. Decisions came more quickly, critical in a fight where speed was essential to capturing enemies and preventing attacks. More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority further down, the quality of decisions actually went up. We had centralized on the belief the 70 percent solution today would be better than the 90 percent solution tomorrow. But we found our estimates were backward, we were getting the 90 percent solution today instead of the 70 percent solution tomorrow.
An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome.
When we stopped holding them back, when we gave them the order simply to place their ship alongside that of the enemy, they thrived.
By 2006 we had transformed the way we observed, assessed, acted, and interacted in all our operations.
I was most effective when I supervised processes (from intelligence operations to the priorization of resources) ensuring that we avoided the silos of bureaucracy that doomed agility, rather than making individual operational decisions.
Traditionally, organizations have implemented as much control over subordinates as technology physically allowed.
While some leaders possess extraordinary gifts and project a charismatic presence, in a career alongside accomplished leaders, I never met a Marko Ramius, or anyone remotely close to the character author Tom Clancy created in The Hunt for Red October.
Even in our environment, we still retain high, often unrealistic, expectations of leaders. We publicly demand high-level strategic and an unerring ability to anticipate broad market trends, but we simultaneously celebrate CEOs for encyclopedic mastery of every aspect of their business. We routinely ask government leaders if they knew the smallest details of an issue, and if not, why they didn’t.
Railroads, telegraph, automobiles, and radio made it easier for leaders to influence developments from afar, but real control remained elusively out of reach. Even at the pace of horses or steamships, local events could develop faster than distant decision makes could monitor, assess, decide, and act.
Information can seduce leaders into thinking that they understand and can predict complex situations, that they can see what will happen. But the speed and interdependence of our current environment means that what we cannot know has grown even faster than what we can.
The doctrine of empowered execution may at first glance seem to suggest that leaders are no longer needed. Senior leaders are now more important than ever, but the role is very different from that of the traditional heroic decision maker. The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.
The idea that a «heroic leader» enabled with an über-network of connectivity can simultaneously control a thousand marionettes on as many stages is unrealistic.
The gardener creates an environment in which the plants can flourish. The work done up front, and vigilant maintenance, allow the plants to grow individually, all at the same time.
Within our Task Force, as in a garden, the outcome was less dependent on the initial planting than on consistent maintenance. Watering, weeding, and protecting plants from rabbits and disease are essential for success. The gardener cannot actually «grow» tomatoes, squash, or beans, she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.
The mental transition from heroic leader to humble gardener was not a comfortable one.
Creating and maintaining the teamwork conditions we needed became my primary responsibility. I found that only the senior leader could drive the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation we needed. I could shape the culture and demand the ongoing conversation that shared consciousness required.
Communicating priorities and cultural expectations to our team of teams spread across multiple continents was a challenge.
Experience had taught me that nothing was heard until it had been said several times.
As a leader my most powerful instrument of communication was my own behavior.
«Thank you» became my most important phrase, interest and enthusiasm my most powerful behaviors.
I adopted a practice I called «thinking out loud», in which I would summarize what I’d heard, descibe how I processed the information, and outline my first thoughts on what we should consider doing about it.
Gardeners plant and harvest, but more than anything, they tend. Regular visits by good gardeners are not pro forma gestures of concern, they leave the crop stronger. So it is with leaders.
There’s an art to asking questions. Briefings are valuable but normally communicate primarily what the subordinate leader wants you to know, and often the picture they provide is incomplete. Thoughtful questions can help fill in the blanks.
I later used a specific question when talking to junior officers and sergeants in small bases in Afghanistan: «If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win, what would you do differently?». If they were forced to operate on a metric of task completion, rather than watching the clock until they went home, the implications would be significant. Almost all were good soldiers and leaders, but they had been shaped into thinking in terms of their tour of duty, a time horizon that rarely predicted successful mission completion. Once they recalculated, their answers were impressive. Most adjusted their approach to take a longer view of solving the problem.
I found it essential to let members of the command hear directly from me.
Soothing words that aren’t backed up by action encourage cynicism. If, after hearing their problems or concerns, I couldn’t do anything about them, I found it far better to state that directly than to pretend I could change things. Simple honesty shows, and earns, respect. It is important to be realistic.
I would tell my staff about the «dinosaur’s tail»: As a leader grows more senior, his bulk and tail become huge, but like the brontosaurus, his brain remains modestly small. When plans are changed and the huge beast turns, its tail often thoughtlessly knocks over people and things. That the destruction was unintentional doesn’t make it any better.
Creating and leading a truly adaptive organization requires building, leading, and maintaining a culture that is flexible but also durable.
The leader’s first responsibility is to the whole.
The leader must allow team members to monitor him. More than directing, leaders must exhibit personal transparency. This is the new ideal.
As the world becomes more complex, the importante of leaders will only increase.
The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.
We had learned that «if it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid».
Patience is hard when people are dying.
I’d learned that trust was critical.
By 2007, the Task Force was winning the fight against AQI. Of course, this was only one piece of the war at large, and the fact that we had gained an edge over AQI, though it greatly behooved coalition forces, did not represent the be-all and end-all of the war.
Though the elimination of Zarqawi represented a pivotal moment in our fight against AQI, it was just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, the decentralization of authority that AQI had engineered meant that «decapitation» was no silver bullet. An organization as regenerative and fluid as AQI would never possess a single point of failure, which was why it was important that we hit them relentlessly and accurately. Zarqawi’s death was a major victory in morale. At long last, we were better.
A system requires shared consciousness before it can reap the benefits of empowered execution.
Tocqueville recognized that empowerment without context will lead to havoc. This is the risk run if traditional, hierarchical organizations just push authority down.
Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization. Maintain this system for too long without decentralizing authority, and whatever morale gains were made will be reversed as people become frustrated with their inability to act on their new insights. Just as empowerment without sharing consciousness, so does sharing without empowerment.
Shared consciousness is a carefully maintained set of centralized forums for bringing people together.
Empowered execution is a radically decentralized system for pushing authority out to the edges of the organization.
Mental models can be very helpful, they can provide shortcuts and keep us from reinventing the wheel. As The Onion put it tastefully, «Stereotypes are a real timesaver». Problems arise when these models no longer reflect reality and when they inhibit creative thinking.
We have to recognize that a mental model is not reality, it is just a representation of reality, and there are a near-infinite number of equally valid representations, almost all of which also leave something out in the interests of simplification.
When we urge people to think «outside of the box», we are generally asking them to discard mental models.
As we look to solve bigger and bigger problems, we will need management systems that can adjust and adapt in real time; that are not constrained by the expired mental models of yesteryear.
There is no such thing as an organizational panacea (the details will always be different for different people, places, and objectives) but we believe that our model provides a good blueprint.
In the past twenty years, the costs of copying, sharing, transmitting, and manipulating data have dropped practically to zero. This enabled us to share in new ways and, consequently, to empower people with new levels of authority.
The Task Force still had ranks and each member was still assigned a particular team and sub-sub-command, but we all understood that we were now part of a network; when we visualized our own force on the whiteboards, it now took the form of webs and nodes, not tiers and silos.
To defeat a network, we had become a network. We had become a team of teams.
Have you read this book? Any other similar book? Do you have anything to say about what this book is saying? Do you recommend any book related to this matter? Anything at all? I’ll be glad to know what you think about it in the comments.
Hoy hablamos con Alejandro Colón, trader profesional, y nos viene a contar algunas de las mayores estafas de la historia del mundo financiero y todo sobre el lado oscuro del trading. Desde gurús de Dubái hasta falsas promesas de rentabilidad, desgranamos cómo operan muchos de los supuestos expertos.
Esperamos que lo disfruten!
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La guerra en Irán está dañando con gravedad la infraestructura energética de los países del Golfo Pérsico. ¿Estamos adentrándonos a un punto de no retorno en materia de precios?
A veces, las discusiones con la pareja parecen una película ya vista muchas veces. Da igual si empiezan hablando sobre quién recoge los platos o sobre un gasto inesperado, el final se repite y terminas sintiendo el mismo cansancio de siempre. No es que no quieras arreglarlo, es que se han acostumbrado a reaccionar de forma automática.
Lo que agota no es la pelea, es la forma en la que se tratan mientras discuten. Si aprendes a ver ese “bucle” en el que caen una y otra vez, será mucho más fácil parar el enfado antes de que se agrande. Aunque siempre tendrán diferencias, pueden entender qué hay debajo de esos enojos repetitivos para solucionarlos.
1. La actitud a la defensiva
Muchas de las discusiones repetitivas con la pareja ocurren cuando uno de los dos entra en la conversación ya enojado, percibiendo cualquier sugerencia como un ataque personal. En este estado, tu prioridad deja de ser conectar con tu pareja para centrarte en protegerte.
En lugar de validar lo que el otro siente, es probable que busques contraargumentos o devuelvas reproches para equilibrar la balanza. Por eso, este comportamiento transforma un intento de hablar en un campo de batalla donde nadie se siente comprendido.
Es habitual que las tareas del hogar dejen de ser cuestiones logísticas para convertirse en termómetros de reciprocidad en el amor. Muchas peleas aparecen cuando uno interpreta el orden o la colaboración como pruebas de respeto (“si no haces esto que te pedí, es que no me valoras”).
La discusión deja de ser sobre la organización de la casa para convertirse en una lucha por el reconocimiento. Así, cada descuido parece una herida personal y cada tarea cumplida es un favor que se cobrará más adelante.
3. El choque de ritmos para resolver problemas
En muchas parejas existe una asimetría en cómo gestionan la intensidad de los conflictos. Una persona puede necesitar resolver el problema de inmediato para calmar su ansiedad, mientras que la otra puede requerir silencio y espacio para procesar lo ocurrido.
Cuando estos ritmos chocan, la pelea empeora. Esta dinámica agota a ambos, ya que quien actúa de inmediato se siente abandonado y quien se distancia se siente invadido por la presión.
4. Las expectativas no dichas
Muchas veces, existe la creencia de que tu pareja debería ser capaz de leer tu mente. Pensar que debería saber qué te sucede genera un resentimiento silencioso que envenena la relación.
Al no verbalizar las necesidades con claridad, se crea un abismo de malentendidos donde la frustración se acumula hasta que estalla ante cualquier incidente, dejando a la otra persona confundida y sin herramientas para mejorar.
5. Descargar el estrés externo en la relación
A veces, la pareja se convierte en el blanco fácil de tensiones que no tienen relación con el vínculo, como el estrés acumulado en el trabajo o con otras personas. Al llegar estresado, la paciencia desaparece y cualquier comentario actúa como un detonante.
En esta dinámica, la persona más cercana absorbe toda la frustración ajena. Esto desgasta el vínculo y convierte el espacio de refugio (el hogar) en un escenario de conflicto permanente.
Es posible que identificar ese patrón que se instala entre ustedes les devuelva la paz. Cuando ocurra una pelea recurrente, en lugar de seguir peleando por quién tiene la razónl, resulta más útil preguntarse qué les está pasando mientras intentan hablar. Desactivar la reactividad y buscar soluciones para evitar que el problema se repita es la única manera de que las discusiones se conviertan en una oportunidad de crecimiento.
De todos modos, esto no justifica la falta de esfuerzo ni los comportamientos hirientes. Detectar un bucle sirve para mejorar la comunicación, pero no sustituye la responsabilidad individual de cada uno. Entonces, si las discusiones de pareja incluyen faltas de respeto o si sientes que el desgaste es demasiado, la ayuda de un profesional puede ser necesaria para mediar en la relación.
Are we witnessing the organic collapse of the Western world, or is the current global chaos a highly engineered script?
Simon Dixon returns to map out the hidden architecture of global power. He breaks down how the Financial, Military, and Technical Industrial Complexes are actively managing a transition to a multipolar world. From the "transitional theater" of the Middle East to the weaponization of global debt, Simon explains how elites are using chaos to asset-strip the West and consolidate their wealth in a K-shaped economy.
We also discuss the pivot to the real pandemic: the profound psychological trauma and existential dread infecting modern society. We discuss our own mid-life reckonings, the horrifying reality of an AI-driven digital control grid, and the ultimate rebellion against the system.
In this episode, we cover: - The Theater of War: Why current geopolitical conflicts are a scripted reallocation of resources, not unpredictable chaos. - The Power Triad: How the FIC, MIC, and TIC control governments, global capital flows, and the media narrative. - The Epstein Leverage: Why the true rulers of the world aren't in the files, but control who gets exposed by them to purge liabilities. - The 10-Year Escape Plan: Why self-custody of hard assets and fully withdrawing from fiat equities is your only financial defense. - The Spiritual Rebellion: Navigating the moral decay of fiat society, the necessity of analog community, and finding personal sovereignty.
TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Introduction 02:45 - Consolidation of Power & The Multipolar World 06:28 - Trump, the TIC, FIC, and MIC Explained 15:46 - Venezuela, Gold Deals, and the Illusion of Regime Change 23:06 - The 150 People Run the World? 26:37 - The Epstein Files & Global Money Laundering Networks 34:39 - Why the Middle East is "Transitional Theater" 49:54 - Breaking the Petrodollar & The True Cost of War 56:06 - Summarizing the Engineered Global Masterplan 01:11:53 - The Psychological Pandemic 01:15:37 - The 10-Year Escape Plan 01:22:50 - Exit the System 01:24:30 - The Spiritual Awakening 01:26:20 - The Quran & Divine Guidance 01:39:24 - The Gross Happiness Index 01:55:55 - Rural Living & Surviving the Collapse
La mayoría cree que el peor jefe es un idiota. Pero hay algo peor: alguien que entiende el problema… y decide no cambiar nada. ¿Quién dirige tu equipo? #liderazgo #trabajo #empresa #reflexion #desarrollopersonal
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Negar el pasado y el futuro para vivir "solo el presente" suena liberador, pero Xavier Guix lo llama presentismo ingenuo: quedarse con media película. El psicólogo desvela por qué el mantra "no tengo tiempo" es en realidad una desconexión total contigo mismo, cómo el rencor funciona como una cárcel que tú mismo construyes y por qué la única salida real exige algo que nadie quiere hacer: decepcionar a los tuyos para poder crecer.
MOMETOS INTERESANTES DE LA ENTREVISTA 0:00:00 La ilusión del tiempo: por qué contar los años te está destruyendo | Xavier Guix 0:05:42 ¿Se puede ser feliz con un pasado sin resolver? 0:10:52 Por qué el tiempo es el mayor generador de angustia del ser humano 0:14:01 El mantra "no tengo tiempo" revela una desconexión profunda con tu alma 0:15:59 La generación sin futuro: cómo la inmediatez se convirtió en mecanismo de supervivencia 0:26:07 La diferencia entre estar presente y estar en presencia 0:27:07 El presentismo ingenuo: por qué ignorar el pasado y el futuro te deja sin brújula 0:38:15 Cronos vs Kairos: el tiempo que te devora vs el tiempo que te libera 0:55:26 El pasado no existe, solo existe el recuerdo que tú construyes 0:59:08 Resignificar el dolor: cómo cambiar el marco de tu historia sin negarla 1:09:22 Por qué siempre actuamos al límite de nuestra conciencia (y cómo usar eso) 1:17:26 Vivir en rencor es una cárcel que tú mismo has construido ladrillo a ladrillo 1:20:25 La abundancia llega el día que dejas de creer que la vida te debe algo 1:33:43 Ceguera al cambio: por qué la gente que te quiere no ve quién eres hoy 1:41:08 El arte de decepcionar: el único camino real hacia tu libertad 1:48:21 Por qué el autoconocimiento es imposible sin el otro como espejo 2:05:30 "Esta entrevista es según mi conciencia": el cierre que lo resume todo
Las enfermeras especializadas en salud mental suelen estar en la primera línea de atención. [Foto libre: Pexels]
Si prestas atención a tu entorno más cercano, es probable que conozcas a alguien que se siente tan desbordado que ha tenido que pedir una baja laboral. O quizá conozcas a una persona que está yendo a terapia porque la vida se le ha hecho muy cuesta arriba o todos los días te encuentres con alguien que corre para llegar a todo, dejando a su paso una estela de estrés que casi se puede palpar.
La ansiedad y la depresión ya no son fenómenos raros ni lejanos, se han vuelto extremadamente habituales. De hecho, la Organización Mundial de la Salud estima que aproximadamente 359 millones de personas sufren un trastorno de ansiedad mientras que 280 millones padecen depresión.
Estas cifras, que ni siquiera recogen todos los casos, nos ayudan a entender por qué cada vez más psicólogos y psiquiatras hablamos de una “pandemia emocional silenciosa”. Y es que la ansiedad crónica, el agotamiento emocional y los estados depresivos se han vuelto cada vez más comunes en un mundo marcado por la aceleración, la incertidumbre extendida a todos los niveles, la hiperconectividad digital, el aislamiento social y una hiperexigencia constante.
La crisis silenciosa de la salud mental: más casos, menos especialistas
El crecimiento exponencial de la depresión y la ansiedad no ha venido acompañado de un aumento proporcional en los recursos disponibles para tratarlos. En la mayoría de los países existe un déficit significativo de profesionales de la salud mental, lo que dificulta el acceso a la atención psicológica o psiquiátrica.
En Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, la situación roza lo dramático. El 90% de la población cree que existe una crisis de salud mental en el país y un tercio reconoce que no pudo acceder a los servicios de salud mental que necesitaba, según la APA.
En 2023, el 60% de los psicólogos no estaban aceptando nuevos pacientes y más del 40% tenían listas de espera de 10 o más personas. Y se estima que la demanda de psicólogos aumentará un 6% hasta 2030.
Ese déficit no se limita a la psicología, los psiquiatras también reportan una alta saturación asistencial. Más de la mitad de los condados de Estados Unidos no tienen ni siquiera un psiquiatra, de acuerdo con la AAMC.
En ese contexto, las enfermeras especialistas en salud mental cobran relevancia ya que, al recibir una formación más avanzada en temas de Psicología, Psiquiatría, Psicofarmacología y Psicoterapia pueden desempeñar ciertas funciones clínicas que van más allá del rol tradicional de la enfermería.
Las enfermeras psiquiátricas, la primera línea frente a la ola de ansiedad y depresión
El abordaje clínico de los trastornos de ansiedad y los diferentes tipos de depresión suele requerir una combinación de distintas estrategias terapéuticas que se extienden a lo largo del tiempo. Las enfermeras psiquiátricas pueden aligerar el peso de dichos trastornos representan para el sistema de salud con intervenciones precisas que también ayuden a los pacientes a sentirse escuchados, comprendidos y acompañados.
1. Evaluación clínica y primer diagnóstico
El primer paso en el tratamiento de cualquier trastorno mental es realizar una valoración clínica adecuada. Las enfermeras psiquiátricas a menudo se encuentran en la primera línea de atención, por lo que suelen ser el primer profesional de salud mental que ven muchos pacientes.
Su labor comienza por realizar una evaluación detallada. No solo indagan en los síntomas actuales, sino que revisan la historia clínica, el contexto familiar y social, los hábitos de vida y la presencia de otras condiciones que puedan complicar el cuadro. Esa mirada integral permite captar detalles que a veces pasan desapercibidos en una consulta médica rápida.
Con esa información, la enfermera puede hacer un primer diagnóstico o cribado, identificando si se trata de ansiedad, depresión u otro trastorno que comparta síntomas similares. Este paso también es vital para priorizar la atención, identificando los casos más graves que requieren intervención inmediata y para orientar al paciente sobre los próximos pasos a seguir.
2. Manejo de la medicación
En los casos de ansiedad o depresión severos, a menudo es necesario recurrir a la medicación. Sin embargo, el talón de Aquiles de los trastornos mentales suele ser precisamente la adherencia terapéutica. Un metaanálisis realizado recientemente reveló que el 49% de los pacientes psiquiátricos no sigue el tratamiento farmacológico, en el caso de la depresión, el 50%.
En la falta de adherencia terapéutica no solo influyen las características individuales, estos investigadores constataron que la falta de apoyo social y los problemas del sistema de salud también eran determinantes. Ahí es donde las enfermeras especializadas en salud mental porque se encargan de acompañar al paciente y asegurarse de que siga el plan de tratamiento.
Estos profesionales se encargan de monitorear de cerca la respuesta al tratamiento. Evalúan si la medicación está surtiendo efecto, están capacitados para cambiar la dosis si es necesario y se mantienen al tanto de cualquier efecto secundario que pueda surgir. Su labor permite que la medicación sea más efectiva y segura, además de que el paciente se sienta acompañado durante todo el proceso ya que explican cómo funcionan los fármacos y por qué es importante no abandonarlos, aunque no note resultados inmediatamente.
3. Educación y empoderamiento del paciente
Otra de las funciones más importantes y transformadoras de las enfermeras psiquiátricas es la psicoeducación; es decir, enseñar y guiar al paciente para que comprenda lo que le está ocurriendo. No siempre es fácil conseguir una cita rápida con un psicólogo o un psiquiatra, por lo que estas profesionales pueden resolver algunas de sus dudas, disipar mitos sobre los trastornos mentales y proporcionar algunas estrategias prácticas que pueden mejorar su calidad de vida mientras esperan la consulta.
Este acompañamiento no solo tiene un carácter informativo, sino que empodera al paciente. Cuando alguien comprende mejor su trastorno y sabe cómo enfrentarlo, suele ser más constante con la medicación y la terapia, se siente menos estigmatizado y percibe que tiene cierto control sobre su recuperación.
4. Intervención en situaciones de crisis
Muchos trastornos mentales cursan con episodios puntales de crisis. En la ansiedad, por ejemplo, son relativamente habituales los ataques de pánico mientras que en la depresión pueden aparecer ideas suicidas o síndrome presuicidal. Estas situaciones pueden ser intensas y desbordantes, no solo para la persona que las vive, sino también para su entorno, y a menudo representan un riesgo vital.
Las enfermeras especializadas en salud mental están preparadas para intervenir de manera inmediata, evaluando la gravedad de la situación y ofreciendo el cuidado necesario para estabilizar al paciente. Su presencia puede marcar la diferencia entre una crisis aguda y otra que se maneja de forma segura y controlada.
Parte de su labor también consiste en activar planes de emergencia, diseñados para proteger tanto al paciente como a quienes le rodean. Pueden identificar señales de riesgo, establecer medidas de seguridad y coordinar recursos adicionales si es necesario. Gracias a su intervención, la PMHNP no solo contiene la situación, sino que también aporta una sensación de seguridad y acompañamiento, lo cual es esencial cuando la ansiedad, la confusión o la desesperación resultan abrumadoras.
5. Apoyo en la rehabilitación y reinserción social
La depresión y la ansiedad no solo afectan el ánimo, también pueden dificultar actividades cotidianas como salir a trabajar, socializar o incluso realizar tareas básicas en casa. Muchas personas sienten que se quedan atrás y necesitan un apoyo estructurado para retomar el día a día.
Las enfermeras psiquiátricas juegan un papel clave en este proceso ya que pueden desarrollar planes de cuidado personalizados que incluyen desde visitas domiciliarias hasta acompañamiento en actividades sociales o laborales, para que el paciente vaya recuperando la confianza en sí mismo y se sienta más seguro en su entorno.
También orientan sobre los recursos disponibles en la comunidad, desde talleres hasta servicios de rehabilitación, y ayudan a desarrollar habilidades sociales y emocionales que faciliten relaciones más saludables. Gracias a esta intervención, la persona no solo se siente acompañada, sino que poco a poco recupera autonomía y herramientas para manejar su ansiedad o depresión en la vida diaria.
En un entorno donde millones de personas sufren ansiedad o depresión y donde el acceso a especialistas sigue siendo limitado, la labor de estos profesionales, generalmente poco conocidos, se vuelve imprescindible. Por supuesto, las enfermeras especializadas en salud mental no sustituyen a psiquiatras o psicólogos, sino que complementan su trabajo, ampliando la red de atención y acercando el tratamiento a quienes más lo necesitan.
Referencias:
(2025) APA Fact Sheet Series on Psychologist Supply and Demand Projections 2015-2030: Geographic Patterns in Supply and Demand. In: APA.
Stringer, H. (2023) Providers predict longer wait times for mental health services. Here’s who it impacts most. APA; 54(3): 28.
Stringer, H. (2024) Mental health care is in high demand. Psychologists are leveraging tech and peers to meet the need. APA; 55(1): 60.
Weiner, S. (2022) A growing psychiatrist shortage and an enormous demand for mental health services. In: AAMC.
Semahegn, A. et. Al. (2020) Psychotropic medication non-adherence and its associated factors among patients with major psychiatric disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Syst Rev; 16;9(1): 17.
Professor Jiang Xueqin on how this war is likely to go and what happens to the world.
Professor Jiang is the host of the YouTube channel @PredictiveHistory. He studies game theory, historical patterns, and eschatology to connect the past, explain the present, and predict the future.
Chapters: 0:00 How Will the Iran War Be Resolved? 7:33 The 3 Major Trends We Will See Due to This War 11:28 Will Japan Become a Nuclear-Armed Power? 16:06 The Future of South Korea 20:12 The Energy Crisis 25:23 The Future of the GCC and Iran 29:57 The Greater Israel Project 35:11 How US Ground Troops Will Change the War 36:46 Prof. Xueqin’s Advice to Donald Trump 38:49 Is It Possible for the US to Get Israel Under Control? 45:03 What Role Does Trump Play in All This? 48:21 The Future of North America 54:59 Are We Seeing the End of Europe? 1:00:58 How Many Americans Truly Understand What’s Happening in the World? 1:03:50 The Effort to Destroy Western Civilization
Imagine that you could tell when someone is manipulating you?
To help teach you how to do that, I’m joined today by Chase Hughes, a behavioural expert who’s trained military and intelligence agencies, and his last appearance on this show has been watched over 5 million times.
Chase has spent years studying human behaviour at a level most people never see. His work focuses on how influence actually works and how trust is built, and how easily both can be used against you.
That’s a big part of why I wanted him back.
The first time he came on this show, the response was huge. I had messages from people all over the world saying it completely changed how they see relationships and even themselves.
What Chase does is take something that feels invisible and make it visible. The signals people give off and the ways we’re influenced without realising it.
In this episode, we cover:
- How do people test your boundaries without you noticing? - What makes someone easier to influence than others? - How do interrogators get people to reveal more than they intend to? - Why do some conversations leave you feeling off without knowing why? - What are the early signs that someone is trying to control the interaction?
There are moments in this conversation where I start to realise how much of what we do happens automatically.
And how easy it is for someone who understands that to influence the outcome.
If you want to better understand influence and how human behaviour actually works, this episode is worth your time.
En España se ha instalado desde hace tiempo una peligrosa tendencia política: cuando los precios suben, la reacción automática de algunos partidos es buscar un culpable empresarial al que castigar con nuevos impuestos. La última propuesta de Sumar sigue ese patrón: imponer un gravamen específico a los supermercados para compensar lo que consideran una «subida injustificada» de los precios de los alimentos y financiar así una rebaja del IVA en determinados productos, en un diagnóstico equivocado de cómo funciona la economía, que conduce, inevitablemente, a resultados contrarios a los que promete.
El primer problema es conceptual. La subida de los precios de los alimentos no se explica por una supuesta conspiración de los súper ni por un aumento extraordinario de sus márgenes. La inflación alimentaria responde, sobre todo, a factores mucho más amplios: el incremento de los costes energéticos, el encarecimiento de los fertilizantes, las disrupciones logísticas internacionales y, en general, el fuerte aumento de costes en toda la cadena de producción.
Los súper son el último eslabón de esa cadena. Su margen comercial suele ser relativamente reducido y se mueve en un sector extraordinariamente competitivo. En España operan grandes cadenas nacionales e internacionales, supermercados regionales y una extensa red de comercio minorista. Pensar que todos ellos pueden subir precios de manera arbitraria y coordinada ignora una realidad básica: en un mercado competitivo, quien sube precios injustificadamente pierde clientes.
En economía, existe una idea elemental que conviene recordar: los impuestos o se repercuten o se asumen vía disminución del margen. En el caso de los supermercados, la capacidad de absorber un nuevo impuesto es muy limitada. Sus márgenes son estrechos y su negocio se basa en rotaciones elevadas y precios ajustados. Si el Gobierno decide imponerles un gravamen adicional, lo más probable es que una parte significativa de ese coste termine trasladándose a los precios finales. El resultado sería exactamente el contrario al que se pretende: precios más altos.
Además, la propia lógica de la propuesta revela una contradicción evidente. Se plantea gravar a los supermercados para poder bajar el IVA de algunos alimentos. Es decir, se crea un impuesto para financiar la reducción de otro. Pero si el nuevo impuesto encarece los costes de distribución, terminará presionando al alza los precios de esos mismos productos cuyo IVA se pretende rebajar, con lo que al ser la base mayor el impuesto final pagado puede ser incluso más alto.
Este tipo de intervenciones responden a una visión profundamente equivocada del funcionamiento del mercado. Se parte de la idea de que el Gobierno puede intervenir selectivamente en determinados sectores para corregir precios que considera excesivos. Sin embargo, cada intervención introduce nuevas distorsiones que generan a su vez efectos secundarios imprevistos.
Gravar a los supermercados no sólo afecta a los precios. También reduce los incentivos a invertir, modernizar instalaciones o expandir la red comercial. A largo plazo, eso implica menor eficiencia en la distribución y menores economías de escala, lo que vuelve a traducirse en precios más elevados. La historia económica muestra que cuando los gobiernos intentan manipular los precios mediante impuestos o regulaciones sectoriales, lo que consiguen es alterar las señales del mercado y deteriorar el funcionamiento del sistema económico.
Si el objetivo real fuera aliviar el coste de la cesta de la compra, el camino es mucho más sencillo y mucho más eficaz: reducir impuestos de manera generalizada. España soporta una carga fiscal elevada en numerosos ámbitos que afectan directamente a los costes de producción y distribución. Energía, transporte, cotizaciones sociales o fiscalidad empresarial son elementos que terminan incorporándose al precio final de los productos. Cada aumento impositivo en esos ámbitos acaba repercutiendo, directa o indirectamente, sobre los consumidores.
Por eso, la forma más efectiva de aumentar el poder adquisitivo de los ciudadanos no consiste en diseñar impuestos sectoriales ni en buscar culpables empresariales, sino en reducir la carga fiscal y permitir que la economía funcione con menos interferencias políticas.
Los supermercados no son el problema, sino que son, de hecho, parte de la solución: gracias a la competencia y a la eficiencia logística han logrado mantener precios relativamente contenidos en comparación con otros países europeos. Convertirlos ahora en objetivo fiscal no sólo es injusto desde el punto de vista económico, sino también contraproducente para los propios consumidores.
Al final, las leyes económicas siguen funcionando aunque el legislador decida ignorarlas sistemáticamente. Y cuando se encarecen artificialmente los costes de quienes distribuyen alimentos, lo que termina encareciéndose es la cesta de la compra de todos los ciudadanos.
Irán denunció este sábado un ataque estadounidense-israelí contra el complejo de enriquecimiento de uranio de Natanz, sin que de momento haya constancia de una fuga de material radiactivo.
"El complejo de enriquecimiento Shahid Ahmadi Roshan de Natanz fue atacado esta mañana", informó la Organización de Energía Atómica de Irán (OEAI) en un comunicado recogido por la agencia IRNA.
La organización aseguró que, tras la realización de evaluaciones técnicas y especializadas en el área del complejo, no se ha detectado la liberación de materiales radiactivos.
"No hay constancia de ninguna fuga de materiales radiactivos en este complejo y no existe ningún peligro para los residentes de las zonas cercanas a este sitio", indicó el texto.
La OEAI iraní denunció que esta acción "es contraria a las leyes y compromisos internacionales, incluido el Tratado de No Proliferación (TNP)", así como a otras normativas relacionadas con la seguridad nuclear.
Consultadas por EFE en Jerusalén, las fuerzas armadas israelíes dijeron "no estar al tanto de un ataque", si bien no dieron más detalles sobre si el bombardeo corrió a cargo únicamente de Estados Unidos.
Las instalaciones de Natanz ya habían sido alcanzadas también en el cuarto día de la guerra que Israel y Estados Unidos lanzaron contra Irán el 28 de febrero.
Sin embargo, en aquella ocasión no fue golpeada la planta de enriquecimiento de combustible (FEP), como sí ha ocurrido este sábado, y como sucedió en la guerra de 12 días en junio pasado, cuando también fueron atacadas las plantas de Fordo e Isfahán.
