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balance it with outcomes-based training,” said Dempsey. “So the task might be to evacuate a casualty. In the past we might do that with a PowerPoint in a classroom and then take the kids out and demonstrate it in the field. Now we start in the field because we not only want to develop the proficiency [in handling] of the task but we want to develop trust, we want trust to be one of the outcomes. We also have peerto-peer instruction. Before, the drill sergeant was God. If he said it, it was to be believed. And if he didn’t, it wasn’t important. Now the sergeants are alive to the idea that there are young men and women in the ranks who have leadership skills. Now they nurture them. They will tell some of the basic trainees, ‘You are responsible for this task: Here is an iPhone with an app on it. You learn about it and collaborate on it, and on Friday you teach the class.’ We find that the students are more attentive to their peers than to us. It requires a soldier not only to master the skill he is teaching but to be able to add value by teaching it to his peers.”

The bottom line: “Collaboration is important on the battlefield and trust is the cement of collaboration,” said Dempsey. “And trust is the prerequisite for creativity. You will never be creative if you think that what you have to say will be discounted. So creativity cannot happen without trust, communication cannot happen without trust, and collaboration cannot happen without trust. It is the essential driver. And that is why you build authority now from the bottom up and not the top down.”

Not so long ago, Dempsey explained, a junior officer would get the intelligence and information from above and then execute on the basis of that information. No one held that officer accountable for understanding or contributing significantly to higher headquarters’ understanding. “Now, in the kind of environments in which we find ourselves, the more important information comes from the bottom up, not the top down,” he said. That means lower-ranking personnel are as responsible for creating and understanding the context in which they are operating as the most senior leader on the field. “We are issuing iPhones to basic trainees so that they can pull down applications and collaborate on coursework,” said Dempsey. “I like to think of us as getting more and more adaptable—learning from what we experience as fast as possible and reacting to it. We have to do that fast and smart … I want this [U.S. Army] to be an adaptable learning organization.”

Dempsey’s former colleague in Iraq, General Stanley McChrystal, witnessed this evolution in the battlefield at the very cutting edge when he commanded the Special Forces operations in Iraq that fought an underground war with al-Qaeda and Baathist elements and helped the surge succeed. They fought that war with a combination of unorthodox, innovative methods and modern technologies. Here is how McChrystal described his evolution to us:

“My grandfather was a soldier. My father was a soldier. From the time my grandfather, at the end of World War I, went from lieutenant to colonel, there was a change in technology. But it was not so fast or so great that his experience did not provide him with a body of expertise that made him legitimate and credible with his men. The reality today is that when a general officer speaks to a captain, that general officer has almost never used any of the communications systems, intelligence assets, or weapons systems that the captain has. So when the general or colonel goes down there and tries to be the leader and the captain looks at him, [that captain knows] that this guy has never done the job he is doing, nothing close. So the reality is: How does the leader retain his legitimacy in his big organization? What is the basis for his credibility? Is it his good looks? This is a really big deal. Things go so fast now it is very difficult for people to be experts and still be leading.”

One way to do both is to be more of an orchestrator and inspirer than a traditional hard-charging, follow-me-up-the-hill commander.