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1% Better David Marquet – Quick Links

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Key Takeaways

• Shift from Commanding to Enabling: David Marquet’s leadership style evolved when he realized that traditional command-and-control methods hindered team performance. By empowering his crew to make decisions, he transformed the USS Santa Fe from a low-performing submarine into one of the best in the fleet.
• Stop Giving Orders, Start Trusting Your Team: Marquet discovered that giving orders often leads to dependency and reduced ownership. Instead, he encouraged his crew to tell him their intended actions, creating a culture of accountability and independent thinking.
• Leadership is About Creating Thinkers, Not Followers: Marquet emphasizes the importance of shifting leadership from telling people what to do to fostering an environment where everyone thinks critically and contributes. This approach promotes innovation and engagement.
• The Power of Language in Leadership: Marquet highlights how language shapes team dynamics and culture. Replacing divisive terms like “they” with inclusive ones like “we” helped unite his crew and foster a stronger sense of shared mission and responsibility.
• Empowerment Requires Accountability: While empowering teams is essential, clear accountability remains crucial. Marquet underscores that effective leadership is about balancing trust with responsibility, ensuring that individuals are accountable for their decisions while feeling supported to make them.

1% Better David Marquet – Transcript

[00:00:10.04] – Craig
Hello, I’m Craig Thielen, and this is the 1% Better Podcast. Today, I’m honored to speak with David Marquet, a retired United States Navy Captain. In 1999, David was unexpectedly assigned to command the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered attack submarine that was struggling with low performance and morale. By implementing his leadership approach and techniques, it empowered his crew to take control, make decisions, and it transformed the Santa Fe from one of the worst performing submarines in the fleet to one of the best. After retiring in 2009, David became a sought-after leadership consultant and speaker, and he is the best-selling author of Turn the Ship Around and the Leadership is Language books. So David, welcome to 1% Better.

[00:00:58.11] – David
Thanks Craig for having me on show. Welcome, all listeners.

[00:01:02.06] – Craig
Yes. So well, your story is the focus here. It’s the focus of your book, and it’s a fascinating story. I’ve got lots of questions for you. It’s been a very influential story and legendary in some circles that we work in, helping organizations drive culture change and using techniques like agility. It’s just been a really great story. So let’s just start with that. You tell it in your words, what led up to it and how did it unfold?

[00:01:35.08] – David
I was this geeky introverted kid who in high school, I did things like computer club. Of course, the computer was as big as a refrigerator at that time…. Math team, chess club, that stuff. But I grew up in the ’70s, and it was a tough time for the United States, and I wanted to do my part. I was supposed to be a scientist like my dad. But I went home and told my mom, hang on, I want to join the submarines. I want to join the military, in particular, the submarines, because why? Submarines hide from people. I mean, that’s what they do. At the time, it was just the coolest thing. Submarines were the ones who were really taking it to the Soviet Union and the ones who were mixing it up, up close. I’d read what the Submarine Force had done during World War II, which was, of course, amazing and historic.

[00:02:29.08] – Craig
Not to mention we had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was in there, and there were submarines floating all over, right?

[00:02:36.05] – David
Yeah, could have been, possibly. Who knows? Anyway, we’re a secretive lot, as you know. I got appointed to the Naval Academy, and I showed up there, and they tell me, they hand me this book, and it says, Leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others. This is the exact quote, Directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others. The dirty secret is I like that. That appealed to me because I viewed myself as one of the people directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others because I was going to be an officer. Of course, it meant that my bosses were going to attempt to direct my thoughts, plans, and actions. Of course. I found that somewhat frustrating and stultifying. But you play the game for the organization that you’re in, and I would go back to really controlling my team. Leadership in this domain requires two things. One, generally being right, and two, getting your team to do what you want them to do.

Now, it’s fundamentally coercion because the people who are choosing what to do are not the people who are doing what to do. And so A has to control B. And we don’t use the word coerce because we don’t want to be truly honest about it. So we’ll say, well, we inspire them or we make a thing because their idea. But the bottom line is we’re not letting we, if we’re in the leadership cast, are not letting them in the doing cast choose what to do. We pat ourselves on the back and we say, oh, well, I’ll decide what to do. And you small thinking people are going to get the opportunity to decide how to do it. And look, how enlightened am I as a leader? Well, I was really good at this. I was comfortable doing it. My teams, it just so happened that I kept going to broken teams and making them better. When I left, the teams went back to where were. It was simply more proof of what a great leader I was. The Navy selected me and said, Hey, you’re going to be a submarine commander. You’re so good at telling people what to do.

I studied for 12 months to go to one submarine. At the very last minute, they sent me to a different submarine day. Because that submarine, the USS Santa Fe, had two problems: poor morale, poor performance, and the captain quit a year early. Now they have a submarine, no captain. I had just finished school. They sent me this… they said, You got two weeks, you’re going to go to Santa Fe. The problem was Santa Fe was a different ship, different kind of ship, different class of submarine, a different reactor, different missile tubes, or had missile tubes which I never had, never studied for. It was one of the newest ships. When I show up, I start giving orders, and I make a mistake. A very fundamental order is the very first exercise. I have two weeks to take over. We go to sea, submerge the ship, reactor scram. Now, remember, I’m there to fix these guys. I’m there to implement this… I’m going to tell you what to do, and you’re going to gradually get better, and then maybe perhaps morale will improve. That’s the sequence. A, improve performance, B, morale is going to improve. That’s the thesis.

I made this It was a meaning… It was a trivial mistake because nothing happened. I basically suggested to the officer we go to second gear on the electric backup motor, which there is none on this class of submarine. It’s just a one-speed motor. So nothing really happened. But the fact that he ordered it based on my suggestion, and then when I asked him afterwards, Hey, did you know that?… He said, Yes, sir, I did. It rocked me back on my heels because all my strategies for leadership were about one of those two things, either making good decisions or getting the team to do it. What happens is when you tell someone what to do, in my mind, the way I picture it now is I’m giving them a piece of paper, a chit, and says, Don’t bother thinking. I’ll do the thinking for you. It’s this exemption from thinking that wipes out most organizations. Because we’re not involved in the decision-making process, we don’t need to think, and we also don’t have any ownership. We can always claim later, Well, I knew it was a stupid idea, but I was told to do it. When you look at Boeing launching 737 Max, when you look at Volkswagen and the Dieselgate, when you look at Wells Fargo getting fined, several hundred million for making fake accounts, and then getting fined again, two billion because they didn’t really solve the problem the first time around. Over and over and over again, it’s the same pattern. Pattern number one is we have these leaders who think they can achieve great things simply by prognosticating on them. Oh, we’re going to be the number one automaker in the world. When the laws of physics, really, in nature, really are in charge, but they think that their blabber is in charge, which is not, of course. Then number two is it’s a highly controlled environment. All these companies, it was very command and control. The leaders all had big egos and big tempers and wanted to be followed. What they wanted was compliance, and we didn’t get thinking throughout the whole organization. What I had to do was stop giving orders.

It’s really hard to find a movie or a book where the top person doesn’t give orders. I don’t care if it’s a gang leader, is the military leader, the captain of the unit, it’s the CEO, it doesn’t matter. To make a good movie, we have to have a focus of attention, and that tends to be the leader who’s out there making these decisions. Typically, it starts with a bad decision or something we’ve inherited, which we have to fix, even though we made it bad ourselves, but then we pat ourselves on the back for fixing problems we ourselves created. In anyway, so that’s the typical thing. It’s very hard to imagine, I gave no orders. Now, the way you do this is through language. I would tell my team, Hey, You guys come to me and tell me what you intend to do. Don’t ask permission…

[00:09:18.10] – Craig
David, can I just ask you one question? Because this is a big moment where you got rushed into a very significant, complex leadership role. You weren’t prepared for, but yet you jump in and say, Well, I’ve been trained. I’ll do my best. In the early days, you make a small mistake, and then you have this epiphany. But what was it that told you, Hey, I’m going to throw all of the protocols of military, all the training, all the culture, all of the stuff that you’ve been taught and you’re part of this system and say, You know what? Right now, this is not going to work, and I’m going to go to plan B. How did you know what plan B and how did you have the wherewithal? That’s a big… Or was it in micro decisions? How did that evolve at that moment?

[00:10:09.05] – David
I think it was a pretty big decision, but it was always bubbling underneath the surface. There were two things. One is I only cared about being a submarine commander. I didn’t care about running the Navy. I mean, that would have been great. Sure. Someone handed that to me, but I was never bucking for that job. I just wanted to be the best submarine commander I could ever be. Number two is I had a snippet. I had one captain way early in my career who played this I intend game with me. It wasn’t so baked in throughout the whole ship, but at least with some of the officers, I saw it and I felt when he said, Well, just tell me what you intend to do and back it up with your rationale, I felt empowered. We got more done on my watch section, and I could see that people were starting to ask to come onto my watch team, and there was this excitement and energized culture that was built around this. But then I went to my next job and the window shut, and I was back to just doing what I was told and trying to tell other people what to do.

I hated telling people what to do. I didn’t like managing people. I thought it was this giant pain in the ass, and it was a big waste of time. I was like, Why? I would talk to my officers and say, Do you need me to manage you? And they would all say no. I said, Well, why are we doing all this? And we had all these artifacts, we had all these meetings, we had all these reports. We had this whole industry that was based on managing the people below you and reporting up. It’s managing down, reporting up. And I said, We’re going to flip that. You guys tell me, you report up and tell me what you intend to do, and I’ll manage my boss. I’ll spend that time managing my boss because I cleared my mind of all this clutter. Now, some people do need a little bit of external. They need to be told what to do, I guess. I think just from conditioning, not from human nature. Basically, what happens is you lean back as a leader.

Don’t lean in. That’s terrible advice. Lean back. Then see the team that leans into you. Four out of five of your people are going to lean into you. That’s great. You want them, keep them. If it’s a fifth person, either find a job for them where they can just do what they’re told or they’ll self-select out of the program. But if you could wave a wand and say, Well, who on my team is only doing what they’re doing because I’m making them do it? Versus, who on my team is really motivated and they’re committed to our mission and they’re self-driving. You could just paint pixie dust and have it show up. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Well, that’s what happens. Because if I just stop telling people what to do, the people will say, Oh, great. There’s an opportunity not to do anything. Great. Now you know. Get rid of them. Don’t promote them. Don’t recommend them for promotion. So us telling people what to do masks the truly energetic self-starting proactive people.

[00:13:17.08] – Craig
Right. Well, so it sounds like you had your own instincts, your own… This doesn’t make sense to me. You had some mentor, someone that talked to you about your intentions, and you had some success with it. So you were in such a difficult position here. Is that what you said, this is my only option is to go because you couldn’t manage it. You couldn’t tell me. You weren’t the expert of the ship. So was it some of it was like necessities, a mother of invention type of thing?

[00:13:53.03] – David
Yeah, exactly. Einstein’s got a quote where he said something like, If I had 24 hours to work on a problem. I’d spend 23 hours formulating this problem, and then one hour on the solution, something like that. When you’re in a culture where your job is to give orders and get people to do it. You do basically know. I mean, I would basically know most of what I needed the team to do because I was a smart guy. I was a math team guy. I would study really hard, and I I really would know the answer. Then when you make a mistake, the problem is you made a mistake. Here, because basically everything I said would have been a mistake, I had to reframe the problem. The problem was not I made a bad decision. The problem was I was the person making decisions. I saw how all my tools for leadership… It was like this. Someone just took a hammer and smashed me on the side of the head. I was seeing stars because I could see all my tools were based… If you had made a picture of an industrial-age factory with a foreman and a bunch of people on an assembly line, and you just laid that on top of the submarine or whatever company you want, Boeing, Twitter, whatever company you want to put on, that’s what the language is designed for. That’s what we teach people, and we think we’re really good. Then we really pat ourselves on the back because we say, Oh, I’m allowing you… Because we used to not allow them, the working people, the doing people, to actually have any thought process. They say, Oh, well, you can choose how. Aren’t we so enlightened and generous. It’s such crap because what we really need is to get everybody involved in what. What are we going to do? Because once the team decides what we’re going to do, they’re in it, they own it. I always had to be… I viewed myself as the goalie, and the ball was decision. The ball would become bouncing down the field, driven by the other team. I always wanted someone on my team to pick it up, turn around, and push it the other direction. But if it got by all the defenders, I was still the goalie, and I would catch the ball and prevent it from going in the goal. But I knew if I was the guy catching the ball, if I was the one making the decision, in other words, there was no one behind me. As much as I wanted and much as I would convince myself, Oh, my team will speak up. They’ll tell me if I’m wrong. I knew the odds were always against it. This is what these leaders get wrong. They think just by sitting there and saying, Oh, you have the power to speak up. Then every once in a while in a meeting, once every six months, someone does and say, I think you’re wrong. They go, Oh, look, all the evidence is on one side. They’re all telling me. But there’s no evidence. We don’t put a chalk mark. What I want is give people a chalk mark. Say, Put a mark by the door, conference room door, every time you didn’t speak up when you thought things were messed up.

[00:17:00.10] – Craig
It’ll be a thousand to one, right?

[00:17:02.01] – David
It’ll be a thousand to one, but we never see that. So we’re convinced the one is the data and not the thousand. So we need to stop telling people what to do and see what they think. Now, it’s always within bounds. And there were things, the orders that I did give in terms of structuring the language. And eventually, sometimes I would have to make a decision when it was at my level. But in general, my objective was not to make decisions and get the team to tell me what they intended to without contamination from what I thought.

[00:17:33.10] – Craig
Let’s just talk about that for a second. Then I want to get into some of the practical methods and tactics you used. But on this topic, there clearly is different stratums of decisions. If somebody gives you an assignment, the President of the United States says, We’re going to go to this theater and have more support, or We’re going to go do this operation, That’s a directive. That’s not for the people on the ship to debate. It’s not for you to even debate. It’s an order. That’s the highest level. Then from there, there’s multiple, multiple different levels that have to do with strategy and go to market. For companies, in your case, it’s military strategy, it’s training, what have you. But at some level, you say, Hey, I’m not going to tell you how to tune the engine or how to run this protocol. You guys are more educated and more knowledgeable. So how do you distinguish those different levels to engage the people differently? Because you can’t have one size fits all, right?

[00:18:41.05] – David
Yeah, that’s true. We’re all operating within a system where we have bounded decision making, and you need to know what the bounds are. And this is when you go to your boss and say, Hey, if you work at Tesla, it’s going to be something to do with cars and batteries and autonomous driving vehicles. You’re not going to go say, Oh, hey, I want to start a luxury resort in Bahamas. That’s not what we do here. Everyone’s bounded, the leader’s bounded by, one, the values and the ethics and the morals of the organization, just like everybody else is. They don’t get an exemption. I guess I agree with exactly what you’re saying. But if you can get the team to elevate their thinking. I think this issue of a decision is not a binary thing. It’s not like I decide or you decide. Not all the decisions are the same. I think that’s where you can make some money. At the top, you have why and what decisions. What should be done? Why are we doing it? Then lower our how decisions. There’s science behind this. Decisions that are further away in our mind, either spatially or temporarily, can be interpreted at a higher level.

So, even something as simple, what we all know from time. If I say, Hey, in a year, there’s a conference in Singapore, and it looks really interesting. I’m like, Well, why am I going there? Because it looks really interesting. What am I going to do? I choose to go to the conference. But then as we get close, now my thinking goes down. It’s like, Well, how do I get there? I need airplane, hotel, blah, blah, blah. Then the problems with how rise up. This is why you always have fewer people showing up in an event than sign up. It’s never the other way around. Because as you get closer, it’s those concrete things that rise up, which when we’re far, far away, we don’t really worry or think about. Oh, yeah, it’s 12 time zones away. But yeah, it’s an abstract thing. And then when I get closer. So when you invite the team, higher, you can use some tricks. First of all, have them not be them. So you say, Well, what would I do? Or what would the boss do? Or what would the board want us to… What would our replacements want us to do?

That’s number one. Number two is you could say something like, imagine there’s a team on the other side of the planet, and they have the same problem. What would you want them to do? Again, it strips away all the concrete detail that’s probably not that important. Then finally, you can advance it in time. You say, imagine you’re inhabiting your future self, so you’re now 20 years older and you’re looking back to today or six months. Six months is I would use for myself. It’s six months in the future, and I think back to today and what would say, what would Commander Marke from six months from now want Commander Marke to do today? What that does is that, again, it demotivates the, Oh, I just got to get through this today, because then six months, obviously, I’m going to have the same problem. I got to solve the same thing, versus I’m going to invest in thinking, in getting my team thinking, building a thinking factory, building a decision making factory where the output is quality decisions, and it shifts you more for the long term. These are good mental vehicles for getting out of the here and now and actually making better decisions.

So when you do, is you get the team up to that level. Not for a long time. It could be five minutes. It could be for half a day, whatever. You get the team up to that level, and then the team decides what, and then you launch into the how, you launch into the doing of the thing. When you’re in the doing of the thing, you cannot worry that it’s a good decision. Just be 100% in the doing, knowing that two weeks from now or whatever, we’re going to put a pause, we’re going to elevate ourselves again, we’re going to look left, we’re going to look right, and we’re going to adjust and go into it again. So it allows you, A, to make better, broader decisions, but it also allows you to be more focused and into the work when you’re into the work. So the work’s better and the decision is better.

[00:22:56.01] – Craig
So it’s not… I mean, what I hear you saying, it’s not just lip service saying, Oh, we’ll let you decide some things. We’ll take care of the hard stuff. It’s really just incorporating people into a fuller process, fuller input. It doesn’t mean that what they come up with, with the why and the what is going to be what’s decided. But they certainly have a say. They certainly can voice, and it’s encouraged, and it’s not just lip service, but it’s an authentic encouragement of, We want your thinking. We want your questions. We want your ideas. And then we get to, Okay, how are we going to do Let’s go. Is that fair?

[00:23:32.08] – David
For most people, as a captain, I was the final line of defense, so I tried to avoid all decisions. For everybody else in the middle, you’re going to have to make decisions, but you make decisions with the input of your team, as opposed to I make decisions thinking that I have the input of my team. For example, if I go in and say, Hey, we got to catch up with the Airbus. We have this new thing. It’s been approved by the FAA. It’s called 737 Max. What do you guys think? Well, of course, they’re We’re going to all say yes. Yeah, we got to push it to market. The problem is, so then we convince ourselves, Oh, the team had a chance to vote, and they’re all behind it. But by the structure of the conversation, we simply made it very hard for people to disagree with us, and then we didn’t get any disagreements. It’s just a lot of… There’s a lot of dishonesty that’s happening. Even when we say we want people to tell us we’re wrong. Our language programming still has us run the meeting in a way which makes that difficult because we do what we call talk first, then vote.

We’ll still discuss it, which means people can suss out where everyone’s position is, and then we vote, and it tends to be binary. What you want to do is the opposite. You need to vote first, which allows… The person who’s in extreme position one way or the other can vote. They’re We’re not going to get contaminated and either shut down the vote or modify it towards the mean or the group middle, which we know happens. Then the decision maker is going to have to make a decision. Individuals make decisions, not teams. We don’t let the team think, Oh, by the way, you’re voting on the decision. You’re voting to expose what your thinking is, and that’s going to be factored in by the decision maker. Because if you say, Oh, I got to make everybody happy, you’re never going to make a decision. You’re never going to make everybody happy. I think that’s the key.

[00:25:31.12] – Craig
I think that’s absolutely a key because it sounds like, and I think this is a big fear of a lot of executives, is that, okay, it sounds great to say, I’m going to be a servant leader and I’m going to empower people. But that evolves into in some companies, this consensus thinking or this anti-pattern that we all have to get along and make a decision. That could lead to some really bad decisions. But I like how you said that. It’s being very, very clear that the group is not making the decision. You are providing your best thinking, your challenging, your insights, your questions, concerns, ideas. But somebody has to be ultimately accountable for certain levels of decisions, right?

[00:26:17.04] – David
With clear accountability, you can’t have empowerment without clear accountability and clear ownership. So we say individuals make decisions, not teams. And sometimes people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? They’re like, Didn’t I just read this whole book about… Yeah. I was getting the engineer, the weapons officer, the operations officer to come to me with what they intended to do. Then I would rely on them to speak with their teams in a way that allowed their teams to really say what they thought, not contaminated by what they thought the right answer was. That’s the key. You ask, Why Why didn’t Musk and Tesla create the first early viable, not ugly electric vehicle? Why didn’t General Motors do it? They had more research. They were building cars. It would have been so much easier. Why? Because they had too many stakeholders. They didn’t have anyone being involved. Musk was only accountable to them. Then if you want to be on my journey with me, join my team. Now, there are limits to that because if you’re wrong, from a society, it’s great. I’d love to have a hundred of Elon Musk doing a hundred different things. If 85 of them don’t pan out, what do I care? We still are benefiting from the 15 to do. From a society point of view, that’s great. But from a longevity, a hundred-year basis point of view, it’s not good because eventually things change and the leader is wrong, and then the whole organization goes down the tube. So you see General Electric basically being celebrated and then collapsing as a result of Jack Welsh’s decision making.

[00:28:16.01] – Craig
Right. Yeah, it’s a great example. So let’s shift gears here a little bit. I just got your Leadership Nudge Newsletter, and you were in Strasberg, Germany, and you were talking about, and you have a book about this, you were talking about creating a unique language to drive culture change. I travel a lot as well, and I’m just so keenly aware of culture wherever I go. Sometimes it’s not just country culture, but subcultures. For example, if you go to Venice, it’s very clear that they are Venetians first, and they are Italian second, and they’re whatever else, third or fourth. So they’ve got this culture that goes way back before they were ever part of Italy, and they’ve kept that culture. And so you talk a lot about language driving that. So maybe just talk a little bit about some examples of how language drives you to command and control culture versus an empowerment culture or what have you.

[00:29:13.08] – David
Yeah. Italy is a pretty new invention. It wasn’t Italy before about 1860, it got unified. I was in Barcelona, and I apologized for not being able to speak Spanish. I said, I said, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Spanish. They said, Don’t worry, we don’t either. Because they speak Catalan there, and they’re very proud of it. The key is, to me, that the language drives the culture. Now, there may be some at some level, over a thousand years of history, culture drives the language. I think maybe the environment element of the industrial revolution has created a language which is fundamentally coercive because one group gets another group to do it. I’ll sit in meetings and I’ll get… so right, so blah, blah, blah, right, so blah, blah, right, and then right, and blah, blah, blah, right, and then right, and blah, blah, blah, right, and blah, blah, blah, right. Why does this person feel like they need to say right every 10 words or after they make a decision? I’ll ask them, say, Are you trying to get real reactions to what you’re saying, or do you just want me to nod my head in agreement?

They go, Oh, no, I really want to know what you think. We’ll say, Well, you saying right is a vehicle, it’s a mechanism for just mindless head nodding. We Good. Everyone happy. I hear it all the time. Does that make sense? Yeah, yes, boss. Drools coming off the side of my mouth because it’s just mindless head nodding. The problem isn’t that that’s what we really want to be. The problem is we actually do want people to speak up, but we’re programmed by this language where this mindless stuff comes out that makes it harder because it’s a coercive, fundamentally structurally coercive language. There’s so much baked into the language in terms of… Number one problem in my mind is this idea that we have two cast. We have the thinkers and the doers. We have the leaders and the followers. We have management and union. As soon as you start using these words, you’re separating people into cast, thinking cast, doing cast. We all have roles. We wear different uniforms. We wear different hard-colored hard hats. Some companies figured this out. You go to a new core steel company, and around 40 years ago, they had a particularly enlightened leader who put them on the map, and it changed it so everyone wears the same hard hat. Then they changed it. They made hard hats by role. So the safety people would have a different color hard hat. But a lot of construction companies I go to, it’s white for management and blue for workers. There’s white-collar, blue-collar mirrors. It’s like, why are you doing that? You’re just telling these people, Oh, you’re not in the thinking class. You’re not in the decision-making class. We are. There’s this cast system.

We go to Silicon Valley and we have an all-hands meeting. Why? Hands? Really? That’s not what your company’s wealth is being built based on people’s handwork. So that following the clock, we have a whole culture of we pay people by the hour, we feel the stress of a ticking clock. We have language that, again, mirrors this. And again, it’s from the production lines of the industrial revolution, where it was X units per hour, per minute. That’s how you measure production in manufacturing, and that’s the appropriate way to do it. But when it comes to decisions, the quality is really much different. The industrial revolution was about manufacturing, which benefits from reducing variability. Consistent, like the first assembly line we all know from school happens by making the same part as similar as possible over and over and over again.

But then we basically take that mold and put it on the people. That’s what we want. Now when we say, Oh, thinking, we understand thinking benefits from variability and diversity, yes, but the language we’re using is a reduced variability language. When I say, Right at the end of the meeting, it’s a reduced variability tactic. When I say, Hey, what do you guys think about this 737 Max? And there’s a discussion followed by, Okay, now let’s all vote. Are we going to launch it or not? Again, it’s a reduced variability structure because the conversation, if I were to vote twice and people say, Well, how strongly do you feel it’s ready? It has to be a non-binary vote. That’s the first thing. How ready is it for launch? Whatever the product is. Then we vote. Sometimes we hand 5-5. Sometimes we do 1-99 voting. But in any event, you’re going to get more variability than if you talk about it and they say, Okay, now let’s vote. You’re going to get a lot less variability because people are coalescing. They’re self-censoring their extreme ideas. Those are the things that make the magic. Ideo, the famous design firm out in Silicon Valley, when they really want lots of great ideas, they constrain three or four vectors but they leave the one vector unconstrained.

So one team, for example, isn’t worried about cost, or one team is only worried about safety and not worried about any of the other things, cost, manufacturability, or anything like that. So it’s Now I can really be extreme, and it’s in that integration of those extremes. None of those things we’re going to build, but it’s an understanding, well, what is the real boundary here? Because I think the boundary is here, but the is really way out here. This is what Musk figured out when it came to the electric vehicles. So that’s what you want to do.

[00:35:40.06] – Craig
Would you say that if you really want to drive culture change, that one, you need to have really clear intent, and two, what you were just talking about is you need to change your language to be more inclusive, more engaged, more authentic to drive some of that conversation. Are those the two things or what else would you add to that?

[00:36:05.11] – David
Well, yeah. Intent means you need to know. Here’s the activity we do with leaders of companies, one of the activities that we do. We’ll say, Hey, I want to fill in the following blank. We would like a culture that is more blank. What do they put in? We know all the words. Collaborative, thinking, engaged, ownership, inclusive, whatever. They say, Okay, great. Now pick one. As a team, they got to pick one. And they say, Now write a script. I want you to write a script for the office. Like your videotaping is a scene from the office. But I want a small group, five people sitting around a table discussing an issue or making a decision. And I want you to put the words in these people’s mouths so that anyone watching this little clip is going to say, Oh, my gosh, that team’s the most blank, inclusive, collaborative, whatever, engaged team I’ve ever seen. Why does this work? Number one is because, first of all, when we use a word, any of those words, the only thing I can guarantee is what you’re thinking, what I’m thinking are not exactly the same. They may be similar, but they’re not going to be the same.

When I say, Well, what does it mean to be inclusive? I got to put words in people’s mouths. Now all that friction is going to come out. Well, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean, okay, great. So that comes out. Number two is then you end up with the script that you can then practice. It’s the practicing of the script. I’ll give you an example. On the submarine, I got upset one day because people were referring they. They were saying they did this, they did that. They were talking to people in the submarine, and we’re only 145 people, and we all live within 200 feet of each other. So the fact that some people… For six months, we go away and we’re there for six months. So The fact that we could refer to each other as they, which, of course, means not in my tribe, not to be trusted, not to be collaborated with, was mind-blowing. Of course, I knew it, but it just struck me one day the number of times I heard it. They, officers enlisted, they, engineering, ops, whatever. There are all these microtribes. We outlawed the word, and we had to start using the word we.
I did give an order. I said, That word is outlawed. You can use they for the Pentagon and for naval headquarters. That was always a lot of fun. Say, Well, they made us do this. But on the submarine, it’s going to be we. It was the repeated use of we, which caused our brains to grow the connections that made it feel like. I say, Oh, Craig, instead of saying, Well, you’re on the marketing team, they’re on marketing, and we’re over here on production, it was like, We are in the bigger circle, we’re in the company, whatever. And then the feeling happens. So the action comes first and it drives the feeling, the mindset, not the other way around. There’s a lot of people making a lot of money trying to change people’s mindset because it’s going to be endless work because it’s not the way. Nothing will happen.

[00:39:17.12] – Craig
It’s interesting. What you just described is the same technique that the Miracle on Ice movie, the 1980 Miracle on Ice. And famously, the coach, there was all these superstar kids from all these different colleges, University of Minnesota, Boston. He found that they were having their little tribes. Here’s three or four guys from Boston. Here’s three or four from there. He basically called out language and saying, Who are you playing for? The front of your jersey or the back of your jersey? He had to call that out, and they had to say they’re playing for the front of the jersey, USA, not the back of their jersey, whatever, school or last name or whatever. It’s interesting because that was a very important point in the movie where we were either going to be a team and be all in together, or we’re just going to be a bunch of individuals. Now, maybe that was overplayed, maybe it was over-dramatized, I don’t know. But to drive the change of that team culture, it was about the language that they were using. It’s just an interesting correlation, so there must be something to that.

[00:40:27.05] – David
There is something to it. I love that. Herb Brooks goes in and he unexpectedly turns the thing around. I remember I was at the Naval Academy then, and the US, we were not in a good place. It just seemed like we were getting our butts kicked left, right, and everywhere. We had inflation, all these other problems. And then that thing happened. I remember we were watching the whole building, which was this building housing 4,000 students. It was just erupting. It was crazy. But you see that… I sat next to an NFL head coach on a flight, and he had his playbooks. He sat down in the air, sat down next to me, and he had this big duffle bag with these three big three and three-ring binders, and he pulled them out. I said, I don’t know who the guy was, but it turned out he was a famous Coach. I started talking to him and I was like, Well, I’m a leadership guy. I’m not trying to steal your plays, but can you show me? What does it look like? I expected to see how little arrows and block this guy and that thing.

He flips it open and the whole first binder is just words. I said, What’s all this about? He says, It’s all about language. We designed the language the team’s going to use, not just on the field, in the locker room, at practice, when they’re at home. I didn’t prime it. He just voluntarily said, It’s all about language.

[00:42:03.00] – Craig
I’ve never heard me say that language and culture were so directly related in terms of influencing one another. But it makes 100%… I played football in college. We had our team. Again, it’s all about teams, right? We had a language, and only the people on the team would know the language. Anyone else wouldn’t understand this language. Even in World War II, Hitler, he was consolidating the German language. There was something like 80 dialects of German pre-World War II, pre-Hitler. He basically said, No, there’s one version of the German language. That’s a way of coercion. That’s a way of influencing. That’s a way of getting control of the people. So it’s interesting how you see it in every aspect of life, really.

[00:42:56.03] – David
Yeah.

[00:42:57.04] – Craig
So let me shift gears here. I want to just really briefly talk about this little space that we’re very involved in. So we do a lot of work in management consulting, helping organizations change. One of the areas is this notion of business agility, which started from Agile in the software development world, and now it’s spread organizationally wide. It’s interesting when you talk about language, like Spotify famously created an entire new language around this agility, and everyone wanted to copy them, and they said, Don’t copy us. We built it for ourselves. We didn’t build it for anyone else. But everyone wanted to copy the Spotify model because they created such a unique language about how they work together. So anyways, one of the things that I see very often work with leadership teams is this isn’t just for, like you said, the doers, you guys go do this agile stuff and we’ll get better results, but we’re not going to change. There’s a direct conflict there. So we sit down with leadership team and say, Listen, this is about how you lead, as much as it’s about how they’re doing the work. And you have to really shift to more servant leadership, empowerment, etc. And they listen and nod him and say, No, this is very serious. This will not work if you don’t have alignment. One of the ways we do to break that ice is we show your video. You’re famous, one of the viral instructional video about just the intent-based leadership on the submarine. It’s a wonderful video. It only takes about 10 minutes to watch. Then we get a discussion afterwards. It’s interesting because when we first bring up this topic about the kind leadership that you’re going to employ is going to really dictate how people engage or don’t engage or believe you and change, really. We get a lot of resistance when we say, Well, what about you? Can you change to the same values and principles that you’re asking the people to live by? Can you live by those? We get a lot of resistance. We get a lot of defensiveness. Well, that doesn’t work for us. Someone has to make the big decisions, and they don’t understand this, and they don’t understand that. And then we show the video and say, Okay, now let’s discuss after you see one of the most intense places on Earth, a nuclear class submarine, big decisions, big ramifications… Can these kinds of techniques be deployed? And we do see people go, Wow, if it can be done there, why can’t maybe I rethink?

But my question for you is, why is it so hard? On some level, we get the industrial age, how companies were built, and some of that came from military. We went through two World Wars. We trained a lot of people, and they went back and built the industry. But to another degree, some of this is not obvious, but it’s very logical. If you want to get the most out of your people, your biggest asset, you want to engage them, you want to use their brains, not just have them follow you. That’s very logical. It’s a very fast-changing world where resources can go anywhere, especially in the US, Western world. They can get a job wherever they want to get a job. Then it’s almost obvious, this is the way you have to go if you want to compete in this digital world and compete for the best, smartest people, right? So why is it so hard for leaders to change and not… This is just an obvious path for us to go down, and we can’t compete in this old mindset.

[00:46:31.10] – David
Yeah, their brains are tricking them into thinking it’s better to be in control than to give control to the team. They think that that’s more resilient because they’re the ones making decisions, which is simply their brain searching for certainty and overbiasing them in the wrong direction. You’re more resilient. I got two stories. One is, so I was doing a speech in in the Netherlands several years ago, and there was a guy in the audience who was borderline disruptive, but I think he really took issue with the fact that I was in the military. He was Well, he was asking questions like, Well, if you got an order to shoot a missile or a nuclear missile, would you just do it? I said, Look, here’s a question. Who do you want running the nuclear submarines? People who are just going to blindly follow orders or people who are actually thinking, not just the captain, but at every level. Anyway, it got to quiet down.

I was doing a seminar the other day, and one of the things we really like to do is to get people to… We say we act our way to new thinking. This is, again, we use words, but we also use practice. I can explain soccer pretty easily. Kick the ball in the net. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good. Say we got to act our way to new thinking. I said, Okay, so we’re about to go on lunch break. When you’re on lunch break, here’s what I invite you to do. Pair up and have the other person get your lunch. It was like a lunch being served inside the conference room. The risk here was basically zero because the selection was already made by the people who ordered the food. There were like two or three different choices, maybe chicken or fish. I don’t even remember. Anyway, so I said, Hey, pair up, because I want you to practice. I want you to know what it feels like to give up control. In this case, we’re going to give up. They’re not going to say what they intend to do. They’re just going to go do it. We’re actually going to push it a little further than we normally like, but just for purposes of the exercise. So 30 people get up, they go, You know how many people did it? Zero. I was asking them. I didn’t want to poke them in the eye too much, but I was like, Well, let’s talk about this. Why didn’t no one do… Oh, well, I knew it would have happened. I’m really picky eater. Well, that’s part of the deal. How are you going to see… you know… I’m using my own, I’m using industrialized language. Anyway, they had all these reasons. I was a little disappointed because they weren’t really fully in. They were phoning it in at that point in my mind. But sometimes I do the same thing when I’m reading a book and it says, Okay, now take out a piece of paper, write some notes, close your eyes, imagine this. Do I do that? Probably not. I’m just going to imagine what it would be like imagining a thing. But these are actual physical things that we ask people to do. Go to dinner, don’t order, get the server to choose for you, or get one of someone else to choose for you. You got to know what it feels like, not imagine. Sometimes imagining works, but for this, no.

[00:50:07.05] – Craig
Do you think deep down, is it the neural pathways in our brain are just so entrenched in doing the same thing over and over? We have to literally bounce ourselves out to do something that we haven’t done before. You got to act, you got to practice, you got to envision it. Is it that? That’s the big thing, or is it that people just don’t want to fail?

[00:50:30.06] – David
It’s all that. I chide myself. I just say, DSD, do something different. Do something different. If I drive to the swimming pool one way every day, every once in a while, I’ll say, I’m just going to do something different. I’ll pick the alternate route. Is that life-changing? Probably not. But sometimes, say I go on a run, I tend to be a guy, when I go on my runs. I have it all planned out, how fast I’m going to go. I’m going to go left, right, left, on these trail. It’s parks with a bunch of trails near where I live here, which is very nice. I have the whole thing planned out. Then one day, part of it’s flooded. If it’s all overly rigidly planned out in my mind, and I’m making a left, and I’ve gone half a mile down the trail, and then it’s flooded, and I got to go back, in my head, I’m like, Oh, man, I jogged an extra half a mile or a mile, and now I got to figure… It’s all like I’m trashed, I’m useless, versus every once in a while, I say, I’m just going to go… I won’t even wear my watch. I’m just going to go and run around and just enjoy it for 90 minutes or so until I get tired or whatever, and I come back. I don’t know, maybe there’s 10% of them I do like that, or especially if I don’t know where I’m at, I’ll try. I’m going to run out and run back. I’m not going to look at my map. See if I can get home without looking at the map. And then you end up half a mile away and you say, Okay, now I’m lost. And then you look, I’m half a mile. Oh, my gosh, I went on an extra. I think you have to practice dealing, find ways in your personal life to practice dealing with these, I don’t know what you call them, but uncertainty and changes. Just being able to adapt to it and just say, Okay, just turn around and run the other way. It’s fine. What’s the big deal? I’m the 257th, millionth fastest person in the United States. What’s ever difference does it make?

[00:52:47.06] – Craig
I think that’s why your story… I think it is the neuropathways, and I think that we do get just in ruts, and our brain does that for efficiency. But I think the higher you go up in organizations, I think they’re more… They’ve built up all of this muscle memory of what’s worked for them and what hasn’t worked for them. Sometimes we say, the more you have invested in something, the harder it is to change. And so if you’re a leader, you got 30 years in, It’s like, I’m not going to change. This is what got me to be successful. This is who I am, et cetera. I think that is a big challenge, but I think that the world is changing very fast, quickly in a lot of different ways, and people are having to be forced to rethink, and why wouldn’t you be open to considering better ways? And I think your story does a wonderful job of saying, Hey, if you can do it in this environment, why can’t I do it running some company, making some widgets? Let’s get over our own ego and our own self and say, Hey, maybe I can consider other things.

So let me ask you this. You’ve been in this business of post-military for 15 plus or minus years here doing leadership. You do a lot of consulting. Obviously, you’ve got books that you’ve written. You’re working with a lot of companies, and you’re seeing what the corporate world is like, and the challenges are different. Some may be the same, but are you seeing society or corporate America shifting? Are we getting better? Are we moving on this? And what do you see as the future? What are the trends?

[00:54:27.05] – David
Yeah. So, I recognize it’s totally self-selecting. I mean, a company is not going to hire me if they don’t already think that this is the direction they need to go. And we always say, We never convince anyone to do this, but if you think this is the way you want to go, then we think we can help because we have a lot of experience now. We got a pretty constant stream of companies who want to change. I I think the trend is, here’s my grand theory of what’s happening in the world right now, which is, if you think about the doing work and the thinking work, the doing work is moving towards extinction because bots, robots, algorithms, and AI is taking it over more and more. They’re taking big, big chunks of that stuff. The people doing the doing work, sense this. They see it. Their bargaining power is getting reduced. They’re being replaced. They’re being downsized. They’re being replaced by whatever. They sense it. They know it’s happening. The value of that work is heading towards zero. There’s only going to be thinking work because machines are going to do this. They’re acting up because they don’t like it because they think they made this deal and the deal is being reneged on, which I think they’re partly right.

And so whether you’re on the extreme left or the extreme right, basically it’s being driven by the same thing. It’s this fear of irrelevance and not mattering. So what we need to do in business is we need to get everybody involved in thinking. If you’re part of the thinking class, which everyone should be because we like to think as human beings, we like to solve problems, then you’re probably a lot more secure. I try to really appreciate the fear behind the way some people protect their jobs. Why is this guy so afraid? Because for me, I’m like, Well, if this doesn’t work out, do something else. Because I always know I have my brain with me and I can figure things out. I don’t think we really appreciate someone who’s been conditioned. All you do is weld. And say, Oh, well, go learn AI. Well, a welder is not going to learn how to code an AI. It’s just not going to happen. And then we blame them. Well, you could have gone to a job retraining program, but you didn’t. So I think we need to really be careful and we really owe it to all humanity because we need everyone thinking, not just, oh, some annoyed whatever, gurus.
That’s terrible. That’d be terrible. We need all humanity thinking.

[00:57:23.12] – Craig
Or rely on AI. Ai is going to do our thinking. That doesn’t sound like a great future either.

[00:57:30.11] – David
Well, my experience with AI is, and I love it and I use it a lot, is it’s pretty good. It’s okay at the how. If I say, write an email or write an 800 word synopsis of this book, it can do that pretty well. But to say to me, Hey, this morning, I think what you really need to be doing is focus on this, this, this. It’s not so good to me at the what or the why, but it’s pretty good at the how. Now, maybe eventually, a hundred years from now, it’ll move up market. But yeah, so that’s my prognostication for whatever it’s worth.

[00:58:04.10] – Craig
Well, very good. We could talk forever on this topic. Certainly been interesting and enlightening, but we always finish every podcast with the same question, which is just putting aside all this leadership discussion in your books. If you just look back on your whole career, you’re sitting down with yourself when you were 18 or maybe your grandkids, you just want to give some piece of advice just about the life experience, what you’ve learned in life, what would some of that advice be?

[00:58:34.11] – David
I’d say the number one thing is seek feedback whenever possible. So this probably applies all the way along. So when you’re just starting out, I didn’t like feedback. In the Navy, we have this structured thing for feedback, which makes it unpleasant. I would have spent much more time, Hey, how did I show up? How did I lead that meeting? How well do you think I’d listen to you? Actually, the more specific, the better. Then just getting in this habit of always seeking feedback because no one cares about feedback if they’re not seeking it. You tell me after this podcast, Hey, that was pretty good, except for this one point. You know what, Craig? I really don’t care. I’ll pretend. I’ll put a good face on. Oh, thank you so much. I’ll incorporate that next time. That’s not what I’m thinking in my head. I’m like, F this guy. But if I’m like, Hey, I really am driven by improvement and by winning in the long run, I really need to know how does it feel, how does the shirt look, how was the light, whatever. Then you’re seeking feedback. Now it doesn’t hurt. There’s no sting because they’re helping you.

I think this is the one piece of advice that eyes no matter when and where you are. That feedback is always… It’s weird because I do swimming and I videotape myself and I send my videotapes into my coach who’s in Australia. The worst thing you could possibly say would be, Oh, your stroke’s perfect. There’s nothing we can do with it because that means I can’t get any faster. I’m screwed. The only way to get faster is to get younger now. I want him to say, The way your right hand’s entering, it’s a little bit twisted and it’s coming over. So you want to get it in line with your shoulder. So let’s do this drill. I want that. But when it comes to leadership and communication, for some reason, it’s like, I hope no one has a problem with this. Seek feedback is my one thing. Take that to the bank.

[01:00:53.01] – Craig
Yeah, it’s very applicable at every part of life. I always say there’s one thing that creates improvement, and that’s failure. You don’t get better, generally, by having all these successes. You get better by failing, learning from it, retrospecting, what can I do better? How’s my stroke? But I guess we could add this to it, feedback. Seeking feedback and learning from failure, that’s what creates improvement. So I like that. Yeah. Very good. Well, thanks again. Appreciate all your time and sharing your life story with us.

[01:01:27.13] – David
Cheers. Thanks. Thanks to the listeners.

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