Reclaiming Verbal Agility

Matt Perez (00:08):

Hi, my name is Matt Perez, and we are here in rHatchery.live with David Marquet and Jose Leal, my partner. And in case you're wondering, and I don't care if you're not wondering, this is a guayabera, it's a formal tap in very hot countries like Cuba, where I'm from… in the Philippines and all those things. David… I want to say a couple of things. I saw him back in 2009, I think it was in World Blue, a World Blue event. And he was talking about what he did and what we hadn't done, etcetera. And I thought it was, man, that's kind of. And then I bought the book and I read it twice. I never read a book twice. One because they're badly written or, you know, it is a boring story or whatever is I read it twice because he managed to do all he could possibly do and maybe more at inside his suffering, which, oh, he's got the book. And it's called Turn the Ship Around. And highly recommend it. We're going to talk about his new book, but highly recommend it because it, really blows your mind, and it blew my mind. It was an inspiration for me. So, David, now we'll give you time to explain what you do and all that stuff in which you're what's come out after the book, the consulting company, etcetera. And then we'll have more of a conversation. So, welcome.

David Marquet (02:08):

Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Matt and Jose for having me on your show. And welcome to all of the live participants. Thanks for sharing your incredibly valuable time with us. So, my story is I was really good at command-and-control leadership. I came up through the Navy. We were basically trained to be command and control, not basically, we were trained to be command and control leaders. We were trained to give orders and get people to do stuff. And this framework of leadership was leaders make decisions and get the team to execute them. And when I go around the world now, I find that this, like, it's such a default framework that people don't even question it. And it's a framework, which is, I don't think really well aligned to human nature, because humans are not good at just doing what they're told. No one likes to just do what they're told. Two-year-olds don't like to be, or do what they're told, humans like agency, humans like creativity, and humans like to think humans like all these things, which this leadership model doesn't give. Now it's great for the leader cause the leader gets all the juice. The leader gets the psychological benefit of saying, oh, yeah, I made the decision. Oh, oh. But, but I said, we did it, but I really knew it was my brain and their hands. And that's how it worked. Well, yeah, but it's not really human. Why do we have it? We have it because that's what worked in the industrial age. That's what worked. And we took humans and we put them on assembly lines where variability was an enemy, and we needed to make everything the same as possible. And it was this structure of language. We spend a lot of time on language. How'd I get this? Well, I was a math and science geek in high school. I was growing up in the Cold War. I wanted to do; my part was natural for me. Go in the submarines, submarines hide from people. That was perfect for me. <Laugh>. And I was a big introvert way over here on the introvert scale. And I was good. I was a good submariner, and I knew my job. And I was good at the Navy's leadership model of telling people what to do. Now, I didn't always feel comfortable because when I got told what to do, it was sort of like I chafed and I felt, well, but there's more. And oh, but I have a question. And why are we doing that same old way? And I could see a better way. Oh, no one really cared, what I thought. In any event, I had an opportunity to change, and rewrite the script. I was so good at telling people what to do. The Navy promoted me. They made me a submarine commander and went to school for 12 months to learn the ship. I thought very last minute. I didn't go to that ship, went to a different ship, the US of Santa Fe, because the captain there quit early.

Jose Leal (05:17):

I wanted to jump in there if I may. I just want to ask you a couple of questions about your career before you became a commander.

David Marquet (05:23):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jose Leal (05:24):

How long did that take you and what kind of roles did you have? And did you feel a difference between the amount of autonomy you had in those roles?

David Marquet (05:34):

So, the Navy's relatively structured, and the way it works is you alternate between going, you're physically on a submarine, taking the ship out to sea, repairing it when it comes back to port. And then you go to a staff job. So, it's like three years on the submarine, two years on the staff job, three on the submarine, two on staff, you alternate and you're moving up the rungs of the submarine. So you start out, you're a division officer, then you become a department head, and then the second in command, then finally the, the, the captain. So, your responsibility is growing as you move up this very sort of linear progression. And I will tell you that when I wasn't the captain, I tried to do things about empowering my team and I failed. It was a miserable failure. And part, like, I can blame external situations, like my boss didn't support me, yada, yada, yada. But a big part of the problem was me. I didn't really understand the ecosystem of quote, empowerment. And even when I got to be the captain, where, where I could basically sort of take on whatever risk I wanted in terms of my own personal career in terms of empowering my team, I, we, the phrase we might use is, like, I ran ahead of my headlights because I gave too much power away. I thought as long as I kept giving power away, the team, all, the rest of the ecosystem would respond in an adaptive way and people would make good decisions with the power that I was giving them. And I learned that giving power away has limits to it. And the two things, the two input variables, I think to these limits are one, what someone's technical competence is. So this makes total sense. And basically, no one needs to do need to be explained to them. So, if you're like a doctor, you've gone on this medical training, you can make decisions about how to do the operation, which say, for example, someone who hasn't gone to medical school can't make because you have the technical knowledge. The same thing with operating a nuclear submarine, running an investment bank, a hedge fund writing code, whatever. It's, that's, that's pillar number one. Pillar number two, however, is understanding what we're trying to do or why our purpose, what our intent is, what are we, what are we, what's our intent here? And so, what we, what I learned was that when you give the team intent, Hey guys, here's the situation. Here's what, here's, here's what success looks like. Now you come back to me, in five minutes or in a day or in five weeks, and tell me how you tend to achieve that. Now what you're doing is you're invoking you get thinking. One of the biggest things I learned is as soon as you hand a ticket to someone and say, here, this is what I want you to do, it comes with a get out of jail. You don't need to think, and you don't need to take responsibility, right? As soon as we start telling people what to do, we, try and hold them quote accountable after the fact. But it feels false. There are a lot of people who ask me about accountability. He says accountability is sort of like this. Okay, I'm going to tell you what to do. I'm going to tell you the team you have to work with. I'm going to tell you the deadline. I'm going to tell you what, the quality standards are, and then I'm going to quote, hold you accountable for not doing it. Well, that's. Like, I didn't get to make any decisions. So how you can try and hold me accountable, but you're the one who controls everything? Once you give people control, you don't need to hold them accountable. They hold themselves accountable because they're actually making the decisions. So, I learned on the submarine the power language. And for us, the word intent was super powerful. I would try and give intent instead of instructions, although when I got stressed out, I fell back in old habits, and I would just tell 'em what to do. And I then I would regret it. And then they would give me their intentions. They would not ask permission, but they would also not just do it. And when, when you hear an organization say, well, I'd rather get forgiveness than permission, that's because we say we're not playing with a full deck. We're not playing with the intent card. That gets you the best of both thinking ownership initiative, but also a sense of control. Because when someone, one of the officers comes to me and says, Hey, tomorrow I intend to change the torpedo load out. I got to ask questions and I got to say no. But all the initiative and the thinking come from them. But they can only say that they understand that tomorrow our mission is going to change from what we're doing now to something different that's going to require a different way of optimizing the torpedo tubes.

Jose Leal (10:32):

That's awesome. Thank you, for that because that you.

Matt Perez (10:36):

Your boat went from being the worst in the, in the Navy to being the best or something like that.

David Marquet (10:42):

Yeah. So, we got, when, the reason I went to the submarine that wasn't trained for was because the previous captain quit. Because he was doing so badly. We had less than 10% of the sailors signing up to stay in the Navy over the next 12 months. A hundred percent did every, every, every sailor 33 out of 33 had a chance to stay in the Navy said yes. And we got evaluated, but the highest score in the history of the Navy for operating the submarine. But the same people who were pretty broken before that. And we didn't fire anybody. And the reason was because we moved the needle on thinking, we changed the way we talked to each other. So that thinking became easier to express. And I always had this picture in my head of like, it was a, like a gas needle. Like what percent of the total organization, we have a hundred thirty-five, a hundred forty people. What percent of the brain power of 140 people times a hundred percent of their brain are we using right now? And most of the time I, when I got there, I, it was like 2% literally because I felt, oh, I'm giving a hundred percent. Cause I'm the boss. I'm doing all the thinking; I'm making all the decisions. Well, if you're not making decisions, you're not using your brain that much. Now we, we would try, you know, we would happily talk ourselves into saying, oh, but look at all this. Like, people doing m Yeah. But if you're not the final signature on an approval form, if you're not the final authority making a decision, you're not using a hundred percent of your brain, I submit. You just, you can phone it in because you're not you really don't have the accountability. So once you do that, the needle starts to move. Now people are using their brains. And then we did a bunch of other things. We changed the way we asked questions. For example, , we got rid of some negative language and industrial-age language. So here, here's some quick examples. Well, first of all, we, they, you get rid of the word. They, high-performing teams, don't use the word, they, they didn't change the batteries. Well, who's they? Oh, that guy is right over there. No, we didn't change the batteries. That's how high-performing teams talk, number one. Number two, people say, I hear this all the time, A leader will say, CEO gets up and says, so we got this new product, it's called 737 max. He's going to help us catch up with the airbus FAA's approval. So, we're going to go ahead and send it to market. Does that make sense? Number of mistakes, number one, talking first. Number two, expressing what you think. Number three, does that make sense? Why do we ask the question? It's binary and it's self-affirming. It induces head nodding, mindless agreement. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yes boss, greatest thing ever heard. It does not induce. Hey, no boss, I think you have your head up your butt. It makes no sense. I don't understand. So, we have to ask the question differently. We have to say what doesn't make sense. Or how could this be wrong? Don't, don't say what doesn't make sense to you because then you're basically implying the person's an idiot that, that, that's really not the way to go either. But like, what, what, what could be wrong? How could this picture be wrong if you go down this path? Cause You have to make it easier for people to speak up and say their mind, speak their minds. Otherwise, you're just great. You're right. You're right, you're right, you're right. Everything's great, great, great. Then you're wrong. And the company goes bankrupt, or people die.

Matt Perez (14:15):

You know, it makes sense to me that with this explanation you were a math and science geek when you were younger. And you, I mean, language is math or math is language or whatever. And science is a thing of if it doesn't work, try, you know, set up an experiment and try it again. And I may have read your book again, So, because it cast a different light on the whole thing. And that's, that's what you're doing. Cause I was going to ask you, so what made you so weird and so different and blah, blah, blah. I'm getting it. It is like, you've been carrying this for a long time and finally you get your chance to express it. Not through yourself, but through a bunch of people.

David Marquet (15:10):

Yeah, I think you're, you're exactly right. Matt and I personally hate the phrase quote soft skills because there is really, to me, nothing soft, about them and the language. And so, we, the, the, one of the things you can do with language since it's expressed, is you can measure it. So, I can measure, for example, I, I could scan the emails that a company sends, and I can measure how many times question marks are sent from subordinates to bosses. And I can measure how many times question marks are sent from bosses back to subordinates. And that tells us something. I just measuring things. We did research for this book, leadership is language. We were, we were looking for patterns of resilient versus fragile teams. And so along the lines of being a math major, we would take transcripts. People don't appreciate in my mind, don't appreciate the details of, and, and, and they'll just say, well give, gimme a summary of the meeting. Yeah, you're missing a lot. So, we would take the transcript of a meeting of a team that would make a mistake. Now, of course, they didn't know that they were going to make a mistake while they were in the meeting. They were just talking about a decision. Should we continue on course? Should we land the airplane? Should we launch the pro? These kinds of things. So, we're we were looking at things that we had transcripts of. And the first thing that we did with my team was, I just said, count the words <laugh>. I don't care. Long word, short word adjective. Now, whatever, I don't care. I just want to count the number of words people say. And then, so we lined up counting the number of words against the hierarchy. And you know, what was eerie when it came to the teams that made mistakes? Those two lines were identical. The most senior person said the greatest number of words. The second senior person said the second the greatest number of words all the way down. And so, if someone said one, if you said, here are five people in the meeting, this person said 1% of the words, I'd say, I predict that person's the most junior person in the meeting. And guess what? That'd be correct. So, if you want to make a more resilient team, what you need to do is level that share of voice. So, if you're the senior person, talk less and make it easier for the junior people to speak up more. Now, that seems pretty easy, but it runs against everything that you do. But it will induce, it will make you make better decisions. Why? It just, well, it makes sense. It's because you'll now know what everybody knows. You see what everybody sees, not just what a few loud people see and want to share. So that was the kind of stuff that we did. And I think language is super powerful because not only is it man, it's manifesting our internal beliefs, but by changing our language, we can change our internal beliefs. Yeah. Language rewires our brains, not the other way around…

Jose Leal (18:12):

Or the other way around. But it's a, it's a feedback loop, right?

David Marquet (18:17):

It's a recursive Yeah. Feedback loop. Yes, exactly right.

Jose Leal (18:21):

So, if I start speaking differently, I start thinking differently. If I start thinking differently, I can start speaking differently and it just keeps improving.

David Marquet (18:28):

Right, right. So we, so I, well, one of the fun thing things we like, our thing was no, they, on Santa Fe, we outlawed the word they, so you had to say the word we, anyway, it changes. Like, if you think someone is not in your tribe or not on your team, you call them they, but if you think they're in your tribe, you call them a, we, well, we did this. But if you start calling someone, you, your brain will then eventually say, well, I must be in my tribe because I, we're using the word we for that person. Therefore, the synapses will grow and make the connection so that it then feels like we, that's what happens.

Matt Perez (19:12):

Yeah. And the, the, the worst offender of all is the people that like to talk in terms of, I, I decided this, I I'm going through that. And what it really means is, y'all are going to do this. Y'all are going to do that. And t's poison. It really is poison.

David Marquet (19:32):

Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah. I'm, so with you. I think, like we say oh, so should we put the sign out front? Yeah, we should. And everyone just sits there. Well, if, if you mean, we then say we, but if you're not planning, going back to the garage and pick it up the sign and start to help carry it out front. Don't use the word we, you say you, you're going to, I need you to take the sign off. I, I, I just think all these things add the way I think about its friction, it's like grit in the machine. So now I have to spend some, it might be a really small amount, but some percent of my brain trying to figure out, now is that really we, or is that just the fake we, or is that the fake guy? And hey, it's a very competitive world. You're going to spend some, you're going to like to throw away parts, your brain power on stuff. You don't need to No. Be very specific, and precise. Be precise in the language.

Jose Leal (20:36):

So, is that what the book is about? The precision and the, you know, the title is reclaiming verbal agility. So what's, what's the?

David Marquet (20:46):

Yeah, so that's like a sub, sub-theme. The main theme is here's the number one main thing. You are not choosing your words. Your words were chosen for you by someone who designed a factory 100, 200 years ago and got people to talk a certain way. What was that? Their bosses. There are followers, there are white-collar, blue-collar leaders, followers, management workers, whatever it is. Okay. And that those words are embedded in your speech patterns, asking binary questions. Will that work? Is it safe? Right? We are good. All these things are manifestations of this industrial world, which is a fundamentally coercive management structure. Why? Because the people who make the decisions aren't doing the thing. The people doing the thing are not making the decisions. So, it's a world where one group decides what a different group is supposed to do in life that has to be coercive. Now, we don't use the word because we're not honest we'll say, oh no, we inspire people to do what I want them to do. Well, that's coercion. So we're not deliberate about it, we've just inherited that word. Now, we, I, I talk to leaders and I'll, I'll ask them a question. I'll say, hey, in your group so I'm working with an oil company, and I'll say, Hey, I want you to predict what the price of oil is going to be on December 31st this year. And I said, and you have 60 seconds, and the whole table has to agree. And I got like, say, five tables of five executives ready to go. And as soon as I say go, what happens? Someone who thinks they know the answer says, well, I think it's going to be this. And then other people say, well, no, my, you know, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. And then what happens, is the group ends up very close to that initial estimate. And if, that initial estimate was from the boss maybe exactly on it. And then I say, well, how come you ran the meeting that way? Like, well, what do you mean? Well, why did you do that? Where one person talked first, and then other people had to sort of pile on and change or agree. And who let that person talk first? Oh, they don't think about it. No, it is mindless. It's like, well, is there another way? Yeah, there's a much better way. We, we, we call it vote first than discussed. So, everyone takes a card and writes it down. Now five people simultaneously slide out a card. Now I have five real opinions, not five people just buttering up the boss. Anyway, there are lots of little things like this. So, these, these patterns of speech, which we just mindlessly do because we inherited from the industrial age, and people are not thinking about it, and they're not achieving what they want in life. They're not achieving cognitive variability.

Matt Perez (23:42):

What you call an industrial age or industrial practice or whatever is what we call, is part of what we call fiat. Fiat meaning because I said so. And it is a system that we live in. It's all around us. It, there's no there's no escaping it as it is. And a lot of people get close to the edge of it, but then they go, oh, that's the edge. Let me go the other way. And they don't, they don't ever confront that radical as much as it is going to the root of things. We discovered that it was an alternative system to fiat is instead of, instead of coercion or force as we call it how about doing things collaborate and do things out of love and do things more collaborative, more, you know, let, what you were saying about leveling up the system and stuff like that. That's all helping people express themselves in whatever ways it takes. So, the radical model, the radical foundation as we call it, is very simple. And, and it helps in getting away from fiat. One important part of the Fiat system is ownership. Ownership is centralized, right? I own the company. You don't, and you mean a bunch of people. Our company got to be, well, it's still around. It's, it's more people now, but it got to be 800 people. And I own a third of the company, and my partner owned a third of the company, but nobody else, I mean, people did have smart parts and stuff, but they didn't own it. They, they weren't you know, when you walk through your house, you're the owner of the house, right? You move a glass from here to there and all that stuff. And people didn't quite feel that way, even though in some areas they, they can make their decisions and, and stuff like that. But they didn't quite feel that way. And we're, what we're saying is we got to get away from Fiats and more to a radical foundation-like model. And so ownership is a big part of it. In the case of submarines and things like that, the owner is the US government, and, you know, there, there's, there's no fighting that for now. But in businesses, which is what were focused on, and people, which is what we're focused on as well, ownership is, is something that you potentially can own and you can have co-ownership of the business or ownership of your own thoughts. The problem is people don't know. People are, are trained away from owning their own decisions. And like you said, if the guy says yellow, you say, ah, it looks like yellow, even though it's blue. Yeah, it looks like yellow. And so that's the distinction going forward. But like I said, what I think what you did was what you're doing now the example you set with the cards. We had a, interviewing system there was no commanding voice. They could say, oh no, this guy is an idiot. And off the go is everybody decided who the person was. And normally we would go, what do you think? What do you think? Well, the first number had a huge influence, on the second number and third number. So, we went to the car business so that we do it online. But when everybody had entered a number, everybody saw their numbers. And you saw in a case of somebody really good, you saw a lot of fours, and but you would see a one and we focus on that and go, why one? Well, because blah, blah, blah, blah. And oftentimes that person would point out things that the rest of us have not caught onto. So that's a good system of having what's it called? What's it called? Something poker. But the whole idea is that you don't disclose your cards until the very end.

David Marquet (28:39):

You said vote first, then discuss, don't discuss, then vote. We do fist to five and we do cards and probability cards and things like that.

Jose Leal (28:49):

One of the things that you mentioned David earlier was you know, human nature part and, and how people have these needs that you described. You know, they need to know what's going on. They need to be able to have autonomy. They need to be able to think. Two of the things that we think are really critically important are, are meaning and belonging. So, the belonging really is speaking to your we, right? I'm, I'm not only not part of that team. But I'm very often alone within my team, right? I, I don't feel like I'm part of the team. And so in our organizations, when I say ours, I mean the typical organization around the world today, people feel disconnected from their colleagues. They, walk in, they do their work, they walk away, and they do not feel like a we. And the other is, is the meaning. So, you tell me what to do, I don't understand it. My brain just goes, okay, I'll just do what you tell me to do. But I feel a sense of, well, I don't understand, and that makes me feel disengaged from the work that I'm doing. And so I end up just going through the motions, which is according to a lot of the statistics we see, I'm sure you know, the same statistics we do. You know 70 to 80% of people are disengaged in their workplace. And that has to do with the reality of both not having adequate meaning or belonging, within that workplace. Yes. Does that align, with what you saw?

David Marquet (30:43):

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I think so, so now I'm having discussions with my co-founder about, well, how do we spread the ownership and the company? And because on the submarine, I, I didn't have to deal with things like equity and, and shares and, and that kind of stuff, which was, in a sense, it made it easier in a sense. It made it harder. So how do you get people to feel a sense of ownership? Well, we did it through language and agency. For me, it was like, the more, the more decision-making authority I give you, the more you're going to fill a sense of ownership over those decisions. You're not going to feel a sense of ownership over a decision that I make and then tell you to implement is like no matter, there's going to be no amount of ping pong tables and, and foosball games are going to really compensate for that. So step one to engagement is always to give people more agency. Step two is to repeat, step one until uncomfortable, and then do it a little bit more. So one of the things we like to get our CEOs and executive teams to do is to, is not order when they go to a restaurant, see if they can get the server to choose their meal. You don't even know what it's going to be until they put it in front of you. When you get that right at a restaurant, you've earned the right to go to work and lead a team. But if you can't get a server to choose where you can't delegate a decision to a server to pick something as safe as what your dinner's going to be, you're probably going to have a really hard time at work because of letting the team make decisions.

Matt Perez (32:22):

In the submarine, you weren't the owner of the submarine. You couldn't be fired for whatever reason, so you weren't the actual owner, but you had the agency. And what you did is, is share that with everybody. So, by the way, you used twice now, you used the word leader and it's a pet peeve of mine. We call them bosses. Okay. because the leader is somebody that I follow and there's lots of leadership around it. It's dynamic and it changes all the time and all that. But if I have to follow somebody, he's not my lead, my leader, he's, I have to follow him for my, about my salary and all that other stuff. So one of the things that, we take particular aim at is what we call fi fiat hierarchy, which is this business of somebody's boss. Somebody's not, somebody's not, somebody's not. And I just want to make the decision.

Jose Leal (33:36):

It sounds like your term leadership is, or your use of the term leadership is more around an existing structure in an organization.

David Marquet (33:50):

Well, when we say people, I want people to act like leaders. It means I want them to think, and express their honest thoughts, not what they think that they should be doing. Take initiative and take ownership of their decisions and align their decisions to what's best for the organization, not what's best for them personally. So, when we get that going, then I say, yeah, we're building leaders at every level.

Jose Leal (34:12):

So, there are leaders top to bottom.

David Marquet (34:16):

Yeah. As opposed to leaders and followers. Followers to me means, in a way, a play on words, because we're all in a sense, following the mission and the principles of the organization. But what happens is instead of following the mission of the organization, I end up following JAG, or it becomes not a way, but a who, not a principle, but a person. And that's where you get into trouble. Like I followed like the, the, the mission and vision of Volkswagen was not to create a diesel cheat. The mission and vision of Volkswagen was to, they, they were running ads on environmental making, you know, changing the world environmentally and making the greenest cars possible. But that will always fail when you put in competition. Well, my boss says I have to do this. So now, instead of following the mission, I'm now following Winterkorn, who's the c e O. Yes. And so the principle to becomes gets corrupted and usurped by the person. And so we end up with a system which is basically feudalism.

Jose Leal (35:27):

Absolutely.

Matt Perez (35:29):

So I got to announce next week's guest Greg Meyer, CEO of TiER 1 Impact. And Greg is the co-founder and CEO of TiER 1, he spelled with the… Yeah, lowercase “I. And he's completely owned by the employees with an ESOP. So, I had a, I had the chance of having a conversation with him and stuff like that before beforehand. And I think he's going to make a great guess. He's got very different ideas, some of which i, I don't agree with, but that's, that's where the juice is.

David Marquet (36:18):

That's part of the game,

Matt Perez (36:20):

Is that, the friction of the two? So, with that, I if you guys have anything to say.

Jose Leal (36:28):

I was just wondering if David has something else to impart. I really loved what he had to share to us, especially the language part. So, I, I look forward to reading the book. If you could pick it up one more time, I'd appreciate it.

David Marquet (36:41):

It. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks a lot. No, that's, that, that's great. Yeah. So you start with turning the ship around, which is sort of the story, what happened on the submarine, and then the analysis of the language and the understanding of what patterns that we've inherited, these fiat patterns, and how we wanted to quote radicalize them comes from is stories are coming out of leadership as language.

Jose Leal (37:05):

Awesome.

David Marquet (37:06):

So, thanks all the listeners for tuning in and participating. Yeah.

Jose Leal (37:11):

Thank you for showing up and having a great story to tell. Have a good one.