Pat Sweet - Host: This is the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet episode 31. Welcome to the engineering and leadership podcast. The show dedicated to helping engineers thrive today. I speak with captain David Marquet about his new book leadership, is language, the hidden power of what you say and what you don't.

Pat Sweet - Host: Hey everybody, pat sweet here and welcome to episode 31. This is a very exciting show for me. Very exciting episode. And, and it's, it's special for me, frankly. I'm really excited about this because I've been a fan of David Marquet, who is my guest today for a very long time. In fact, his first book called turn the ship around has long been one of my favorite leadership books of all time. Uh, and, and his story has had a real influence on me and my views of leadership and how I practice. So to get to, to meet him and discuss leadership and his new book on the podcast. It's, it's a real honor and a lot of fun. And I think you'll hear that during our chat today. So that's all I'm going to say today. Let's just fast forward and move ahead toward the main content for today.

Pat Sweet - Host: The world we operate in today looks very, very different than it did 100 years ago. There's more complexity, more uncertainty and greater competitive pressures than ever before. But according to David Marquet, there's one thing that hasn't changed very much in that time. And that's how leaders speak to their teams. David Marquet believes that much of the language we use today was born 400 years ago and refined throughout the industrial revolution. It's language that may have made sense back then, but has no place in the working world of today, and may actually be holding you and your team back David's views are captured in his latest book, Leadership is Language, the hidden power of what you say and what you don't. And we'll go deep into that book during our interview today. David Marquet is a retired US Navy captain, the former commander of a nuclear submarine, the USS Santa Fe, and bestselling author of Turn the Ship around! Today, David works to develop organizational leaders globally through his company Intent-based Leadership International. Here's my conversation with David Marquet, Mr. David Marquet, welcome to the engineering and leadership podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here today.

David Marquet - Guest: Thank you. You go by Pat or Patrick?

Pat Sweet - Host: Uh, either is just fine. My, my wife would call me Pat, so that's, that's a good, uh,

David Marquet - Guest: Thanks for having me on your show.

Pat Sweet - Host: You're very welcome. Um, you just released not long ago. Uh, your latest book called leadership is language, the hidden power of what you say and what you don't. And I've just wrapped that up. It's a, it's a phenomenal read. And the thesis statement to me seems to be that well, if I'm really to boil it down, that language is incredibly important. You say that language drives culture and culture drives performance. Could you, could you expand on that and maybe, maybe give some examples of, of where you've seen that play out?

David Marquet - Guest: Yeah. It's language, people think intentions drive culture, but they don't because we can be well intentioned, well meaning, but still have dysfunctional language habits. And most organizations, a lot of these are either defensive ego, defense behaviors defending ourselves or preemptively, trying to protect other people's egos and or structurally coercive language patterns that are a legacy of the industrial revolution. And it's, and it's these sort of, um, coercive language patterns, which, which I meant I'm going after in this book in particular. Now, if I say coercive, that's a pretty strong word, but fundamentally the, the leadership structure that we've had for 400 years is a coercive structure. What do I mean, some group, the leaders tells some other group, the followers what to do. That's gotta be coercive because where it's not, you choose what to do. What you're doing is chosen by somebody else.

David Marquet - Guest: So there's two, two problems. Number one is someone is trying to control us, which we don't like as humans. That's stress. And number two is I'm trying to control somebody else, which is impossible. And it's also a source of stress. And so no matter what we do in our leadership training, if it's fundamentally about making decisions and telling other people what to do, it's inherently stressful. We can't get away from it. We can mitigate it. So instead of maybe level 10 stresses level nine stress, but it's never going to be level two stress, right? And so the problem is we can say, oh, well, I want my people to speak up. So here's where intentions and words separate. I want my people, I, I would love for my team to speak up. I love to hear different opinions. Okay, great. Let's go watch a meeting.

David Marquet - Guest: What's the meeting about, uh, is this product ready for release is Boeing 7 37 max. Ready for prime time? How are we going to have the meeting? Well, we opened the subject. Hey, we're here to discuss 737 max. What does everybody think? Who speaks first? The loudest person to the person is trying to kiss up to the CEO first. I'm being a little, maybe harsh. I don't know, but who's who, why, why does that person speak first? You got to think about that. And they say, oh, look, we've done. All the testing of the FAA is up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a greatest thing. We're going to catch up to Air Bus. And then more people pile on. And then the person who thinks, you know what, this is really not a good idea. It's been going crazy in the trainer, but, and I really think we need their, their ability to speak up, starts to shrink, shrink, shrink.

David Marquet - Guest: And at some point it crosses a threshold. At which point it becomes so socially painful to speak up that they don't speak up. And then it goes to zero. And then we say, oh, well, everyone had a chance to speak up. And then we run a vote, okay. Or we're ready to launch. And what's the characteristic of the vote. It's binary. And then again, the same first person puts their thumb up. This is the person who wants to be the next CEO, puts their thumb and they stick it on the, up the reaction. So I say, and then I say, oh, do you? Yeah, I haven't had a chance to speak up. Everyone could, but the way I ran the meeting was structurally coercive and fundamentally inimical to different voices. What you want to do is don't talk about it. You want to vote first.

David Marquet - Guest: And the reason that sounds weird is because it's different. And because our language patterns, our pattern after the industrial revolution, not the future, they've coming from the past. And so we vote first on a, on a, on a non-binary basis, on a probabilistic basis. How ready is this product? Everyone slides a card out one to 99. We don't allow zero. We don't allow 101 to 99. And then now I said, okay, I'm gonna flip your cards. And I see there's a whole bunch of nineties and 99, but there's two, there's a one and a five. I really want to hear what that per one and a five have to say. And then I say, okay - I say, Hey, someone want to tell us about like, let's hear from this group. And if, if it's a safe environment, those people will speak up. And if no one speaks up, they say, okay, great.

David Marquet - Guest: Why would someone think this? What would a, let's come up with five possible reasons why someone would vote one? And what people generally say at that point is, well, um, you know, this is stupid, but they might say, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to diminish it. We're not going to disrespect it. We're going to respect it. And you're going to have to present it as if you actually believe it. You don't have to believe it. But, but we, and then, so then the one persons, maybe they do speak up and they say, Hey, so here's what I've seen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then what does the rest of the group redo again? The next dysfunctional behavior is no, no, no, no, no, you're wrong. Look, we've done all this testing. They, they explained to them why they're so raw, what what's missing.

David Marquet - Guest: They're not curious about what that person sees and knows that they don't see it. Now. They come from a place of arrogance. They come from a place of certainty. They come from a place of determinism, which is how we've been wired to be as leaders and maybe even got them where they are. But in the complex, fast moving world of today, it's not going to get us. It results in fundamentally bad decisions, bad decisions are, they're not engineering problems. They're human interactions, social dysfunction, language problems, and telling people, oh, run a meeting in a way that invites separate voices or makes it easy for the outline opinions to be heard. Isn't enough. Uh, here here's another one is a good example for a personal behavior is I had a bad habit where I would quote, if I had to explain something, I would explain it. And I say, right, does that make sense? And this, this, what does that do? Well, right. Of course. Uh, does that make sense? So of course, why I can't admit that. Well, no, that doesn't make sense. Cause swept. That makes me stupid. Right. So right. See, I just did it.

Pat Sweet - Host: Oh my gosh.

David Marquet - Guest: So I'm stumped. I I'm just stunned into silence. This is so funny. Anyway, it speaks to how easy

Pat Sweet - Host: It is to, to, to kind of roll with the punches. That way that that's just, that's just how we speak at work. Right? The it's it's right. You don't even think twice about. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

David Marquet - Guest: Exactly. Because because the language, what is the purpose of saying that the purpose is to get people, to nod their heads and get on board and, and it's deliberately to suppress this sending opinions. It's deliberately coercive it's because in the industrial age I made the decision and I needed you to just do it. Like don't like, I'm not really, I'll pretend we'll run a charade. Well, I'll pretend to care what you think, but I really don't care what you think. What I really want is I'm waiting for enough time to go by, to just say, okay, great. Now can we just get on with it? And again, people die. Products are malfunction. Companies go out of business. People lose their livelihoods. The environment is trashed, whatever bad things happen because we have this, these function, dysfunctional language patterns, not I'm an optimist about human nature. I think people want to be good. They want to make it easy for the person who feels like, yeah, I don't know. It's a little bit scary. I must be the only person who sees the speak. Most people would say, yeah, I want that. So it was not the intention. It's, it's the words that will,

Pat Sweet - Host: And this is this circles back to what you said right off the top was, was that, um, intention isn't enough. Right? And it's, it's that, that action that you really need. And so many of our interactions, so much of what we do in a workplace relates to the way we speak to one another, the way we engage with one another. Um, so this is really fascinating stuff. Um, one of the other kind of big ideas, I think that came out of this book is this delineation between red work and blue work. And I'd love it. If you could just explain the difference between the two and why like good red work looks so different from good blue work.

David Marquet - Guest: Yeah. So, uh, on the submarine, as a submarine commander, I had a problem because I, we had a posity of thinking. We had plenty of people doing stuff, and we were generally pretty good if I said, or if I ordered load a torpedo, we'd open the book. We do step 1, 2, 3 in sequence. And we'd load torpedo, where I was missing was the ability of the weapons department to recognize that we were changing our mission and that we needed tomorrow. We needed to be loading torpedoes. So then always fell on me to order loading to, and then they would do it fine. They perceive their job as, okay. We're just here. We're here to do. We're told, and we're very good at doing what we're told. We're very good, like he does, but I'm not good at figuring out that we need to load torpedoes or change or change from torpedoes, whatever it is.

David Marquet - Guest: So I sat down this path, uh, with my, with, with my team to get more thinking and more often involve more variability. It always involved more variability. So thinking benefits from increasing variability, thinking benefits from more different opinions, iconic cast, a wider, wider net. That's why diversity is beneficial to corporate longevity. So the problem became okay, great. So I get to think, I get to have opinions. I can share them, that kind of stuff, but not when you're loading the torpedo, when you're loading the torpedo, I want you to follow the book precisely. I want focus and I don't want variability. I don't want 1, 2, 4, 3. I want 1, 2, 3, 4. I want every time I want it to be, I want manufacturing, reduce variability. Any kind of recurring process is going to benefit from reducing variability. So we needed a way to talk about, okay, for this kind of work, the decision to load torpedoes, what team we were going to use, what time we were going to do it.

David Marquet - Guest: I wanted to increase variability to embrace variability. But for these kinds of work, starting the reactor, starting a loading of torpedo, I needed a two. I was allergic to variability, right? And so the words of the law was actually like, we're speaking two different languages. So over here, when, when we talk about loading torpedo, which is what we call red work friends, cause I read his focus, I'm blocked, I'm dialed and I'm locked in. And so the point is the crew, the Santa Fe was ironic. We were better at embracing variability. We made better like fundamentally the reason why that the crew became so good was because we made better decisions. Uh, because we had more involvement in the decision making process, by people who are closer to the actual information. And, but we were also better once the decision was made at executing the decision.

David Marquet - Guest: And when you don't understand, is this a reduced, I w I over and over again, I say, are we in reduced variability work or embrace variability work? Or is this an improve and reduce variability game or an embrace variability game, because you don't want to apply a reduce variability rules to an embrace, very variability game or vice versa, because then you will obviously have quite suboptimal results. And we see this both ways. We see meetings, generally speaking, I think we have too much reduce variability. My, because that's what the industrial revolution manufacturing revolution was about being applied to things like meetings, oh, we're here to build consensus. What does that mean? I'm reducing the variability of thinking, right? Obviously that's the whole definition of reducing insects. And so, and then I say, and, and then I wonder, where are all those different voices wet? Well, I just, but when I go to work, that would benefit from re uh, manufacturing or, uh, process like starting the reactor, then that I need to be able to differentiate those two things. So that's where I say, I'm going to follow the procedure as precisely as possible. If I get to a stopping point, I, if I get to a point where it seems like the conditions don't match what the procedure is assuming at this point, then I don't sort of futz around the edges I stopped. Totally. And then I go to, and I widened the, I put my pencil down, put my ranches down and we then go to embrace for really. So the idea is to be super broad,

David Marquet - Guest: If you had a camera it's not about having like a telephoto lens where you can sort of zoom in and zoom out, it's about having two lenses, a super focused light lens, or a super wide range lens. And you want to have either one or the other not halfway. Right.

Pat Sweet - Host: And I, my, my, my experience anyway, is that, and many of the project teams, I've been a part of that, that distinction between the both happen, red work and blue work happen, but they often happen simultaneously. It's often unclear which mode we're in. And, and I've, I've personally experienced this, this kind of sense of, of burnout and confusion. Not, not really knowing like what, what, what are we doing here? And this is one of the big problems you described in the book is, is finding that balance. And, and really someone making the call like this is blue work. This is how we're going to play it. Ha ha ha. What would you recommend to an organization who's, who's struggling with this kind of thing?

David Marquet - Guest: Well, I'll use the very first step is always to put a name to the phenomenon. And so like, we call it red work, blue work. You can call it expert an execution mode or we're in thinking mode, but it's gotta be clear. What, what mode we're in the, the other thing is we have a lot of metaphors, which I think make it muddy the situation. So for example, like some people come back to this. Oh no, no, we're in purple work. Like yeah, no, there's no such thing as purple work. I'm like, I made it up. I get to say that. Um, but then another thing is, so the term continuous improvement to me, that, to me evokes a picture like an escalator, it's just, I'm always, I'm continuously, but it's, to me, it's a misnomer because improvement is discontinuous because continuous improvement would mean that every time I do a procedure, I've changed it slightly.

David Marquet - Guest: Like every single time I'm making it different. There's just not what you want, but you want to do as batches, you say, okay, we need to do this a hundred times until we have enough data, we're going to do a hundred welds. And then we're going to look over here at 10,000 Wells, whatever it is. And then we're going to run them. We're going to, then we're going to pause and then we're going to, oh, I want you to here's the procedure for a, well do it exactly this way. 100 times. Right? Okay. Now let's take data. How was that? Because if I'm saying, oh everyone, yeah, everyone do an experiment. Well, however you want. And then let's see what we learned. Like that's, that's not an experiment. That's just a chaos. That's people die. So we say this, do it this way. Then we're going to study it.

David Marquet - Guest: Then we're going to make a change. So it's, it's a stepwise function. Right? And so in a project, it's the same. We're gonna say, okay, let's put our heads down. We're going to go to work. We're going to do the, we don't really know how it's going. Look finally, but we don't know. We're trying to achieve, we know the first step. So let's start, we're going to work for two weeks and then we're going to stop. We're going to get together. We're going to say, how are we learn, blah, blah, blah. Let's adjust it. If you don't do that, then what happens is at the 2.5 day point, the product owner has some brilliant idea or the senior vice president for product or whoever someone goes to some conference and they get some idea, oh, wouldn't it be great if we use the aluminum instead of steel and was like, maybe, but here's the deal.

David Marquet - Guest: You got to hold that until we get to the next period of blue work, which is going to be in two weeks. No, I don't have, you know, the discipline mental discipline, like leave my mouth, shut that long. So I have to blurt it out and lay it on you. It's like, no, well, that's fine. We're going to put on our backlog, but we're not going to do anything until we have to protect the team. When they're in red work, we can't interrupt him. Cause uh, then we get nothing done all day, which is like AKA half of people's lives during absolutely COVID because it keeps scheduling zoom meetings that go from like 10 to 11, 10 to 11 and then 11 to 12, 12 to one. So where's the opportunity to actually do it.

Pat Sweet - Host: I'm I'm envisioning the people listening to this right now, uh, driving the cars and mowing the lawn and nodding aggressively. I think, I think it's, it's an absolute, uh, epidemic, right? Um, executives,

David Marquet - Guest: Who'd call meetings should pay the salary of everyone for the length of time that the meeting's called for and the number of people in the meeting then we'd have much better.

Pat Sweet - Host: Do you think? I suspect we would much better and, and, and, and, uh, much fewer. Um, I, I think a lot of the folks, um, particularly people from software backgrounds, for example, would recognize a lot of, um, a lot of the concepts that, that you talked about here. You, you mentioned product owner, you mentioned, you know, two week periods of work, uh, product backlogs. That there's a lot that, that, um, that sounds similar to, um, agile and I think particularly for an engineering audience, they'd be very excited about this.

David Marquet - Guest: Yeah. It's agile. I love it. It's great. I, um, it's the old, it's like, it's the only thing that I've seen that recognizes that we have this rhythm of work, which is we go into the work and then we come out of the work. We go into the work, come out of the work. And we, like, we think about the work from a distance. We go back into the work and there was probably other boat management systems, but none, none that I've seen, unfortunately I'm contaminated because I ended up getting invited to a bunch of Advil, lots of agile or agile conferences is great. And then I, I learned just barely enough to say the word and, and be dangerous, but yeah. So, so it's funny, like, so this, we develop like our approach. Uh, I didn't have quite the structure that Jeff Sutherland and those guys put into the agile manifesto and the, and the structure, but yeah, it's, it's, I mean, human nature is human nature. So it's not surprising that as we were making the shift from physical visual manufacturing work to invisible, uh, cognitive thinking work, that multiple places on the planet have independently come up with the same kind of fundamental structure.

Pat Sweet - Host: Well, I think that there's a common recognition that the old way just, just isn't working. Thank you very much. Right. Um, and, and a lot of what you described in the book, you, you reach into, um, you know, academic literature, particularly in, in psychology and sociology. So, so the, you know, that there's a common core there, and like you said, that's really interesting, um, that this is, you know, it, it, it is an independent, uh, system and way of thinking and, and, and nomenclature. Um, but, but certainly, certainly there, there's a, I think a lot to be said for, um, it being a different expression of, of some, uh, some ideas that a lot of technical folk would be, uh, would be familiar with and what no one love. Right. I think part of the problem with agile is, is, uh, not, not a problem with agile, but, um, folks outside of software, I've had a hard time wrapping their heads around it.

David Marquet - Guest: I'm trying to help. Part of it is I'm trying to help all the agile coaches who say they come up to me at these conferences. I say, oh, this is great. I've been in the software teams are working well, but unless leadership fundamentally changes, we're sort of limited in what we can do. And so this is, this is sort of, it's, it's a camouflage agile infection of the top leadership ranks is really what I'm trying to do. Okay. So now I'm going to think and act agile. I never heard the word because sometimes people sometimes get allergic. Cause then I get the zealots is say, none of it has to be called a sprint. It has to be called this. And they're like, you know, okay, great, fine for you. But, uh, and anyway, another one though, uh, sorry, I talk about in the book is the, what pilots use the pilots are, have learned to rescript their language, right?

David Marquet - Guest: And again, it's the same thing. We're intentions, aren't enough. They don't say, oh, uh, yeah, everyone listened to your copilot. Yeah, of course. Everyone says that. Sure. Book. And it's called CRM crew crew resource management that started by NASA several decades ago. And it's made the world that's made flying safer much, much, much, much, much safer. And it's not about preaching the desire to hear other voices. It's about the words that you say to make it easier for those other voices to express themselves. And then when they do express themselves, how do we react? Which is part of part one too.

Pat Sweet - Host: So one of the things that, um, I I'm imagining myself, um, at work, making this fluctuation jumping between red work and blue work. And one of the points you make in the book is that that blue work in particular suffers when time pressure is applied or any kind of pressure, right. That, that forces a narrowing of the mind. It, it decreases that variability. And I've been trying to reconcile myself to this whole idea of, of inviting teams to, to engage in blue work and giving them the space to do that while at the same time meeting the next client deadline. Um, there's a story you, you invoke in the book that, uh, my, my daughter happened to be listening. I was listening to the audio book and you invoked the story of frozen, right? Where the test screenings, the original version of the story. It just bombed. And, and the team was invited to take their time, figuring out what figured out what worked and, and, and generate new ideas that explore, even though Disney had already committed to a release date, I thought that was just remarkable. And I, I find it very difficult in, in my experience to, to think through how, how would I do that? How would I give the time and space needed for broad thinking while at the same time panicking about the date and, and meeting that next deadline, how do you, how do you reconcile those two things?

David Marquet - Guest: Just saying time out, it's not about how we allocate a week or six hours. It's not about that. That might be a 5% difference. The 95% difference is when you relieve people of the, okay. Today, we don't need to write any codes of software, any lines of code. We're just going to put our pencils down. And we're just gonna, we're gonna talk about in the morning, we're gonna talk about where we've come in the afternoon. We're gonna talk about where we're going. There's no expectation because I can, I mean, lines of code is a silly way to measure software, but let's say that's what we're doing. And so we say, um, I need to write 10,000 lines of code in the next 10 days. Well, I can write 10,000 lines of code a day, or I can keep one day to do some thinking and then write 1100 in a bit lines of code for nine days. And that's the bet we're making. We're saying, if you do that, those 1,111 lines of code will be better, more relevant, less likely to have to go back and get fixed than if you had written a thousand lines of code every day for 10 days. And then the next 10 days and the next 10 days, and never paused and thought about where you're going to at the end of the day, you have a 2 million line of code program, which is worthless. Right.

Pat Sweet - Host: Right. And after a day thought, maybe you realize you only need 5,000 in the first place to heck

David Marquet - Guest: With the other ones. Exactly. Or one of any, any of a hundred thousand things. Right. So, perfect. Exactly. So, so that's so controlling the clock. Isn't about get letting people like let their belt out after Thanksgiving dinner and that's American.

Pat Sweet - Host: Oh, Hey, we've got Thanksgiving too. And it happens to fall a little earlier. Right. And we beta test it for you.

David Marquet - Guest: Okay. Good, good, good. Um, letting our belt out after Thanksgiving dinner and just flopping on the couch. Uh it's. It's about controlling the rhythm and being able to say, pause, the team will have a natural instinct to want to keep working teams always do. Hey, let's feel so good. It's psychological rewarding looking at lines of code I'm writing. And so we have to invite the team. They, they may send signals, Hey, I'm not sure about this. And then sometimes we ignore them. Sometimes we don't, but it's up to the leaders to say, okay, I'll take the heat from the boss today. We're not going to write any lines of code. I do my daily report. I'm going to show zero and it's going to be fine. I'm going to die. Don't you worry about that? That's my problem. And then that's what it, that's what I mean by, we got to relieve the production stress to get into the thinking mode.

Pat Sweet - Host: Yeah. You really need to, you need to give the team permission to act, to not example thing done today. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This has been an awful lot of fun. I, uh, we're drawing kind of down to the, to the end of the, uh, the chat here, but, uh, two, two more questions that I did want to ask before, uh, before signing off, if you could eliminate any one word or phrase that you hear leaders say, what do you think it would be?

David Marquet - Guest: Well, I like quote right. Eliminating. Right. And I like, does that make sense? But, uh, I'm going to go with, are you sure? I, because these other things, they're, they're more ubiquitous, but they're, I don't think they're quite as harmful as I think, are you sure the reason are you sure it's so harmful is because, so, so, so, so what, what am I talking? What's the context someone comes up and says, Hey, I really think we should delay product launch. Are you sure? So the, there, the problem is not boxed a person into a binary response. Yes. No. And it's about a future that I it's impossible for you to be like, sure. Like how can I be sure? Like, no, I'm not sure, but the right answer is to say yes, I'm sure. Of course. I'm sure. No, I'm not sure. And so what happens is knowing that the knowing that if I bring this up, the question is going to be, am I sure I'm much less likely to bring it up?

David Marquet - Guest: So in other words, products get launched unless someone is 99% sure. This is going to kill people, but like 90%. Yeah, no, it's not quite certain enough. Like I'm right. And so what happens is as to it's too, like risky to me as an individual in the organization to [inaudible] to be the person who asked the question and then a quote is proved wrong. But so are you sure is a terrible question. Is it safe? Will it work? Uh, I mean, there's so many of them, but, but any, but that binary question when applied to the future is really harmful.

Pat Sweet - Host: Oh, there's no winning. There's no way to give

David Marquet - Guest: There's no winning in the moment. And it then creates its own corporate rule, which is only be 99.9 9, 9, 9, 9%. Sure. Before you ever raise your hand and then people don't understand, well, why are no, you know, this happens in the Navy. We have an accident. And then every single time, 100% of the time. So far in the history of the Navy, in the submarine force, this is what I know about when there's been a collision 100%, 100.0% of the time, someone on the ship had an indication that the ship was heading into a dangerous situation. Fascinating. Okay. Yeah. 100.0% of the time. There's never been a collision that just, boom, where did that come from? The problem is the person on the ship either doesn't speak up because they're like, well, no one else seems to know, see that's where I must be the wrong. I'm not going to say anything. Yeah, yeah. Or they say something and the rest of you say no, no, no, no, no, look, 10 people think this you're the, you're just the outlier. You're the outlier. You must be wrong and they get discounted. So the [inaudible] the thing is we need to make it easy for people to say, hold on a second. I'm not sure that does the products could, I'm not sure that 7 37 max is ready for prime time. I wish the culture at Boeing had been more conducive to that.

Pat Sweet - Host: Well, and it's easy to see how something you talk about, um, uh, five finger voting in situations like that. And you you're talking about how sure are you sure.

David Marquet - Guest: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so that's good. Thanks. So the antidote is to start the question with the word, how, right. How sure. How likely, how safe is the COVID vaccine safe, meaningless question to someone who's an engineer, right? What does that mean? Yes. No. Is flying safe, squawking across the street, safe, meaningless, right. Taking another breath of air safe, but how safe is it now? That's a meaningful question.

Pat Sweet - Host: Right? Cause there's no such thing as risk-free that, that that's not a, that's not a thing in our world.

David Marquet - Guest: Yeah. Risk-free is dead.

Pat Sweet - Host: Okay. Um, but th thank you very much for that, that, that, uh, I, I really appreciate that. Um, now, uh, finally, uh, and this is, uh, uh, maybe a softball question. Um, if people are interested in, in you and your work, I'm interested in learning more, what, uh, what can they do to, to, to go and find out more about David Marquet?

David Marquet - Guest: Yeah, I think, uh, thanks for that. Our program is called intent based leadership. So you can Google that we have a LinkedIn page. You can find me on LinkedIn and say, hi mine. First initial is L so it's L David Marquet, M a R Q U E T. But the, probably the most fun thing to do is to go on YouTube and type in leadership nudges. And I have this, a weekly series of these little one to two minute ish, uh, videos where I just take one little tiny thing. And I say, okay, if you're going to ask a question, don't say, are you sure how sure are you so little things like that? Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. Leadership nudges on YouTube, click, like click subscribe, say, hi, make a comment, let us know how it works for you. Uh, you can subscribe on the website and we'll send you a weekly email. You hit reply to the email comes back to me.

Pat Sweet - Host: Cool. Cool. That's great. And what I'll do in the, uh, in the show notes, I'll put links to all this stuff to make it, uh, make it easy for people to, uh, uh, to, to find all this stuff. Um, uh, David has been an absolute pleasure. This has been just great. Uh, I really, really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you.

David Marquet - Guest: Thanks pat. And thanks to all your listeners talk soon. Cheers.

Pat Sweet - Host: Thank you. Once again, David, for that conversation, uh, really truly enlightening, uh, and an awful lot of fun. As I mentioned off the top of the show, it's very, very cool too, to be able to meet the authors of some of your favorite books. It's just a brilliant, brilliant experience. Brilliant man. So thank you once again, a few things really jumped out to me during that, uh, that chat and, and right off the top, uh, David mentioned something really important, which was that intention on its own can't drive culture, wanting things to be a certain way, and even expressing that you want to be a certain way, like hearing the opinions of those around you. Isn't enough. You really do need to set the scene. You need to behave in certain ways that make that possible. So all the intention in the world won't really make a lick of difference until you take action to support that intent.

Pat Sweet - Host: And I thought that was a really important takeaway from that. What are the other things that I really, really like is this idea of voting first in meetings and then discussing, and he talked about non-binary voting the world we operate in as engineers and engineering leaders is, is not binary. There's all sorts of gray. So to, to, uh, couch conversations in binary terms, D just doesn't make sense. Uh, yet we continue to do that because it's easy. And it's what we know. So I really liked this idea of voting first driving conversation and allowing for shades of gray, like in five finger voting, for example, and other people will have heard of, of systems like multi voting on a whiteboard, that kind of thing. These are extremely powerful tools, and I'm really glad he, uh, he went into that today. What are the other big things that I really, really liked from all this is the importance of avoiding asking, right?

Pat Sweet - Host: Which is so funny because I did it during the podcast right after he did it during the podcast. It's so easy to do. It's so easy to seek that automatic validation and actually put the people that you were trying to lead in a very awkward position. You're essentially asking them to validate you, instead of asking them to check your thinking, when you ask, right. Which is, which is something I do all the time all the time. And even since this conversation with David, I've caught myself over and over and over again, doing this. So that's going to take quite a bit of time to, to correct. So I really appreciated his insight on that. And that's a suggestion that I'm definitely taking to heart. Just a reminder that if you want it to refer to anything we mentioned during the show, you can go to the show notes@engineeringandleadership.com slash episode 31. Next up we've got the engineering and leadership mailbag.

Pat Sweet - Host: Well, my friends, you know how this works, this is the part of the show where I read your messages and answer your questions. I promise to read absolutely everything you've sent me. And I promise to share my favorites right here on the podcast. I had a wonderful note from, uh, uh, someone named Henry at asina, uh, which I'll read to you here. Hi, Patrick Henry from Nigeria here. Just that to drop in that your podcast has been amazing in my personal and career growth. Over the last year, I started listening at the beginning of the pandemic and haven't looked back, made a step toward applying to a school in Germany for BSE in engineering management, Henry, thank you so much for reaching out. I really appreciate it so glad that you've been on this journey throughout the pandemic. In fact, honestly, it was the pandemic that drove me to resurrect the podcast.

Pat Sweet - Host: It had been sitting dormant for quite a while and all of a sudden I had all this time on my hands. So I really wanted to reconnect with the community, reconnect with the podcast. And it's been an absolute blast on this end here as well. So best of luck in your application to a school in Germany and, uh, uh, again, very, very cool. I say this all the time. Very cool to know that there are people around the world listening to the podcast. So, uh, you, you really did make my day. Thank you so much for that quick reminder that if you'd like to be on the show, there's a way to do that. You can just leave me a voicemail@engineeringandleadership.com slash contact. Uh, and if you would like to chat, you can also find me on LinkedIn or leave a comment@thebottomoftheshownotesagainatengineeringandleadership.com slash episode 31, 1 that is all the time we have for the show today, I'll be back next week with our next episode with Henry Selstam, the CTO of Wastefront on circular economies and how technology can save the world.

Pat Sweet - Host: If you enjoyed the show, it would be awesome. If you could leave a review and I'd love to hear what you found most interesting today, if you do leave a review, that helps me a lot by providing me solid feedback on how I can make the show better, and it can help others find the show as well. And if you do leave some feedback, I promise to share that in the mailbag section for more information and links to the resources mentioned today, just go to the show notes@engineeringandleadership.com slash episode 31 until next time, this is pat sweet reminding you that if you're going to be anything, be excellent. You've been listening to the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet. If you'd like to learn more, go to engineering and leadership.com where you'll find more free articles, podcasts, and downloads to help engineers thrive. That's engineering and leadership.com.