Comments at Leadership Seminar, AFCEA/USNI West Symposium
by David Marquet on Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 11:58am
On VADM Konetzni’s leadership panel at AFCEA/USNI WEST on 12 February titled: “Leaders, How Do We Find, Develop and Promote People with the Right Stuff?” we had the following discussion.
The number of officers serving aboard ships is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the total officer billets. This is because of the following:
1. The US Navy ratio of active duty end-strength to ships, which had been relatively stable since WWII at 1000:1 has recently crept up. Today, with 332,000 Sailors and 283 ships, it stands at 1170:1.
2. Officers manning, as a proportion of total end-strength, has also crept up. This is in response to demands for specialties and joint commands.
3. Finally, officer billets aboard the ships we have has been trending down. As an example, the Baltimore had 61 officer billets, Leahy 27, Ticonderoga 24, and Burke 23. The trend continues with LCS.
While I use at-sea billets aboard ships as my metric, the trends are true in aviation as well: 4-seat aircraft are replace with 2-seaters; 2-seaters by single seaters; and single seaters by UAVs.
Why does this matter? The Navy continues to act as though service at sea is the litmus test for competence as an officer for the unrestricted line. Navy has difficulty properly valuing the contributions of officers in “other” billets. Thus, more and more officers are being passed through fewer billets, resulting in shorter tours, sub-optimization of performance, and execution-based (or worse, presence-based) assessment of capability. Further, the body of operational knowledge among a typical officer dealing with the vagaries and risk that comes with operations at sea, is reduced. [I don’t like using the word experience because that gives credit for simply occupying a billet.]
I suggest that a coherent Navy strategy needs to:
1. Embrace the reality of this trend and learn how to value non-seagoing contributions; or
2. Reverse the trend and return to a more maritime-focused service.
The USS Baltimore cruiser from WWII had 61 officers. Current ships of the same size have less than half that many officers.
World War II continues to fascinate us. The scale of human drama, suffering, cruelty, heroism and compassion is unparalleled. Here are some reviews of recent books on that story.
Five Best: Books on the Beginnings of World War II – WSJ.com.
Book review: Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General – WSJ.com.
Hitler’s Endgame: a review of the third volume of Richard Evans’ trilogy – WSJ.com.
Book Review: The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany by Ian Kershaw – WSJ.com.
The siege of Leningrad: 900 days of solitude | The Economist.
Measureless Masterpiece. On the Battle of the Atlantic – Forbes.com.
Book Review: The Battle of Midway – WSJ.com.
War heroes: Born to live. An experience of war as a POW in the Pacific | The Economist.
Book Review: Freedom’s Forge – WSJ.com. by Arthur Herman.
Five Best Books: Max Hastings on War Memoirs – WSJ.com. These are first person accounts of war, not necessarily from WW2.
Craig Symonds' recent book on Midway is one of a number of interesting recent reads on World War II.
Ever wonder what an HR manual would look like for a company that gave their employees large doses of responsibility and decision making authority and backed it up with a clear sense of organizational purpose? Well, here it is.
Ever hear of the computer game Prospero? No? That’s because it was killed by Valve before it was ever released. We know about it because it’s in the handbook. That’s just one of many enlightened parts to this manual.
Let’s start with control. How much decision making authority do Valve employees have? Well, a lot. They can not only pick the projects they want to work on, they can pick the projects the company works on, and can decide when to ship a product. The mechanism for allowing employees to choose their projects is to provide desks with wheels that can be easily moved by the desk owner. Here’s are the instructions for doing that:
The manual advises company personnel who are interviewing potential hires that they need to ask themselves whether the potential hire is capable of running the company, because they will be, literally.
…telling [people] to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.
Organizational clarity is achieved by clearly and repeatedly stating the company’s purpose. The first words in the manual are that the company makes great games. The primacy of the customer experience is repeated again and again as are the criteria for working on and shipping products. All told, it’s clear what Valve is here to accomplish.
Technical competence is achieved in the hiring process by only taking the very best software engineers. There’s no mention of company sponsored training but self study, improvement and learning are strongly stressed. One of my favorite parts of the handbook states that mistakes will happen and when they do, learn as much as possible from what happened.
Employees are encouraged to fashion themselves into “T-shaped people.” T-shaped means your skills run broadly across many disciplines and very deep in a few. This idea is also espoused by Tim Brown of IDEO as the best way of developing interdisciplinary teams.
…and who wrote this manual? The founder? No. The HR department? No. In keeping with the content, the manual was written and is available for editing by any employee.
I’m not a fan of focus groups as a means of soliciting feedback from customers. An obvious flaw in this era of 24/7 social media is that they are an infrequent mechanism for listening to a small subset of your customer base. Compare that to the ability social media provides of listening in to what your customers, and indeed what customers of other companies, are saying in real time and they seem a poor substitute.
Of course another significant issue is whether your customers actually know what it is that they want. I mean really know. For instance I know how to ride a bicycle pretty well, but if you asked me to describe how I do it I’d probably struggle to do so in any detail. Likewise it’s pretty common for people to say they want or need one thing whilst deep down their demands are somewhat different.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the focus group was applied by some new research published recently in the journal Psychological Science. The research monitored brain activity in subjects that were shown three different anti-smoking adverts. By directly monitoring the brain the researchers hoped that they would get the most accurate insight into what was working and what wasn’t.
The researchers gathered 30 smokers together. They had all shown a strong intention to quit the habit and were shown a series of television ads designed to help them do so. At the end, each participant was asked to fill in a questionnaire about the effectiveness of each ad.
So far so normal. What made the research stand out however was that each participant also had fMRI scans to monitor their brain activity whilst watching the ads. The scan specifically monitored the ventral subregion of medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in Brodmann’s area (BA) 10. This region was selected because it was the cluster most highly associated with individual behavior change in a previous independent study.
The research then took to the field, broadcasting each advert for a month in different states. The call to action in each ad was a phone number for the National Cancer Institute’s Smoking Quitline. This allowed the researchers to determine the effectiveness of each ad by virtue of the number of calls the quitline received.
They could then compare these real results with what the focus group had predicted to see whether the brain scanning or the questionnaire was more effective. You can probably guess the answer. The brain scan triumphed quite emphatically. What’s telling is that the brain scan results also beat the predictions of public health experts.
Now this is cool for a couple of reasons. Firstly it obviously allows us to run much better focus groups. That’s a given. Secondly it should allow us to more accurately predict the response of entire populations by monitoring the brain activity of a small group. Finally it should provide yet another reminder to us all that hubris in leaders is not a good thing. The wisdom of crowds has shown the limitations of so called experts, and this research provides yet another reminder.
Thinking you know all the answers is a dangerous place to be in. If you don’t want egg on your face I’d strongly advocate testing things with your market so you know for sure rather than relying on your best guess, no matter how educated you think it is.
Adi Gaskell is Head of Online at the Process Excellence Network
Matt Ridley on Maestripieri’s Games Primates Play | Mind & Matter – WSJ.com @WSJ.
‘Eisenhower in War and Peace,’ by Jean Edward Smith. Eisenhower knew how to lead without appearing to. @NYTimes.
Bell Labs and innovation: The organisation of genius. @TheEconomist.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. By Jon Gertner. Penguin Press; 422 pages; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com“MY FIRST stop on any time-travel expedition”, Bill Gates once said, “would be Bell Labs in December 1947.” That was the time and place of the invention of the transistor, which powered the technology revolution that built today’s connected world. The handful of scientists who gathered in downtown Manhattan to witness the first demonstration of this transformational technology understood that it was special. The transistor was, one observer noted, “a basically new thing in the world” (other Bell Labs discoveries would earn the same astonished praise). The breakthrough was so big that William Shockley, the boss of the two scientists who made it, spent the next weeks in torment until he designed a better version. In doing so he broke a sacred Bell Labs rule—“absolutely never to compete with underlings”—for which he was never forgiven.The men of Bell Labs (the scientists were overwhelmingly male) are brought to life by Jon Gertner in “The Idea Factory”, his wonderful history of the most influential corporate-research lab the world has seen. A writer for the New York Times Magazine…
9 Timeless Leadership Lessons from Cyrus the Great. Forget 1-800-CEO Read. The greatest book on business and leadership was written in the 4th century BC by a Greek about a Persian King. Yeah, that’s right. Behold: Cyrus the Great, the man that historians call “the most amiable of conquerors,” … @Forbes.
The unconscious mind: Hidden depths | The Economist.
Stories of resistance: Shades of grey | The Economist.
Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller’s ‘Great Leaders Grow’ – Leadership Books – The Washington Post.
Games Primates Play seeks to explain human behavior from an evolutionary perspective.
The employee handbook for the software company Valve has been pushed around as an example of a new organizational model. I love it. There are a lot of things that are really good in it. They were the ones who developed the wildly successful and clever half-life.
In general, any company can achieve the kind of flat organization that Valve has. Here are the steps:
First, flat organizations have divested control (decision making) to employees in an way hierarchical organizations haven’t.
Second, in order for employees to make appropriate decisions, they need two things: technical competence in their jobs and clarity as to what the organization is trying to (really) accomplish.
Technical competence is solved with training (and learning).
Organizational clarity is achieved with honesty and communication of goals.
For a complete list of “don’t do this, do this” click here.
- Innovation Excellence | Polar Innovation. On managing teams for innovation.
- What Doesn’t Motivate Creativity Can Kill It – Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer – Harvard Business Review. From authors of The Progress Principle.
- The Hidden Power of Mundane Ideas – Riley Gibson – Harvard Business Review.
- The 8 Essentials of Innovation. You might hear that innovation depends on creativity or on new ideas but leading practitioners have gone beyond that. In fact in my experience many companies still only pay lip service to innovation. Those who are looking to do innovation well, in contrast, are either pioneering or looking to develop eight new elements. Here are those eight new attributes of really good innovators.
- Creating Innovators: Why America’s Education System Is Obsolete. America’s last competitive advantage — its ability to innovate — is at risk as a result of the country’s lackluster education system, according to research by Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner.
Rarely do you get something for free but the behavior of “deliberate action” is one of those things.
We developed this onboard USS Santa Fe after a problem we had when a sailor, without thinking, moved a red tag aside and shut a breaker. Fortunately, no one was hurt but it launched us into an exhaustive study of how to reduce these kinds of errors. After rejecting things like more training, and more supervisors, we realized the problem was that of engaging brain before acting.
We decided that when operating a nuclear-powered submarine we wanted people to act deliberately, and we decided on “take deliberate action” as our mechanism. This meant that prior to any action, the operator paused and vocalized and gestured toward what he was about to do, and only after taking a deliberate pause would he execute the action. Our intent was to eliminate those “automatic” mistakes. Since the goal of “take deliberate action” was to introduce deliberateness in the mind of the operator, it didn’t matter whether anyone was around or not. Deliberate actions were not performed for the benefit of an observer or an inspector. They weren’t for show.
On Monday we had a meeting with the crew on the pier to discuss the concept “take deliberate action.” I first explained what had happened with the red tag and the critique of the incident, and then I described what thinking deliberately meant and why we were going to do it. Even though it wasn’t presented as a bargain, I think that the crew, knowing their shipmate had been spared captain’s mast, were more receptive to the alternative—take deliberate action.
Deliberate action was accepted by the nuclear-trained personnel fairly readily because it built on a concept they had been exposed to at nuclear power school called point and shoot. Unfortunately, deliberate action was a tough sell with much of the rest of the crew, and we would ultimately pay for that.
Deliberate action is not for show
I believe “take deliberate action” was the single most powerful mechanism that we implemented for reducing mistakes and making Santa Fe operationally excellent. It worked at the interface between man and machine: where petty officers were touching the valves, pumps, and switches that made the submarine and its weapons systems work. TAKE DELIBERATE ACTION is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
But selling the crew on this mechanism’s value was hard going.
One problem in getting the crew to perform deliberately was the perception that deliberate action was for someone else’s (a supervisor’s, an inspector’s) benefit. Even though we continuously talked about how deliberate action was to prevent the individual from making silly mistakes, I would overhear sailors discussing deliberate action among themselves in this misperceived way.
The second problem was overcoming the perception that deliberate action was something you did as a training exercise, but in a “real situation,” you would just move your hands as fast as possible. I used the following thought experiment to dispel this error: consider we are conducting a training drill around Pearl Harbor and the ship loses all propulsion due to errors. What happens? We would surface and call for help, which is nearby. We’d critique the event and write the appropriate reports. No one would die. What happens, however, if we lose all propulsion in a “real situation” in the face of the enemy due to errors? Now people might die. The key is that as the importance of doing things right increases, so does the need to act deliberately.
How Can You Implement Deliberate Action?
If you are in a business where there is an interface between humans and nature the concept of taking deliberate action is pretty clear-cut. Electrical utilities, airlines and cruise lines, manufacturing plants, and hospitals are examples. In these kinds of organizations, you’ll be able to see immediately how acting deliberately would help reduce mistakes. The challenge will be when things are happening quickly, or need to happen quickly, as in a casualty in a power plant or emergency room procedures in a hospital. It’s even more important that actions be performed correctly. You don’t have time to “undo” something that’s wrong.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but it turned out that take deliberate action had two tremendous benefits in addition to reducing errors. Rather, as a mechanism to reduce errors, it operated in two additional ways.
First, in team settings, when operators paused and vocalized and gestured, it allowed adjacent operators to step in and correct mistaken actions before they were taken. When I arrived at Santa Fe, many operators felt it was a point of prowess to operate as quickly as possible, and we had to overcome this. For example, the reactor operator in a pump shift may say, “Shifting number one reactor coolant pump to fast,” and he would be pulling the switch at the same time he said the word fast. Unfortunately, if he accidentally had his hand on the switch for pump number two, it would be too late to stop him, and the wrong pump would be shifted. In exercising caution and deliberateness, the pause prior to starting the pump would allow the operator sitting next to him to stop him or him to recognize the error himself.
In addition, when we ran drills, we would station monitors whose job it was to intervene to prevent inappropriate action. The drill monitor would have full insight into the drill and would know which actions were allowable and which ones were not. If the operator were tempted to take an inappropriate action, either intentionally or not, the monitor would stop him. Unfortunately, with the operators moving quickly, the monitors frequently only recorded errors after they happened because they didn’t have a chance to intervene. This was especially true if the operator announced the correct action but became confused in the stress of trying to respond properly to a casualty and physically operated the wrong switch, breaker, or valve.
Later, when Santa Fe earned the highest grade on our reactor operations inspection anyone had seen, the senior inspector told me this: “Your guys made the same mistakes—no, your guys tried to make the same number of mistakes as everyone else. But the mistakes never happened because of deliberate action. Either they were corrected by the operator himself or by a teammate.”
He was describing a resilient organization, one where error propagation is stopped.
Many people talk about teamwork but don’t develop mechanisms to actually implement it. Taking deliberate action is certainly one.
Let me know how deliberate action works for you.
Here an operator points at an operating switch for a control valve in the torpedo room of USS Santa Fe, and pauses, prior to operating it.
Macaque monkeys have hormonal changes that track with social status. Image from The Economist Misery Index of 14 April 2012.
A recent article in the Economist adds to the growing body of evidence that there is a positive correlation between control and health.
The article reports the results of a study by Drs Tung and Gilad on macaque monkeys. The study found biological changes that accounted for what researchers have known for a while: people at the bottom of social hierarchies exhibit greater physical symptoms of stress, have higher incidences of heart disease, and shorter lifespans. (The landmark study was the Whitehall study of British Civil Servants starting in the 1960s.) The biological changes are marked by hormones that are triggered by genetic activations which are linked to social status. By changing the order in which the monkeys were introduced into a group (later inductees have lower status) they were able to tinker with status and detected hormonal changes that matched change in social condition.
One of the things that higher social status brings is increased control of your life and work circumstances (the objectives and methods). It follows that workplaces organized in such a way the people at all levels, even the lower levels, have greater control of their work (greater decision making ability) will be healthier overall.
If you want to create healthy workplaces, then, “give control, create leaders” rather than “take control, attract followers.”
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
