What If You Stopped Making Decisions?

Turn the Ship Around is Captain David Marquet’s account of turning the dysfunctional culture of the nuclear submarine Santa Fe into one of the highest-performing ships in the fleet. 

Marquet argues that leader-follower frameworks are outdated, and even empowerment in that context is suboptimal. “...[E]mpowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader ‘empowers’ the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers.” 

“I vowed henceforth never to give an order, any order.”

Instead of empowerment, Marquet argues for “emancipating” the team with a leader-leader framework. On the Santa Fe, that meant changing the language people used. 

“Officers would state their intentions with ‘I intend to . . .’ and I would say, ‘Very well.’ Then each man would execute his plan.” (p. 81)

Requiring this language forced everyone to be proactive. Instead of asking, “Can I…?”, the crew had to think: 

• What decision am I proposing?

• What are the conditions my boss would want to see to agree with my decision?; and 

• How can I communicate that clearly?  

In other words, the kind of thinking that forces everyone to level up. After implementing that strategy, Marquet writes, “We had no need of leadership development programs; the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program.”

So how can you use this?

Beyond adopting a form of the “I intend…” framework, to turn passive followers into proactive leaders, look for specific decisions to release to others on the team. This was the first step in the Santa Fe’s culture transformation. 

“[W]e didn’t give speeches or discuss a philosophical justification for the changes we were going to make. Rather, we searched for the organizational practices and procedures that would need to be changed in order to bring the change to life with the greatest impact.” 

Put another way, without creating the conditions for people to be proactive—i.e., ownership of actual decisions and the resources to carry them out—it won’t happen. 

A tactical exercise would be this: Think back on all of the decisions you made in the last two weeks. 

In what situations did people ask Can I…? 

Do any of those reflect rules that aren’t necessary or useful?

Are any of those decisions that you could give them authority to make?