Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - This man commanded a Billion Dollar Submarine. Let him teach you Leadership Language: David Marquet (#064)

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

  David Marquet’s leadership transformed the fate of those aboard the U.S. Navy submarine under his command. Watch this episode to learn tips from his latest book and motivate people through your language. David and I talk about the small adjustments in our habits and language that can make a difference. His creation of intent-based leadership programs encourages purposeful and effective leadership, which in turn creates happy and productive workers. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive show notes for this episode: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 10:32 Language matters in leadership. 19:42 The ego of decision making. 25:25 Reprogramming our instincts to live in the modern world. 32:14 Getting real feedback using the “Fist to 5” method 41:44 You can be better every day. 48:03 What ethical will does Marquet plan to leave behind? 49:52 What object or knowledge would Marquet put in or on his monolith? 50:39 What did Marquet think was impossible until he did it? David Marquet served as captain of the U.S.S. Santa Fe, a Navy nuclear submarine. Since retirement, he has written books and workbooks about effective leadership. He also gives speeches and runs the YouTube channel Leadership Nudges. Buy Marquet’s books here: Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say–and What You Don’t https://amzn.to/37nXeNr Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders https://amzn.to/3d0Sf6h The Turn The Ship Around! Workbook: Implement Intent-Based Leadership In Your Organization https://amzn.to/37muHI7 Subscribe to Marquet’s Leadership Nudges https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM6PvFiH_weNCMCnFynTNdg?sub_confirmation=1 Watch Marquet’s TEDx Talk https://youtu.be/DLRH5J_93LQ Find Marquet on the web: https://www.davidmarquet.com and Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldavidmarquet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to this episode of Into the Impossible. I just finished recording the episode you're about to listen to. I want to say this was a very interesting conversation for me. I had not yet had on someone with the experience of commanding a $2 billion vehicle, and then such as the USS Santa Fe, which was Captain Marquez's previous assignment, and yet he has this humility, servant leadership trait that's allowed him to really speak to the hearts of the people that he works with. He's working now as a consultant advisor.

I want to really just say how much I appreciated his time. And his team has graciously allowed us to have a giveaway for residents of the United States or air post office boxes if you're in the military. So we have a lot of military guests on the show. You will hopefully have a link that you can download for a giveaway of Captain Marquez's book, his new book, Leadership is Language. I have it on audio and in the physical world right here. I'm going to give an introduction to him. I didn't want to spend his valuable time reading his introduction because it's so extensive.

I'm going to do it now. So L. David Marquez is an author, is student of leadership and organizational design. He's a former nuclear submarine commander and was named one of the top 100 leadership speakers by Inc. Magazine. David is the author of the Amazon number one bestseller, Turn the Ship Around, and Turn the Ship Around Workbook. I have not read that, the workbook,

but I'm actually going to pick it up right now. David's recently released book Leadership, His Language, is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. David Marqueh imagines a workplace where everyone engages and contributes to their full intellectual, capacity, a place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work, a place where everyone is a leader. And just breaking away from that publicity materials that he sent me, his team sent me, there's really a special message encoded in this

podcast and maybe even in the book, which is his life's mission. We'll tune into the end of the podcast. He'll talk about why this book is so important outside of leadership. And it really touched me to hear his response. So stay tuned for that. David's in 1981. U.S. Naval Academy graduate, and he served in the U.S. submarine forces for 28 years. After being assigned to command the nuclear-powered submarine in the USS Santa Fe, which was then ranked last in retention and operational standing, he realized that traditional leadership approach of take control, give orders, would not work. He turned the ship around by treating his crew as leaders, not followers,

and giving control, not taking control. This approach took the Santa Fe from worse to first, achieving the highest retention and operational standings in the Navy. After Captain Marquay's departure, the Santa Fe continued to win awards, promoted a disproportionate number of officers and enlisted mental leadership positions, including 10 subsequent submarine captains.

And I can tell it was one of his highest honors for him that he not only had many followers, but he created many more leaders. And in the previous book, in this book, there's a foreword by Stephen Covey, who I believe has since passed away, unfortunately. And this book says, I don't know of a finer model of this kind of empowering leadership than Captain Marque.

And in the pages that follow, you'll find a model for your pathway. It's also by Joe De Bono. He called it, The Hunt for Red October meets Harvard Business School. Simon Sinek said, David Marque, as the kind of leader, comes around once in a generation. So this book is really a precursor. I would read this first. If you're going to read it, maybe get the workbook. I'm going to go buy that now.

I'll put links in the show. notes so you can get it too. And then remember to enter into the contest. I'll promote that on social media and he will as well. And then just lastly, the team sent me what is the message of this new playbook for leaders called Leadership is Language. And really, he says it's time to ditch the Industrial Age Playbook of Leadership. This book provides a structure as well as specific language for dramatically improving decision-making and execution for teams. In addition to being a Wall Street Journal in Washington, Bo's bestseller, leadership in his language, has been named the business book of the month by the Financial Times. So I think what was so exciting for me to talk

about him and obviously talk about scientific leadership, academic leadership, is this notion that we're all leaders and we can lead in any level and the ways and tools that he describes and how to do that are actionable. And you can do that at any level in your family, in your friends, in the military, even if you're not chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, you can do it. And he really gives you in this new book, Leadership is Language, the number one tool, which is this unique ability that human beings have to communicate. And so I hope you'll enjoy this episode with Captain L. David Marquet, U.S. Navy, retired. And I hope you'll enjoy, like, subscribe, comment, all those good things, keep this podcast going.

Let me know what you like about it and let me know what other guests you'd like been to have on the show. Thanks very much. Now, please to present Captain L. David Marque, Leadership is Language on the Into the Impossible Podcast. Welcome, everybody, to the Into the Impossible podcast. I am your lately very fearful host, as I say, Brian Keating, co-director of UCSD's Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations, Into the Impossible Podcast, where we talk

to great leaders and thinkers, scientists, artists, poets. Yesterday, Captain, you'll be pleased to know I talked to a NASA astronaut. My second one, the first one I talked to Dr. Jessica Meir. She, I talked to from the International Space Station. But you're also calling in from where Nicole Stott, astronaut Stott, that I spoke to yesterday, called him from, which is Florida. So first, Captain, how are you doing in Florida? Good. I'm fine.

I'm like being home. I'm an I'm an introvert and a geek So hey this is great I was like you know Mono Zuma's revenge or something It's uh I told you guys it was scary Getting together with people

Yeah I know I was thinking well you know For a lot of our friends I always joke you know how do you know if a scientist is an extrovert Because he looks at your shoes instead of his own shoes And I like to be with my fellow Geeks and nerds especially one such as yourself who's taught me so much. You didn't know this, but I read the previous book, Turn the Ship Around, and just devoured this book called Leadership is Language.

Reportedly, I think I heard that you were going to call this the five love languages of leadership, but maybe that's not true. We had a lot of titles. Yeah, so I always ask my guess. Actually, let's segue right into that. The advice is never judge a book by its cover, but I always judge all books by their cover, because I'm just human, right?

So how'd you come up with the title, actually, for this book, your most recent book, but let's actually start with Turn the Ship Around and the Covered. Turn the Ship Around was easy. It was, I was, this was like five years before I wrote it. I was still in the Navy. I was doing, anyway, I was talking to various people. I had a job at one point where I was a liaison up in Manhattan to business groups, And that was really interesting because I got to meet all these business people and financial people, hedge fund people, whatever.

Anyway, so I'm telling kind of my story, my thoughts, what's going on. And one guy just blurt out to he said, oh, yeah, I'll give you the title of your book, Turn the Ship Round. And as soon as he said that, I said, yeah, that's it. And then, of course, you have the scene in Star Wars where Lay is coming back and they say, They turn the ship around and they kind of come back to pick up Luke. He's dangling from that thing. And so if you type and turn the ship around, you'll either get my book or you get a scene from Star Wars. Oh, we love it here.

And our Arthur C. Clark would be proud to hear that. And then Leadership is Language, subtitled, The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don't. And I think I understand the symbolism of the colors. But can you talk us through the title and what it means to you? So at one point I want to one. want to call it the new playbook for leadership or have the subtitle be a playbook because here's the way I think about it. As I went through my leadership stuff, I kept, it's all about how you interact with people. Leadership's always about other people. And how do you do that?

We do it through language. So if you're a paint, if you're a painter, you use paint. If you're a bricklayer, you use bricks and mortar. If you're a leader, you use words. And it always seemed to me like we, 99% of leadership programs got shy of saying the actual words. We would say things like, well, you need to communicate more. You need to care of your people. You need a blah, blah, blah. Like, well, what do you actually, like, what do you say? How do you make that happen?

You need to empower your people. And so for me, I started making this big list of don't say this, say that. So, for example, when you ask a question, someone comes up to you and says, I think that's a bad idea. And your reaction is, no, let me explain. Let me tell you, or you might say if you're in light and feeling enlightened that day, well, why do you think that? Anyway, none of these I don't think are very good responses. What you want to be is curious, not compelling.

So, and even if you said, are you sure, that's still not that helpful because the response still doesn't tell you a whole lot. I would argue. Yes, I'm sure. What does that even mean? If it's about the future, you can't be sure. You and I are physicists, so we know everything is probabilistic. In the future, anyway, maybe even in the past, but we'll let that be. Anyway, so I would say, well, don't say, are you sure?

Ask how sure are you? Don't ask, is it safe? Ask how safe is it? And so I kept starting to being this big list. And it turns out there's a underlying pattern. all these different things that we say. And the pattern is they're structured from an industrial age era with the objectives, two objectives.

One is to reduce variability, collapse variability and uncertainty as soon as possible, which often means prematurely. And two, there's a coercive nature because the industrial age organization was designed so that one group of people made decisions and a different group of people had to implement the decisions that were determined by the first group of people.

And it looks like this. This is your industrial age factory. You have all these people. These are people doing what they're told. And this one person over here, the foreman, is a person who's telling people what to do. So the point is, in that model, it's coercive. We don't say it.

We use, oh, it's motivational, it's inspirational, whatever, but it's fundamentally about getting someone else to do something you decided they needed to do. And it hit me like a lot, like just a ton of bricks. Like that's the model. It doesn't have to be that way. We can let the people who are doing the work make decisions about the work. How do we do that?

We know it's better. And it came out through language. And so what I think is my hypothesis is that our language is an industrial age language. And you can do everything you want to claim to be in an enlightened workplace and an enlightened leader. But unless you actually change the words you say, now this is the easiest and the hardest thing to do. You don't need software. You don't need to change laws of physics, but you have to change your habits. And there's so many people, myself included, that you're stuck in the patterns.

There's some people, for example, who like to say the word right. So, da-da-da-da, right, and then-da-da-da, right? No, wrong. Why do we have to, first of all, why are we saying right? It's a coercion. It's a micro-coercion to piggyback in another genre. It's a micro-coversion because it's just saying, if you don't think this is right, you're the odd person. And I just make it a little harder for people to disagree.

Yeah. The structure of meetings. where we talk about something and then we vote is inherently coercive because the conversation makes it harder for the outliers to speak up. We want it to be because I'm not really truly, honestly, interested in a real conversation. So I say, hey, we should launch 737 Mac software, right? I mean, we've done a lot of testing. I mean, you told me that test.

That's a bit of those. It's very important. Airbus is getting ahead of us. We're ready to go, right? Yeah. Yeah, what do you guys think? Uh-huh. No.

So it's all upside down. It's the culture, yeah. I usually don't push. No, it's the words. It's the words. Right. But I'm saying, yeah, we're stuck in this culture. Culture.

Yeah. And it all starts with the word that you say. Yeah. So I'm an educator. You know, my day job is an educator. My night job is doing podcasts. But, but, you know, and I usually don't push back against my, my guest that I'm a very honored to have so early in the conversation. But I'm going to push back a little bit. So

I'm an educator and the educational system in America and throughout the Western world, I don't know so much about other parts of the world, is still this industrial, even pre-industrial model where you're training people to be in that factory setup, just like you displayed on your virtual background a couple of minutes ago. And that language is also extremely important. You can't teach somebody if you don't have sort of a notion of, I don't want to say love, but I feel like you have to have a certain amount of affection. The Maslow's hierarchy, you talk about this before, but you have to have physical safety, you have to have some kind of emotional connection. You can't say, like, you're going to, I mean, you're drill sergeants or whatever you have

equivalent in the Navy, the same thing. You know, I don't think that's the most important language to communicate teaching in a way that's going to penetrate into the soul of the receiver. And I guess my pushback to you is if the educational system, which every leader had to go through the educational system, and if that hasn't changed in 250 plus years, why are you optimistic that we can change a higher order meta skill like leadership based on language if we can't even get the preceding amount of education change in the way that we use language as educators? I don't think you're pushing back. I didn't say it was optimistic. Okay. All right, fine. Yeah. I, it's going to change. And first of all, I totally agree with you. A lot of these things are not obvious.

If you're picturing the drill sergeant, that's the wrong picture. Like, that's obvious coercion and it's played for a certain reason. Well, these are things that we say not meaning to be this way, but are patterns of speech. So if I ask you, well, so I consult a bunch of big companies and they run a meeting and they make a decision I said well how why did you run the meeting that way why did you discuss it and then vote and why was the vote like a binary Roman vote why didn't you ask a probabilistic vote and why didn't you ask the vote at the beginning no one I don't know just the way we do it people no one's thinking

there's just unthinkingly repeating the same thing and so if you go back that so we're unthinkingly repeating stuff from a hundred years ago because all all the way in between no one ever stood up and said, this is not helping my cause. So first of all, yeah, the education system is part of it. Things are changing. I mean, there are education, there are spotlights, and we know companies and they're changing,

but it always starts with you, and we always have awkward conversation with leadership. They're like, oh, we allow you to come in and fix our people, teach them to speak up, teaching to think creatively. I'm pretty sure they're already thinking creatively. They're just keeping their heads kind of a thing. I was like, okay, well, let's start with you guys.

No, no, no, we're fine. I ordered them to speak up. It's not me. Like, okay, got it. Click. Anyway. So, yeah. So it's going to be hard, but what's going to happen is the companies that don't

operate this way are eventually going to go out of business. You can make a lot of money for a long time, but eventually it's all got to collapse because the leader is going to leave. So the leader could create a system where I'm the key decision maker like Jack Wells. And you can tell these people because it's a very personality-based thing. Jack Wells is a thing. Name one of the vice presidents. Right.

Can't do it. Yeah. Because they never heard about them. Jack Wells never talked about them. We really talked about himself. Yep. And so then we put our covers on the pictures. a picture on the cover of our books,

and then the thing falls apart, A, after he leaves, or B, because the things are in place. So it's not replicated. Now, Apple with Steve Jobs is kind of an interesting and different story. I think, you know, I never met him, but I read

the different biographies on them. They kind of pay a pretty brutal picture, but there's something going on there because they're still doing very, very well. It wouldn't be the case if they're all, if it was Steve Jobs, if he was bug up. Yeah, I mean, that might owe itself also the different culture in Silicon Valley. As you talk about in the book, towards the end of the book, you know, when leaders are fearful of granting authority and even the communications delegation to younger people in particular, you make this point, they do themselves a disservice because it might be that a younger person, yeah, they're not, he or she might not be a senior as,

the leaders, quote unquote, and this holds for experiments, this holds for department chairs and academia, which I want to get to. But actually, they're doing themselves to this service by creating this sort of cult of personality, as you say, it dies with them. And you give the point of, you know, Gordon Moore and also Andy Grove and talking about they would do these kinds of exercises where they'd ask themselves, and what we call as physicist, a Godankan experiment, a thought experiment, how would the company look if we suddenly disappeared, not gruesomely, just

they're gone, you know, maybe they got a bigger, better offer. And I wonder, say that again. They got them to save, they saved Intel because Intel was a memory kit maker and they decided to go into processors and there was a critical moment when Gordon Moore

turns to Andy Grove and says, well, what if we, imagine we both be fired and they brought in two new people to run the company, what would they do? And he's like, well, that's easy. We'd shift from memory to micro processors. Well, like, that's a brilliant, why is it so easy to do that? Because I psychologically detached myself from my previous decision.

And this is one of the key things that happens in organizations. Once you make a decision, your emotion, your ego now attaches to that. And so now you are contaminated. You no longer can dispassionally evaluate that decision. And we have lots of examples in history. that's called escalation of commitment, as you probably know. So we keep pouring effort into proving that, yeah, it was right. Blah, yeah, doing print film.

Of course, we got rich making print film. We're going to keep doing print film. Print film is the future, even though it's not. Everyone else knows it. We might even know it. We can't just because we were the people who did print film. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster,

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only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Yeah. What's interesting to me are the counter-exam. I mean, there's just a few, but you look at Microsoft and they basically put no energy into the web they kind of thought it was a passing fancy and they're one of the few to Kodak you know

versus Instagram or something like that that were nimble because I think they had a vision of themselves with a leadership mindset and and again I mean Bill Gates is was at least for a long time the real focal point of that organization and so it is sort of surprising a they've done better maybe since he's left in some ways and be that they were surviving these huge strategic mistakes not just the tactical mistakes, and we'll get into the El Farrow. But since we already started it down this road, I mentioned just before we started recording, I'm a pilot and just a hobby pilot. Hopefully, I am in training to get my CFI, my certified flight instructor certificates.

I'm a commercial pilot. I'm going to try to become a flight instructor, mainly so I could teach my kids someday to fly little Cessoners around. But we're taught very early on, and it's actually funny to me, Captain, you'll be reviews. in the whole federal register of documents, I believe that there's only one place where they talk about, you know, someone's emotions and their feelings and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's an FAA federal document on how to be a flight instructor. And it talks about like the need for love and the need for say. I just think it's funny. Like you wouldn't find this in the IRS, you know, handbook for auditors. You know, here's how you're, you have to make your auditee feel loved and welcome. But anyway, in this, yeah, we're taught that the most dangerous words we can say is, Captain, I'm going to see you at the airport at 503 p.m. exactly on Sunday afternoon. Don't be late. I'm not going to be late. It's called get there itis. And I feel like that's another name maybe for this escalation of commitment.

It's sort of a sunk cost fallacy. With pilots, it's extremely dangerous because we'll just get tunnel vision. We'll just ignore the weather. Oh, there's a huge buildup. Give me a little buildup over there. Oh, there's the airport's got a no-tam. There's a TFR, the presidents. And we just ignore it. We have to be there because I made this commitment. you know, I'm going to meet the captain there. I don't want to be late. And I get my ego invested in it. And I think these biases that you talk about in the book, they're so pernicious.

And yet, I just feel like they're hardwired. Maybe this is another thing that we're both not optimistic about. I don't know. But these things are so hardwired in that we have names for them, these fallacies and biases. Are you sanguine at all that the human mind, especially in the leadership, high stakes, corporate world or even academia, that we can overcome these lizard-like reactions that our brains are subjective to? subject to? Yeah, so the play we call, the play you're describing, we call obey the clock. We have work, we have clock work. We clock, many, many people still clock in and clock out.

Why? Because it's an industrial age construct that was about obeying the clock. Now, the problem is when you're obeying the clock, as you know, is from flight instructor, your brain, exactly how you described it. You get tunnel focused on the, and you don't, it's not like you see the clouds and you say, no, I'm not going to pay attention to the storm, to the weatherhead over there. It's like, you don't even see it.

And so what you want to do as a leader is control the clock, control it for your team. The leader's one that's got to say, all right, everyone stop, put your pencils down, and we now need to raise our heads. heads and turn left and right and scan the horizon and decide what to do. Then we'll go back. It's good to be focused and committed on the work for bulk periods of time but be super

focused. What happens is organizations don't define, this is a focus time, this is broad perspective time. So what happens is while I'm focused, I need to reserve a little bit of my cognitive ability to be scanning. So I'm only 90% into it. Because there's only partly out of it, then I'm liable to miss stuff. And then there's no rhythm.

So the whole thing about the new book is in these plays, you've got to be laser focused, but then super broad to be looking at the horizon. But there was something else you said that what was the last thing you ended up with? Just psychological biases that were all subject to. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So look, so we have instinctive responses to things. And as the world gets more and more complicated, your million years of DNA has no chance of this thing. So what's happening is our biological wiring is many times needs to be overridden by a more level-headed cognitive thinking. Connman talks about System 1 and System 2.

It's not just Connman, but it's a common, like we have our instinct, immediate reaction. I'll give you an example, though, racism. We're wired to be suspended. of people from the other tribe. Someone who looks differently than me, that's a marker the person's from another tribe. Now, we have been,

we as a race, have been working diligently, in my opinion, some more than others, to create systems to make it fair for everybody because we recognize, the conscious brain recognizes that's evil. That's not very, That's not good.

There's no reason for me to be suspicious of this person. And so I have some of this instinct, but then I have to override it as a human. And in our policies, we say, well, you know, I can write policies when I'm in calm, clear, cool, collected thinking mode. I'm not in a dark alley. I don't have, I don't have my primordial fears triggering. behavior. And so then I can write policies that will help me not fall into these traps.

So anyway, it's like maybe it's taken longer than it should have. But just like I think we can be better. But there is some deep, deep down wiring that is no longer helpful for us. and 10,000 generations from now, it'll be gone. Right. We've got a lot. We've got to get from here to that. What do you make of, you know, this, say we're speaking to a young middle manager

or associate professor, somebody who wants to, you know, move up in the corporate or academic ladder. There are all these gatekeepers, you know, ahead of her. And she's not really in charge of her own destiny. So she may read these books. benefit as I did, you know, I'm blessed to be, you know, co-leading with some of the most brilliant scientists around this huge, you know, $100 million project called the Simon's Observatory in the high out-acomond desert of Chile. And those people are so brilliant, my co-leaders

of the experiment and all the people that work for us. Let's say somebody has a suggestion. They may be a graduate student. They may be an assistant professor, you know, lower in the pecking order, you know, equivalent to a, you know, lieutenant or captain, or not a captain and not in the Navy, obviously, but lieutenant commander or something like that, but not at the level where they can actually turn the ship around, so to speak. What do you make, like, it's, it's frustrating when I remember what it's like. I know more than this person. And yet they knew me when I was a, you know, what do you call the ensigns, a puke's or whatever you call, the scabs, scallywag, I don't even know, but they knew me when I knew nothing.

And so how are they ever going to revise that image, that mental model that they constructed, which is another bias. But how can you actually empower somebody in minimal? I guess what I'm asking, are these books only for like the Jack Welch's, you know, they should have read this book, or how can someone who's not in the apex of the pyramid yet, you know, how can she make a change and effectuate the great wisdom of the books? well you influence you you influence in your family you influence in your division or if you don't in your department if you're not a department head in your division if you're not in your squire

if you're just a team member you can influence to in a positive way that people to the left and the right of you and you can maybe even influence upward you can find there are things in this book that i think will help you be heard The big problem is people just try and have influence and they skip the earn the so it's always a two step earn the right to be heard then have influence and people say well that's that's going to take time. It's going to be annoying. They should just trust that I'm a brilliant genius and smarter than them and they need to listen to me. Nah, it doesn't work like that. So step one, earn the right to be heard, step two have influence. So I yeah, therefore if you deal with human beings in your life,

life, then I'm, then there's something in here for you. Yeah. We have a lot of people talk about in how this works in their families. Yeah. No, I can definitely see that. I mean, I was just after reading the book yesterday, I was talking to my oldest son. And he's, you know, he's really interested in these podcasts and so forth. And he's like, you know, what makes a good interview data?

And I said, well, look at, you know, look at what God or nature, if you prefer gave you, you know, you have. you know, you have two ears and you have one mouth. And basically, it's a hint that you should listen, you know, basically twice as much as you talk. So I hope I'm doing that. But, but I agree. When you say earn the right to be heard, that's really just like first you have to listen and then you can speak. So it's kind of like the two to one ratio, almost embodied exactly what you're saying. I want to talk. And then, of course, there's this notion. You mentioned it in your book that leaders speak last. And it goes through with these tools. And I love the fact that you give not. only the strategy, you know, the kind of 30,000 furlongs, or I don't know what you guys talk about, but the really big picture view, you know, we'd say 30,000 feet as a pilot, but you give the strategic overview, but it's more important, I think, are the tactics that you give. So I thought maybe we could go through just one quick one. You talk about the cards, and I'll have a link to some exercises that my listeners can apply so that they can viscerally feel that.

But talk about the fifth to five, because I want to use that to riff on something that I came up with that has to do with of all things the second law of thermodynamics after this but talk about fifth to five how you came up with it or what how you apply it and how it benefits leadership as well one of our clients is a global construction company and for anyone in construction and anyone can imagine a construction site there's a lot of top down do-it-your-told kind of stuff and every morning the team gets together so i was uh i would observe these meetings and so one morning i was in Boston observing a meeting and it was a bunch of carpenters and the foreman walks in and he's a little bit of a younger guy but he takes a very gruff tone he uses the f-bomb about 15 times in the

five minute so we're going to do this this this this this this this this this this this uh you good go now you good it's not really a question you i wouldn't put a question mark after it if I were writing it. It means you better be good. And you're on your way. And no one had any questions. The head safety guy got up and he said, he asked six questions immediately in a row, immediately went out on the next one.

So you have the tools you need, right? You don't want anyone's heart had to blow up, do you? And blah, blah, blah. Like, again, no one said anything, 40 people. No one said anything. And afterwards, I was like, were you really looking for responses to those questions? Well, yeah, they're just, the problem is these are these binary questions. Is it safe?

Yeah, are you sure? Yeah. So you got to say how safe is it. So we changed it. So on the construction site, because no one's going to, no one, literally no one's going to say, it's not safe to work today. We have a storm blowing in. We have five new people.

We're going up on the third deck. There's no railings. It's not safe. But if you ask every day, you say, how safe is it? Zero to five. And people are going five, five, five. And then one day they say four. It's easy to do that.

Now you're like, oh, something's changed. We were talking to the doctor's organization in Seattle. So this one COVID hit. And one enlightened doctor started asking her team. The rest of them were like, you guys are good, right? You're good, right? And they would all say, yeah, they would all pretend to be good. They weren't good.

They were nervous. Some of them had when they had elderly parents, they would go home. So they'd be exposed as health care workers. They would go home interact with elderly parents. They were super miscared. So this one doctor says, how safe do you feel, not are you safe? And they're putting up, one person puts up a zero. That takes guts.

I mean, you just work with three, but zero. You know, first of all, thank you. You're the first person ever asked me that. And number two, And she told the story. It was with this, my mom lives with me. If I get sick, she's going to die.

I will know that I killed her. Can I work in a different, can I do something? Anyway, so the idea, so that's fist to five. You got to ask your questions in a probabilistic way. We say start the question with the word how. I'm sure. I'll say, visit, didn't. Don't tell people just so.

That'll make your questions better. Right. Yeah, I was thinking about that, you know, when you go to a restaurant and you ask the server, you know, what's your favorite dish? Well, you're just getting, you know, a sample of one. But if you say, what's the most popular dish, then you're getting a sample of every person that that server is interacted with. Now, it's not as high as stakes as dealing with COVID or dealing with the ship. The other thing that that really inspired me to think about is, I've heard it asked, you know, on a scale of one to 10, you know, almost everybody will say seven, you know, no matter what it is, because seven's safe, seven's cooked. Ozzy, you know, it's not too far away from 10, so you're not insulting somebody, and it's not so far away from five that, you know, five is almost awful out of a 10 points. So you basically say, you know, on a scale of, you know, one to 10, but you can't pick seven, what would you assign the probability exactly as you're saying? And I think those kinds of exercises are extremely valuable, because a lot of times, yeah, you don't want to stick your neck up. Those are people that get shot. Speaking of fingers and your hand, And I wanted to just remind you, because you had training in physics, that the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy is always increasing.

And the reason for that, your coffee will very often stay mixed up with the cream, but it'll almost never separate into a state of pure cream and pure coffee because there's only one such state, whereas there's an infinite number of combinations of multiple states. And I like to take people through an exercise, you know, how many pairs of interactions, you know, can you have in an organization with N elements in it? So if there's a, you know, a sub has, what, 80 people on it, Captain, something like that? 140. 140. So how many pairs of interactions are there? Well, it's easier to start with your fist, start with your hand.

So if you have five people on the submarine, how many combinations are there? Well, this guy can pair up at this one, this one, this one, and this one, and this one. And so you go through it, and it's four plus three plus two plus one different combinations. There's ten combinations. And actually, the pairs of contacts scale as the square of the number. So it made me think what I was reading, and that's kind of like the entropy of leadership. Like the number, it is it more, at least in my opinion, the organization has actually built up of pairs of networks. And then the network as a whole, you know, can be influenced by any one pair, but it doesn't have the influence of the N squared.

And so you kind of cost benefit when is the number. It's N squared divided by N. But I wonder, you know, in in this regime, is it more important as a leader to work on those like interpersonal? I've heard it said, you know, Lincoln was such a great, you know, Jim Simons, who's the patron of our experiment, the Simon's Observatory. He says Lincoln's his favorite leader of all time, even a human being of all time, because he would go out and he would mix with the troops. He would create those bonding pairs that I just talked about. What like single trait besides, in addition to language, perhaps, or maybe in the context of language when you're talking is the most important, you know, trait or tactic or skill to use in order to be a successful leader? Well, I'm guessing Lincoln's relationship with Grant was more important than his relationship with a common soldier,

but those interactions are important because on the aggregate, that soldier will talk to other soldiers. And Lincoln may learn something that he wouldn't have learned if the only is talking to Grant and Halleck and the rest of the union leaders. So I think you The thing I just keep going back to is why did you ask, why did you say it that way? Why did you use those words? 99% of the time people shrug their shoulders. So really in-depth listening, deep listening.

And deliberate speaking, if you're going to speak, decide how you're going to. to say what is the question you're going to ask and how are you going to ask it? Captain, I know we just have a few more minutes if you'll indulge me. I have some questions from my audience. So one member of my audience is practicing Jew, and one of the worst offenses that a person can commit in Judaism is what's called Lashon Hora, which means literally an evil tongue.

And there's a parable said that when a rabbi was disparaged, in the ancient, not ancient, but in the Stettles of Eastern Europe in the 1800s, and somebody told some gossip about this rabbi. And then the rabbi found out about it. His reputation was ruined as a leader in the community. And he asked the congregant or whoever it was to go see him when the congregate decided he wanted to apologize to the rabbi. So the rabbi said, you can apologize to me and make amends very easily.

And the, oh, thank you so much. I feel so bad. How do I do it, rabbi? The rabbi said, get a pillow, a feather pillow, and cut it open. And the guy said, okay, that's kind of weird. But he cut it open. And then he said, shake it out. And he shook it out.

And the feathers started flying around. And he said, now go gather up all the feathers. And that's how you'll make amends to me. Basically, that it's impossible. So a question that this listener has is, you know, let's say you make a mistake. And you fail. You failed as a leader in some sense. It may not be you went into.

the eye of a hurricane like the El Farah did, but nevertheless, we failed and at some level, as a leader, as a follower, somebody in the community, in the organization, how would you go about rectifying that? The language, you know, Martin Luther King said, you know, words that come from the heart, enter the heart, you know, how can we undo or make amends the mea culpa side of things? As leaders, saving face, you know, I mean, is it possible? Or, you know, you just have to just soldier on or, you know, sailor on. Again, I keep failing at my neighbor's analogies.

But can you help our listener kind of deal with, like, failure and letting your team down and then but wanting to have a teachable lesson from that experience? Well, you can't undo anything. That's obvious. It's happened. You can try and... have justice or make amends, but it's, unless you have some power to go back in time that I don't know about. I'm working on in the lab. I'm not allowed to talk about that.

Yeah, you're not going to under. Darpa's not letting me. You're not going to undo anything. Look, if you get to the end of the day and you don't in your head think, oh, I could have made this better. I could have been or had this been. I could have asked this better. I could have been more empowering here. I could have trusted a little bit more here. If you don't have like 10 of those at the end of the day, I think you're just walking through life clueless. If you don't think every day, now I'm not saying like I made a decision

launch the Columbia shuttle and people die, it doesn't need to be that dramatic, but you can make it better. You can be better every day. You just move on. Sometimes you don't need to apologize. just move forward be better i made a public commitment to my team to be a better leader to not tell them what my thing was don't give any orders i tell you guys what to do you i want you guys to

to call me out on that i want you to yellow card me we had referee card we had a little referee cards went through a lot of them and so you're going to get feedback but hiding it no You're not going to want. They're going to be dysfunction. Look, whatever behavior you do, they're going to do. So do you want, if your team makes a mistake, do you want them to come tell you about it? Or would you rather they just hide it? Yeah.

Okay. Whatever behavior you do, they're going to do. So if you make a mistake, you come clean. You say, hey, I could have done better. I wasn't in a good frame of mind when I was running this meeting. I didn't really do a very good job listening, in my opinion. It was brought up to me or maybe you just self-reflected on it. then isn't that what you would want your people to do?

As leaders, we have this arrogant asymmetry in our perspectives. Well, I'm going to be like this, but you have to be like that. Right. Different standards shifting zeitgeist for the followers versus the leader. But I don't know a single leader who wasn't a follower, and I don't know a single leader who never failed at something. if you even look at, you know, how many baseball teams win the World Series every single year for all eternity and no one. So, you know, getting, succeeding and dealing with that.

It brings up another question for me to you, if you indulge me, and then we'll get on to these final three questions. How do you deal with the letdown? I mean, you had the keys to a $2 billion vehicle. What was that like when you stepped down? I mean, I know it was also the beginning of another career for you, but what is that like emotionally? I mean, you got to the promised land. So few people in that industry, so to speak, get to there. Was it a letdown?

How do you deal with it? Is it just your character? You're just like, I don't know. I'm just going to get to work the next day. Start writing the book. No, I didn't write the book for 10 years because it took 10 years. The reason I wrote the book was not because we turned the worst submarine into the best and we went to the worst, the best morale,

it's because 10 years later, we created more submarine commanders than any other submarine. And this is what's lost. I mean, the turn the ship around is just the hook to get you to buy it. But the real story is about creating leaders. But again, listen to the language. When you stepped down. Why not when I stepped up or stepped away? But the language builds in these emotional interpretations that, look,

Look, look, leaving the submarine, that was awesome. But I was on the next phase of my life, which was in this case, I was an inspector. I stayed in the Navy for another 10 years. Wow. I was an inspector of other submarines. You moved to places of bigger. Yeah. So just the last thing I'll say on that, there's a famous rabbi in Judaism, the Labavitur rabbi, the head of the Habad movement of Judaism.

And he was rumored to say, you know, a good leader. creates a massive number of followers. But a great leader creates a massive number of leaders. And I think that that's sort of in harmony with the message of turn the ship around. The last... Leaders create more leaders. Yes. Here's a question.

Following what? Because it makes a big difference. That is a thought experiment. Yeah. Another Goden experiment. Okay. Okay. I was just about to call you rabbi.

but that's another honorific captain. Captain Marque, let me just finish up with the questions that I ask of all my guests, if you'll indulge me for a couple more minutes. First one has to do with a concept that we call an ethical will. And you may know that Alfred Nobel had a will that endowed in famous Nobel prizes. And in that will, he said the prizes should go for the greatest discovery or invention in physics, chemistry, etc. But he also said that the award should be for something that benefited mankind. In other words, the will was not just a material will giving away his Swedish croner,

but it was also an ethical will. It was giving wisdom or advice or conveying a message to humanity that he most wanted them to adhere to. And in fact, that lesson has probably been heated more than the impact of his financial munificence. So I want to ask you, Captain, if you're going to leave an ethical will, not your material will, what would you leave as a wisdom, as a brief inheritance to future generations that you've accumulated from your wisdom or advice so far on this planet? I want to work to not suck for so many people. I want people to be able to go to work. I want people to be able to be fully human. Say what they think, not worry about being judged, not feel psychologically.

safe, not worry about being second-guessed, not worry about being judged based on how old you are, to color your skin, and to go home free of toxins and free of stress so that you don't carry that out on your family. And the problem isn't evil people. There are a few evil people, and we'll get them sorted out. But the problem is the vast majority of people who are just doing, the same thing that their grandparents did, which was okay for their time, but we can do so much better now. We're not. Yeah, I'm kind of hoping that this book, as I said, there's more people that go through the education system than become leaders, but maybe the top-down approach isn't working.

Maybe we can change education if we change our leadership models and language is the first step, as you point out. Second question, Captain revolves around Arthur C. Clark's famous 2001, a space odyssey. his book turned into a movie, Stanley Kubrick, where the movie features an opening really, you know, canonical scene of all time, these monoliths, these giant structures that are, you know, really meant to be discovered by humankind, placed there by an ancient unseen civilization as sort of a time capsule, encapsulating something objective, a material object, or what have you. I want to ask you, if you could plant a monolith on some other planet or even on Earth, it's going to last for a billion years. It's your billionaire time capsule. What would you put in it on it? What would it be? Well, I don't know about other planets, but on earth it would be think for yourself. Good enough. I think that's fantastic. And last question really revolves around the second law, a third law of Arthur C. Clark, which was the only way to find out what is possible is to venture out a little bit beyond into the

impossible. So now we're going backwards in time. We had, too, about the future of your contributions and then the future of perhaps the planet. Now going back in time, advice to your former self, what seemed impossible to you once and now is eminently possible because you ventured a little bit into the impossible? Me? Well, I will tell you that I grew up during the Cold War and that just seemed like that was going to define life forever. And then it ended one day, and it was amazing. And it seemed like we'd stepped away from,

we didn't have to hide under our desk and do nuclear. And that was because Reagan and Gorbyshop were maybe able to step outside of their traditional roles. Gorbachev in particular, I think, who's a huge amount of credit for that. That's not such a personal story about it. I did definitely dedicated my, I mean, I went into the military because of the Soviet threat. I believe in the Constitution and our role in defending it. And I spent hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks thinking about how to defeat them if we ever had to go to war. And then all of a sudden it was over.

Well, that's actually a hopeful note to end on. because, you know, thinking about the generation of kids growing up with this anxiety, fear of, you know, COVID, et cetera, there's going to be light at the end of the tunnel. And I think it's fitting you discuss your patriotic commitment. I want to thank you for your service. We're hopefully going to release this episode on July 4th, befitting the great contributions that you've made to the country, not just in terms of your service and commitment to the armed forces, but also to training and inspiring. the next generation of leaders and benefiting, as you say, this follow-on effect that we don't know, the butterfly effect you help a leader at work, he or she has a better family life, you're going to multiply the midst vote, as we say. Captain, I want to thank you so much for sharing your time.

I know we went a little bit over, but I really appreciate it. Thanks, and thanks for having me on your podcast. Thanks for all listeners out there. Thanks for what you guys do to make the world of better things. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguable from mass. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.com. E.U. Find us on Twitter at Imagine U-CSD. Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, associate director, produced by Stuart Volko.