Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

by L. David Marquet

The COW’s action to point to the vent switch, the next key action, was critical to this success. I asked Dillon, “Why did you do that?” Well, he explained, he knew it was the next action to take, and with deliberate action, he wanted to be ready for the order. Yes, and at the same time he signaled to the OOD in a tense time, without injecting more words, what the OOD needed to order. In this way, we learned another powerful aspect of deliberate action: think about it as anticipatory deliberate action. With the movements of watch standers indicating the next action they anticipate taking, they signal fellow team members and supervisors what they should be thinking about. It was powerful and helpful. Thereafter, whenever we talked about deliberate action, we talked about multiple benefits. Not only did it minimize the chance of a mistake by a person by himself and provide an opportunity for drill team intervention; it was also a critical aspect of teamwork. It worked in a couple ways. It was a bottom-up way of signaling action. It also worked because adjacent watch standers could correct potential mistakes before they happened. This was an excellent example of putting our mechanism of deliberate action into practice.