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

by L. David Marquet

But this time Senior Chief Worshek walked into the control room and suggested we change the practice. Instead of us (in the control room) hunting down the violation, we told the watch standers that if they made a transient they should just call the COW and report it without being prompted. This would save a lot of time, and it turned the handling of this issue of the stealth of the submarine from a top-down approach (We will force you to be stealthy, by God) to one where everyone felt an obligation to maintain the stealth of the ship. We tried it. Not everyone was sure this would work. First of all it was different. Old-timers grumbled that we’d lose our acoustic superiority if we let the crew make whatever noise they wanted to so long as they just confessed. Once again, however, it didn’t turn out that way. We started getting many more reports of transients than those detected by sonar. No one yelled; no one criticized. We just analyzed when, why, and how the noisy events occurred. They were things like pressurizing tanks, shifting valves under pressure, using hydraulics, or shifting steam or lube oil system lineups. Many occurred back in the engine room, and because the main sonar was in the bow they would go undetected. By unemotionally addressing all the transients that occurred rather than only the ones that our monitoring system detected, we ended up with a quieter ship.