Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say--and What You Don't

by L. David Marquet

Changing the way we communicated changed the culture. Changing the culture transformed our results. Changing our words changed our world. The language changed in three ways:

We replaced a reactive language of convince, coerce, comply, and conform with a proactive language of intent and commitment to action. We replaced a language of “prove and perform” with a language of “improve and learn.” We replaced a language of invulnerability and certainty with a language of vulnerability and curiosity.

Everything started with me. I’d always believed that I couldn’t remain quiet because people wouldn’t speak up. Finally, I realized that people weren’t speaking up because I couldn’t remain quiet.

waiting for people to prove themselves in order for me to trust them was backward. I needed to entrust people with authority and autonomy in order to give them the opportunity to prove themselves.

When I came aboard Santa Fe, I had it in my head that I would improve the crew’s performance. Better performance would then lead to better morale. It didn’t end up working that way. Instead, once people were given autonomy over their work, became connected to a purpose that mattered, and felt like pa...

I learned that if I can only keep my mouth shut for a few extra seconds, ask the kinds of questions that encourage people to share their thoughts, and actually pay attention to what others are saying, their ideas, points of view, and suggested actions are often as good as—often even better (!)—than what I’d had in mind.

It takes continuous self-awareness and reprogramming to avoid the imperative mode of communication that is the default in our society. Today, I try to pause before responding or reacting in order to give myself ample opportunity to phrase things in a more effective way. I’ve seen how powerful the right words can be at achieving results.

The right balance of doing and thinking keeps an organization adaptive and agile, innovative and entrepreneurial. It gives the people in the organization a sense of purpose and progress, which helps drive continuous improvement. In short, the right balance of doing and thinking drives learning. It keeps the company relevant and solvent. It keeps employees happy. It leads to happy customers, too.

In the best cases, obeying the clock creates focus. It puts us into a performance mindset. This helps us get things done, which is fine, as long as the things getting done are the things that need to get done. As a stressor, however, it creates all the effects any stressor will have on us: we retreat into self-preservation mode, with a resultant reduction of cognitive activity and a narrowing of perspective.

As individuals, we should embrace our responsibility for being the best we can be within the design of the organization. But as leaders, our responsibility is to design the organization so that individuals can be the best versions of themselves.

For better results, diverge first: allow each member to make his or her guess before being influenced by the group and, most importantly, the boss. We want an uncorrupted look at what each person believes to ensure the greatest possible diversity of thought. A simple way to do this is to ask each person to write down an estimate before any discussion occurs. Now converge: review the estimates as a group without identifying who made each one, and then narrow the possibilities down collectively.

we have long been biased toward doing, down to the language we use and the ways we design our organizations. We need to call the plays that will balance all that doing with more thinking at every level of the hierarchy, not just at the top. That is the message of this book.

Here is the key difference: Thinking benefits from embracing variability. Doing benefits from reducing variability.

The language of embracing variability is open, curious, probabilistic, and improvement focused. It sounds like “How do we know?” or “How safe is it?” It is the language of curiosity and vulnerability.

The language of reducing variability is focused and goal driven. It means strict compliance with rules and adherence to process. It sounds like “Do it this way” or “It is safe.” It is the language of control and compliance.

Humans are easily seduced by the good feelings triggered by “getting stuff done.” It is only with time that the churn of getting stuff done starts to feel empty if not properly balanced with reflection.

To fix this pattern, to shift from redwork to bluework mode when you need to make decisions, requires going against what feels natural, because we’re used to talking in a language that is deterministic, binary, and unchallenging.

We did not have just bluework and redwork, we had blueworkers and redworkers. One group—the blueworkers—made the decisions, while another group—the redworkers—executed those decisions. One group did the thinking; the other did the doing. One group embraced variability; the other group worked to reduce variability. One group led; the other followed. Assigning the different modes of work to different groups of workers simplified the task of management and fit the times. It drove the organizational design of the Industrial Age. It also shaped the management practices and even the default language of the workplace.

Deming’s first key insight was that quality did not cost money, it saved money. This approach came to be known as Total Quality Management or Total Quality Leadership.

In addition to CRM, there are a host of other modern management approaches with an overall objective centered around an idea like empowerment, engagement, ownership, having people think, allowing people to speak up, creating psychological safety, coaching instead of commanding, or asking the right questions. Intent-Based Leadership, the management style developed on board Santa Fe and refined through its application and analysis in other organizations, is an approach that strives to incorporate all of these attributes.

The limitation of many of these programs is that they attempt to patch over problems in an inherently broken structure, or playbook. In essence, they encourage us to run the old plays better, more effectively, and in some cases replace them with new plays—but the overall playbook of leadership and language remains intact. The result is that leaders unwittingly sabotage their efforts to create better workplaces by using automatic and programmed language patterns that stem from the Industrial Revolution, stifling the emergence of any true red-blue approach. They don’t know they are doing it and don’t see the connection between the leadership plays they are used to relying on and the behaviors at work.

There is an optimal balance for any business, but finding it takes skill and experience.

Cycling between Discovery and Delivery

Across organizations, especially those that are heavily process oriented like power plants, hospitals, and manufacturing, there is a tendency to focus on the errors in redwork and to underappreciate the errors in bluework and, critically, errors in structuring the redwork-bluework balance.

No one *ever* pushes back on what they are told to build

The reason for this is that errors in execution work are immediately visible:

At a trucking company, the decisions for pickup loads, times, and locations are determined by management (blueworkers). So are the maintenance plans for the trucks. Drivers (redworkers) are relegated to simply driving a predetermined load from a predetermined location along a predetermined route. It’s a classic case of assigning bluework to the blueworker class and redwork to the redworker class.

The next time you have a problem at your company, think about this: Is this simply a problem in execution, or was there a decision in the past, perhaps the distant past, that set us down the path where this operational problem was more likely to happen? Is the problem rooted in faulty bluework in the past?

Even more difficult to identify are situations in which the problem results from simply not engaging in bluework. There’s no decision to evaluate because it’s not clear anyone made a decision to do, or not do, something. They just kept doing what they were doing. We call this the Industrial Age play of continue, and this can be one of the subtlest root causes to discern.

Once someone says a number, we reduce outliers and cluster thinking more tightly together, so anchoring is naturally an ally of redwork. But in almost every meeting where a decision is to be made, we observe the same pattern: discussion first, then voting. The discussion serves to anchor thought to a smaller range, suppressing outliers and leaving only one of two or three options that are not significantly different.

In reference to poker planning

To conduct a clear-eyed, unbiased examination of costs and benefits, you must consciously invoke system 2 thinking. This would be a period of bluework: broadening your perspective before committing. System 2 thinking asks questions like:

“What are we missing?” “How might this go wrong?” “If we do this and it ends up going south, what would be the most likely culprit?”

If you want to embrace variability, avoid the anchoring bias by voting first—simultaneously and anonymously—then discussing second. This approach will result in the widest variability and lead to greater collaboration.

Poker planning

The prove mindset is motivated to demonstrate something positive, the protect mindset is motivated to hide something negative.

The improve mindset sounds like this: “How can we make it better?” “How could I do better?” “What have we learned?”

The results were awkward, tentative, and ineffective, which only makes sense: they had never practiced bluework plays. The reason? They had no playbook for bluework. All they had were redwork plays.

First, working products were to be delivered frequently, as frequently as every two weeks. These short bursts of work were called “sprints.” Early and frequent testing exposure to users allowed early and frequent adjustments.

Second, the team would work with the product owners to decide which features they would include during the next sprint. Rather than the Industrial Age approach of separating doers and deciders, the agile approach turned the doers into deciders.

The structure of the red-blue operating rhythm and the plays here should allow a similar approach throughout all leadership levels.

This is the new playbook, which comprises six main plays: CONTROL THE CLOCK, not obey the clock. COLLABORATE, not coerce. COMMIT, not comply. COMPLETE, not continue. IMPROVE, not prove. CONNECT, not conform.

Redwork is doing. Redwork is clockwork. Redwork consists of a constant battle for efficiency and for getting work done against the clock. This is why workers clock in and clock out and many people are paid “by the hour.” People performing redwork feel the effects of this pressure as stress and are “under the influence of redwork.” They cannot help it. Our mindset in redwork is a prove-and-perform mindset. The protect mindset is an unhelpful subset of the performance mindset and is to be avoided. Variability is an enemy to redwork.

Bluework is thinking. Bluework is cognitive work. Bluework is harder to measure based upon the time input. Bluework is about creative input and decision-making. Bluework lives in service to redwork. Stress has a strong negative impact on people trying to perform bluework. Our mindset in bluework is an improve and learn mindset. Variability is an ally to bluework.

Redwork and bluework require two different languages.

Redwork is brittle. The bluework allows us to adapt. But unless we control the clock, we have no chance to do our bluework.

TO MOVE TOWARD CONTROLLING THE CLOCK Instead of preempting a pause, make a pause possible. Instead of hoping the team knows what to say, give the pause a name. Instead of pressing on with redwork, call a pause. Instead of relying on someone to signal a pause, preplan the next pause.

“We have time to do this right, not twice.” “You may have heard that this is an important milestone. That is true, but if we can’t get this done safely, I’ll recommend a postponement and I’ll be responsible for it.” “I invite you to call pause if necessary.” “You all have yellow cards to signal the need to slow down.”

All too often we preempt a critical pause. These executives were going by traditional Industrial Age redwork plays. They were reinforcing the importance of production adhering to the stated timeline. They were deliberately trying to set the team into a prove-and-perform mindset in support of making the deadline. But this action also activated a protect mindset in people, and in both cases, prove or protect, the mindset made it harder for team members to state dissenting opinions or raise objections.

The Andon cord allowed the worker to escape from production work, redwork, and shift to problem solving, bluework.

Upon arrival, the supervisor first thanked the worker for pulling the cord. This gratitude was unconditional.

Stress is dangerous because it inhibits your ability to recognize when you need to exit redwork. This is why it is unfair and unreliable to depend on the person or team in redwork to call a pause.

Controlling the clock is about the power of pause; the power of our ability to control the clock rather than obeying the clock; being mindful and deliberate with our actions; and broadening our perspectives.

Controlling the clock sets us up to collaborate.