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Operating in old ways—conforming to hierarchical roles, maintaining emotional distance from others, avoiding vulnerability at all costs—is lonely and unfulfilling, Marquet learned. Although he was proud of his promotions and awards, he realized that something profoundly important was missing.
When the captain of the nuclear-powered submarine USS Santa Fe abruptly quit and he was suddenly put in command, Santa Fe was the laughingstock of the fleet. At the time, Marquet joked that it had only two problems: the fleet’s worst morale, and its worst performance to boot.
Marquet explained his approach, “When I came aboard my new submarine, I started asking questions. In the past, I’d always made a practice of asking questions, but they were more like test questions: I already knew the answers. Did they? Now, I was asking questions because I needed to know how the ship worked. The officers of Santa Fe and I made a deal that day. I agreed to never give another order. Instead, I would provide intent, the goal of what it was we were trying to achieve. They agreed never to wait to be told what to do. Instead, they would provide their intentions to me, how they were going to achieve my intent. This shift was reflected in a simple change of language, replacing ‘request permission to’ with ‘I intend to.’”
As a result, the USS Santa Fe went from one leader and 134 followers to 135 leaders with a bias for action and thinking. What happened over the next ten years was even more remarkable. The crew of Santa Fe continued to outperform their peers after Marquet left. Ten of the officers from that time period were selected to command submarines, five became squadron commanders or the equivalent, and two (so far) have been promoted to admiral. In the navy, this track record is, to put it mildly, extraordinary.
Changing the way the crew communicated changed the culture. Changing the culture transformed their results. Changing words changed their world. The language changed in three ways:
- Replaced a reactive language of convince, coerce, comply, and conform with a proactive language of intent and commitment to action.
- Replaced a language of “prove and perform” with a language of “improve and learn.”
- Replaced a language of invulnerability and certainty with a language of vulnerability and curiosity.
Marquet needed to entrust people with authority and autonomy in order to give them the opportunity to prove themselves. Once people were given autonomy over their work, they became connected to a purpose that mattered, and felt like part of a team, they became happier. Morale soared. Then the performance improved.
Doing and thinking are the basic building blocks of all human activity. The correct balance of these two activities helps us achieve our goals. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to maintain a healthy balance, tilting too far toward action or too far toward deliberation.
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.
Our interaction with the world is doing. Improving our interaction with the world is thinking. Proving and performing is doing. Growing and improving is thinking.
Losing El Faro
“Oh. No no no. We’re not gunna turn around—we’re not gunna turn around.”
The ship commander’s words were the language of “getting it done” at all costs, the language of invulnerability and invincibility, the language that discourages any expression of concern. It sends the message that these decisions should not be questioned, our path is set, do not challenge me or make me explain this again.
We tend to focus on what others should do—for example, encouraging them to speak up even when we have demonstrated a reluctance to listen. Rather than doing the hard work and spending the time to change our own behavior, it’s easier and cognitively convenient to push the action onto others. Encouraging people to speak up, or even “empowering” them with statements like “don’t hesitate to change course” in an environment of top-down decision-making, simply does not work. Leaders say these things to assuage their conscience. When things go wrong, they can blame others for not speaking up despite the leader’s encouragement to do so. But leadership is about making the lives of others easier, not blaming them. Leadership is about the hard work of taking responsibility for how our actions and words affect the lives of others.
When the National Transportation Safety Board report came out, finding number eighty-one of eighty-one was, “Had the deck officers more assertively stated their concerns, in accordance with effective bridge resource management principles, the captain’s situational awareness might have been improved.” While true, this statement addresses a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. It is the responsibility of the captain and company leadership to create a structure that makes it easy for the deck officers to assertively state their concerns, not create a culture where questioning the plan is an uphill battle.
It is possible to create a safe environment for every member of the team to express their views, to invite dissent, and to collaborate on a decision, which results in a commitment to execute and thinking in terms of smaller completion chunks; this process inoculates us from escalation of commitment.
Share of voice is the proportion of words attributed to each person in a conversation and is an excellent indicator of the power gradient within an organization.
In his book Superminds, MIT professor Thomas Malone probes what makes groups smarter than individuals. He found that one of the factors is the degree to which the words are evenly distributed among the participants.
We need to always remember that the organization is perfectly tuned to deliver the behavior we see, and people’s behaviors are the perfect result of the organization’s design. As leaders, our responsibility is to design the organization so that individuals can be the best versions of themselves.
The New Playbook
“Overclaiming” is common in organizations, when people participating in shared tasks tend to take more credit than warranted for an outcome. The classic studies on overclaiming go back to the 1970s. Husbands and wives were separately asked to estimate their share of the household chores, as a percentage. When combined, the sums consistently exceeded 100 percent.
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.
Consider the “wisdom of the crowd”—a term coined by James Surowiecki in his appropriately entitled book The Wisdom of Crowds. Under the right conditions, the group is consistently smarter than any individual in the group. Doing is important, but action must be balanced with thinking.
The key to learning and growing, as a company and as a person, is correctly balancing these two activities. Here is the key difference: Thinking benefits from embracing variability. Doing benefits from reducing variability.
Redwork sounds like this: “Get it done!” “Make it happen.” “Let’s finish this.” “Are we on track?”
Bluework sounds like this: “How do you see it?” “How ready are we for this?” “What can we do better?” “What did we learn?”
Because redwork statements require only a simple OK or a yes/no response, the share of voice is naturally skewed. The bluework set of questions invite longer responses from the team. As a result, the share of voice will be more evenly distributed and there will be less deviation from a balanced conversation.
The challenge facing organizations in the twenty-first century is this: How do we create environments where we have both redwork and bluework, but not redworkers and blueworkers? How do we integrate the redworkers, previously labeled as the followers or doers, into the decision-making business of bluework?
It is clear that many leaders want to create an environment where their people speak up when they see problems, bring their full creative minds to work, and contribute discretionary effort, like new ideas and solutions.
We still have problems. We still have deeply divided workforces, workplaces that marginalize people, and people suffering stress and burnout at work.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman playfully and credibly identifies many such biases. One of these is the anchoring bias, in which we over-rely on an initial piece of information when making decisions. For example, if you ask a group of people to estimate a number aloud, the guesses will cluster near the first guess offered, regardless of whether it’s correct. We do this instinctively, even if we’re aware of the anchoring bias. It takes deliberate effort to avoid falling into this trap, and this is only one of many such biases.
The reptile brain uses flight, fight, or freeze to achieve self-preservation. Key point: self-preservation. In highly stressed environments, we often see individuals become much more self-serving than in relaxed environments. When teams have difficult problems to solve, and we, as leaders, put them under stress, team members turn into lizards.
There are two sides to the performance mindset. We either try to prove competence (I can do the project) or protect ourselves against evidence of incompetence (I don’t want to be discovered as incompetent). I will label these two subsets either a prove or protect mindset.
The new playbook uses 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.
Exiting Redwork: Control the Clock
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.
In most organizations, people get promoted for being go-getters, by making quick decisions and executing them in short order.
Some preplanned operational pause signals could be: Saying, “Time-out.” Saying, “Hands off.” Raising a yellow card. Pulling a cord. Raising a hand.
It’s hard for team members to call the pause. Here’s why: The team might be lost in redwork because of the stress of the clock. The team might be lost in redwork because of the intensity of focus. The team feels the pressure of obeying the clock most acutely. Calling a pause is likely to be calling attention to a problem, or a possible problem.
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.
Leaders need to be sensitive to signals from their teams that it is time to call a pause, even if the team does not use the exact right code.
In psychology, there is a concept called “metacognition,” or thinking about our thinking. By preplanning the next pause phase, we free all of our cognitive resources for execution rather than holding some back for process monitoring.
Into the Bluework: Collaborate
Let the doers be the deciders. When leaders attempt to collaborate with their teams to make decisions, they often end up skipping the divergent part (“What does everyone think?”) and jumping straight to the convergent part (“Here’s what I think. Does everyone agree?”).
TO MOVE FROM COERCION TO COLLABORATION
- Vote first, then discuss. Be curious, not compelling. Invite dissent rather than drive consensus. Give information, not instructions.
- Conduct anonymous blind electronic polling.
- Ask probabilistic questions instead of binary ones. Instead of the binary “Is it safe?” or “Will it work?” ask “How safe is it?” or “How likely is it to work?”
- Use dot voting or multiple voting (requires good psychological safety).
- Give people about one-third as many votes as there are options—for example: ten options, three votes.
- Use fist-to-five voting (requires good psychological safety).
- Embrace the outliers.
Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, considered this concept of “curiosity first” so important he titled his fifth habit “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.”
LEADERS SPEAK LAST
The higher you are in the organization, the more important this is because the more likely it is that people will want to align to your position.
The Seven Sins of Questioning
1. Question stacking: Asking the same question repeatedly in different ways or drilling down a logic tree you think defines the problem. Just ask one question once, then button it.
2. Leading questions come from a place of thinking the person is wrong, or that you have the answer.
3. “Why” questions: These put people on the defensive and reveals that you think “that” is a bad idea.
4. Dirty questions: Leading questions that do not overtly carry the message that the other person is wrong—but they do carry subtle and often unconscious biases and anticipate a particular answer.
5. Binary questions narrow the available responses to two: yes or no. Instead, start your question with “what” or “how.” This makes it impossible to ask a binary question.
6. Self-affirming questions are often binary questions with a special motivation: to coerce agreement and make us feel good about the decision we have already made. “You know what I’m saying?” Instead, seek enlightenment by asking questions that make it easy to bring up challenging information. This approach is “self-educating,” not “self-affirming.” Some examples would be: “What am I missing?” “What would you like to hear more about?”
7. Aggressive questioning (e.g., straight to “What should we do?”) Start with pause. This invites simple observation of the situation. “What do you see?” “How do you see it?”
SEVEN WAYS TO ASK BETTER QUESTIONS
- Instead of question stacking, try one and done.
- Instead of a teaching moment, try a learning moment.
- Instead of a dirty question, try a clean question.
- Instead of a binary question, start the question with “what” or “how.”
- Instead of a “why” question, try “tell me more.”
- Instead of self-affirming questions, try self-educating questions.
- Instead of jumping to the future, start with present, past, then future.
Make it safe and easy for people to dissent. This might require deliberately introducing dissent. The fear is that dissent equals disharmony and is to be avoided. But in organizations that practice dissent, where people are dissenting with the best interests of the organization in mind, and where people respond to the dissenters with curiosity, dissent does not feel disharmonious. Dissent creates a sense of excitement and energy—a leaning forward, a rubbing-the-hands-together feeling of “This could be the start of something interesting and new.”
Curious questions sound like this: “What’s behind what you are saying?” “Can you tell us more about that?” “What are you seeing that leads you to believe that?
Leaders, your job during any meeting is to scan the room and pay close attention to those who remain quiet. These people will often hold differing opinions that they don’t feel comfortable voicing.
With coercion, the best we can hope for is compliance. With compliance, we get effort, but not discretionary effort. The output of collaboration, however, is a commitment to move forward.
Collaboration requires us to share ideas, be vulnerable, and respect the ideas of others.
Leaving Bluework Behind: Commit
Commitment comes from within, whereas compliance is forced by an external source.
If you want to keep your commitments, try using “don’t,” not “can’t.” The word stems from Latin, combining com (with) and mittere (release, send). The word “mission” is also derived from the Latin mittere. Thus, “commit” conveys “going forth with a sense of mission.”
Individuals make commitments. Groups do not. Commitment is personal; it comes from within. Compliance only gets minimum fulfillment of requirements, whereas commitment invites discretionary effort.
TO MOVE FROM COMPLIANCE TO COMMITMENT
Commit to learn, not (just) do. Commit actions, not beliefs. Chunk it small but do it all.
When having conversations about commitments, there’s a natural sequence of could, would, and should, and it goes in that order. This is because we move from could (what is possible) to would (a conditional) and finally to should (which conveys a sense of obligation).
Escalation of commitment works like this: We are faced with a decision and we make one. Now we feel responsible for the outcome of the decision, but things do not play out like we had hoped. Evidence builds that the decision was wrong. Humans will persist in trying to turn the losing decision into a winner.
Escalation of commitment can also feed a sense of futility among team members about the value of speaking up and can erode their autonomy and control. “We started this; we’re going to finish this.” Or “Failure is not an option.”
In a 2013 article in Psychology Today, Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, states that one way of inoculating ourselves against the tendency to escalate is to separate the decision-maker from the decision-evaluator. This removes the decision-evaluator from the emotional investment that the decision-maker had in the decision.
Corporate rotation programs, where executives rotate among positions, also help to reduce the likelihood of escalation of commitment. The new executive, not having any attachment to the decisions made by the previous executive, is more likely to be able to walk away from a project that is unlikely to succeed.
The End of Redwork: Complete
OUR PLAYS SO FAR . . .
- CONTROL THE CLOCK, not obey the clock.
- COLLABORATE, not coerce.
- COMMIT, not comply. And now . . .
- COMPLETE, not continue.
If every day at work (or in life) feels the same, like it’s simply a continuation of what you were doing yesterday with no clear end in sight—then you are stuck in continue mode.
Complete serves to reset ourselves mentally from our past decisions. Celebration is a key part of the completion play. Celebration gives us a sense of closure on previous activities and, feeling good about what we’ve done, allows us to move on.
TO MOVE FROM CONTINUATION TO COMPLETION
Chunk work for frequent completes early, few completes late. Celebrate with, not for. Focus on behavior, not characteristics. Focus on journey, not destination
Done right, celebrate does several things for us—it gives us a sense of accomplishment, allows us to detach from the past and move on to the next thing, and, done right, it reinforces the behaviors that allowed us to be successful.
In Aubrey Daniels’s book Bringing Out the Best in People, he analyzed the structure of what causes behavior changes. He described it this way: ABC. A = Antecedent. What happens before the behavior. B = The behavior itself. C = Consequence of the behavior. This follows the behavior. What Daniels discovered is that only consequences affect long-term behavior change.
To celebrate with, not for: appreciate, don’t evaluate; observe, don’t judge; and prize, don’t praise. Celebrating by describing what you have observed and signaling appreciation for the behaviors
Psychologist Carol Dweck found that praising someone for an attribute—“You’re so smart” or “You’re so talented”—leads them to identify with that attribute. Once it becomes a part of their identity, they tend to avoid scenarios that challenge that attribute. Essentially, it has the opposite effect from what was intended.
To improve performance, celebrate what people can control—their efforts—and not the things they can’t—outcomes.
Take leadership action “observe and celebrate” because it’s so important to pause, say thank you, and signal appreciation before moving on to describing that effort, let alone deciding on next steps or possible improvements.
Completion gives us not only a sense of accomplishment, but also psychological separation from our previous activity.
Completing the Cycle: Improve
Improvement—which comes from egoless scrutiny of past actions, and deep reflective thinking about what could be better—is the core purpose of bluework, which is meant to improve redwork.
Contemplation and self-reflection are key components of learning, creativity, and innovation. But contemplation by itself is not enough. That’s why the play is IMPROVE, not contemplate.
To set up the IMPROVE play, we need to relax our minds and remove the pressure of the clock. This is why this play can only be called once we have controlled the clock and called a pause.
The term “continuous improvement” does not accurately describe how improvement happens. Improvement happens in batches, in increments, just like the dropping marbles. We have repeated, incremental periods of improvement—the bluework—where we change the process or change the product, like adjusting the funnel over the target.
Research by Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School shows how difficult it is to activate the “get better” self to learn and improve in organizations that do not have a supporting culture. In a 2002 report, she states, “To take action in such situations involves learning behavior, including asking questions, seeking help, experimenting with unproven actions, or seeking feedback. Although these activities are associated with such desired outcomes as innovation and performance, engaging in them carries a risk for the individual of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, or perhaps just disruptive.” People on teams have a choice between protective, “be good” behavior, intended to create an image of effectiveness, and open, “get better” behavior.
Intrinsic motivation comes from within. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan study the importance of intrinsic motivation in driving healthy human behavior. In their research, Deci and Ryan have identified three fundamental components of intrinsic motivation: competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
Fundamental human needs that almost all people feel: Competence is the feeling of mastery. Relatedness is the sense of connecting with other human beings. Autonomy is the sense of being in control of the things that matter in one’s life.
TO MOVE FROM PROVE TO IMPROVE, FOCUS . . .
- Forward, not backward.
- Outward, not inward.
- On the process, not on the person.
- On achieving excellence, not avoiding errors.
Improve is about reflecting on what we’ve done and making it one better. Improve pits the “get better” self against the “be good” self.
The Enabling Play: Connect
The CONNECT play is about caring—caring what people think, caring how they feel, caring for their personal goals. Instead of judging from a position of power, we walk alongside from a position of encouragement.
CONNECT IS ABOUT CARING. TO DO THIS:
- Flatten the power gradient.
- Admit you don’t know.
- Be vulnerable.
- Trust first.
Ideally, orders should follow the chain of command, but information should be able to flow freely throughout the organization. A flatter power gradient results in less censoring because it feels safer.
The “fear” in the workplace is about feeling judged, assessed, and evaluated by others, especially in a social context. Judgment places one person in a superior position to another, which is why so much feedback does not help and actually has a negative impact. Judgment is a special subset of enforcing the power gradient because the ability to judge is proof of being in a more powerful position.
One way to tilt toward observation over judgment is to opt for nouns over verbs—“performance” instead of “performed”—when discussing any dicey subject. This small shift in language can be powerful when emotions run high.
It’s hard to connect with a know-it-all, and a know-it-all is not going to care what you think.
When leaders admit they don’t know, they allow the team to admit that they don’t know. This is particularly important when discussing decisions because there’s no way of knowing whether one decision is better than another until afterward, sometimes long afterward. Ironically, a leader admitting they don’t know also allows the team or a team member to admit that they do know. If a boss says, “I don’t know,” it might allow someone junior to say, “I know . . .” or “How about this?”
Another tool for reducing the power gradient is vulnerability. Vulnerability is anything but weak. In fact, it’s a tremendously powerful tool for creating connection.
Logic is essential in decision-making. Emotions can be manipulated. That said, making complex decisions without the benefit of emotion is disastrous. Emotions are a critical tool for making decisions.
Power gradients exist in all relationships, inside and outside traditional organizations. Pretending they don’t exist can get people killed.
Pilots crash planes more frequently because copilots are less willing to correct pilot mistakes than the other way around. Further, the pilot is less willing to listen to a correction from the copilot than vice versa. This speaks to the powerful allure of human nature to hierarchy.
The rule of power gradients is that the steeper the gradient, the more difficult it is for information—think, truth—to flow upward. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to flatten the power gradient completely. Even if we could, we probably shouldn’t. A perfectly flat power gradient confuses people, leaves decisions up in the air, and makes people unhappy. As leaders, however, we should make every effort to flatten the power gradient to the extent we can, especially for the CONNECT play.
Connect is about caring:
- what people think;
- how people feel; and
- about their personal goals.
Applying the Redwork-Bluework Principles in Workplace Situations
At the end of a short conversation, a CEO told his employee, “Tell me if you need me to come over.” He said it rather emphatically, as in, “You would tell me if you needed me.”
Instead, what if he asked, “How helpful would it be if I came over to the stadium, 0 to 5?” He called. Pause. The answer was “5.”
Make a statement one way and you’ll get one response that leads to one outcome. Say it slightly differently and you’ll wind up with a different response and a different outcome. When the CEO said, “Tell me if you need me,” it required the project lead to admit she needed help and to give instructions to her CEO. Both of these are hard to do, even for a kick-ass, take-names project owner like the woman leading this development team. If she had been a wilting lily, we could attribute her reluctance to ask her CEO for help to that. But she wasn’t. Once he asked, “How helpful would it be if I came over?” it became a request for information. Notice how he phrased the question. He didn’t ask, “Would it be helpful…?” That would have been a binary question that again would have made it just a bit harder for her to say “yes.”
Transition from redwork to bluework with:
- CONTROL THE CLOCK, not obey the clock.
- COMPLETE, not continue.
- While in bluework . . . COLLABORATE, not coerce, with the goal to:
- IMPROVE, not prove.
- Transition from bluework back to redwork with: COMMIT, not comply.
- And use the enabling play: CONNECT, not conform.
When you wake up in the middle of the night, dwelling on a situation, unable to go back to sleep, you are stuck in bluework. How can you get out? Commit to a small, very small, piece of action that will move you into redwork. Act, move, do something.
APPLICATION OF THE PLAYS
When thinking about applying the plays, try to read the situation and deliberately call the play you want. If you are in redwork, then to open up the possibility for collaboration will require you to CONTROL THE CLOCK. If the team is in bluework mode, you may notice people who are still running the old plays: coerce, comply, continue, prove, and conform. In these cases, you will want to deliberately call the plays from the new playbook: COLLABORATE, COMMIT, COMPLETE, IMPROVE, and CONNECT
The Red-Blue Operating System
Creating a learning, adaptive organization requires implementing a redwork-bluework operating rhythm at the top—at a strategic level, then at the operational level, and finally at the tactical level. There is a combination of goals and top-down hierarchy that absolves people from owning their decisions.
A single evil, unethical, or simply wrong person can derail an entire company only in top-down hierarchies, because it is the top-down nature of the hierarchy that relieves everyone else in the organization from responsibility for their decisions.
Either people fudge the numbers or they fudge the process to reach the numbers. The “aggressive goal setting within an organization will foster an organizational climate ripe for unethical behavior.”
STRICT GOALS + STEEP HIERARCHIES = UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR
Notice how the agile rhythm of planning-sprint-retrospective fits the redwork-bluework play cycle of collaborate-commit-complete-celebrate. This is what a redwork-bluework operating rhythm looks like when applied to product development. The sprints include the redwork and are bookended by bluework. While in the production period of the sprint, the team designs and codes the product and is shielded from changes in direction. Leadership resists the urge to shower the team with new ideas and uses the discipline of the backlog to allow recording and to systematically decide upon new ideas and directions.
Our life rhythms adapted to this structure:
(1) get educated,
(2) apply your education,
(3) retire and hope to live a few more years.
Schooling lasted from age five to twenty-one and then we went off to work. So our life pattern was to start with bluework (cognitive, reflective, learning, improving), then shift to redwork (physical, active, doing, proving). The rhythm was not so much a back-and-forth between bluework and redwork but a one-time learn followed by a continuous do, do, do, then die. This worked because it was likely that the conditions forty years on into our working life would be the same as the conditions that existed back when we were educated.
But the situation has, of course, changed. It would be unlikely that someone graduating from high school or college today could apply his or her specific skills or trade in two or three decades without significant modification and relearning. Therefore, in the modern world, to maintain relevance we need to apply the rhythm of blue-red-blue to our lives. No longer is “learn once, then do till retirement” going to work. What is needed now is a restructuring of this approach—one in line with the bluework-redwork rhythm laid out here. We should think of our careers in chunks, maybe ten or twenty years of doing, followed by a period of learning.
The fundamental structure remains learn, graduate, and now do! The second thing that makes this hard is that our brains seem to be designed for the “(1) learn, (2) do” model. They are more elastic when younger.
Leaders have three domains in which to influence the system. The first domain is determining the overall balance between red and blue—with more frequent bluework at the beginning of a project when there is more uncertainty and the focus should be on learning. Then they extend the length of the redwork periods, spacing out the bluework later in the project as the focus shifts toward production and most major decisions have been made.
The second domain is within the bluework periods—getting everyone involved in bluework rather than leadership only, and managing the bluework periods with a goal of embracing variability.
The third domain is within the redwork periods—setting goals and a focus for the team. This is the domain leaders will be most familiar with and which received the least attention among these plays. There are often ways of doing the redwork better. There are many tools available, such as Lean, to assist leaders in this domain.
The rhythmic oscillation between redwork and bluework can be applied at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. It applies to teams and individuals. It can be applied in our lives. The outcome of the redwork-bluework rhythm is learning—learning at work, at home, and at life.
Saving El Faro Using the New Playbook
With the CONNECT play, saving El Faro starts before the ship gets under way. The captain establishes psychological safety now, knowing that when it comes to future bluework, an atmosphere of psychological safety will invite greater diversity of discussion, more creativity, and more resilient problem-solving.
Even in a demanding operational environment, the crew applies a learning and growth mindset, thus invoking the IMPROVE play.
A junior person runs the decision meetings, allowing the captain to remain in the role of decision-evaluator. This inoculates the team against the temptation toward escalation of commitment. During meetings, they practice voting first, then discussing, and being curious instead of compelling. Confident that they will be heard, they do not need to clamor for attention.
Leader, may you learn a new language from Marquet’s new Playbook, as you shoot for the stars!