I’m really enjoying Turn the Ship Around!, a book by David Marquet about his experiences as commander of a nuclear submarine, the USS Santa Fe, and how he worked to improve its operational performance.
One of the changes that Marquet introduced is something he calls “thinking out loud”, where he encourages crew members to speak aloud their thoughts about things like intentions, expectations, and concerns. He notes that this approach contradicted naval best practices:
As naval officers, we stress formal communications and even have a book, the Interior Communications Manual, that specifies exactly how equipment, watch stations, and evolutions are spoken, written, and abbreviated …
This adherence to formal communications unfortunately crowds out the less formal but highly important contextual information needed for peak team performance. Words like “I think…” or “I am assuming…” or “It is likely…” that are not specific and concise orders get written up by inspection teams as examples of informal communications, a big no-no. But that is just the communication we need to make leader-leader work.
Turn the Ship Around! p103
This change did improve the ship operations, and this improvement was recognized by the Navy. Despite that, Marquet still got pushback for violating norms.
[E]ven though Santa Fe was performing at the top of the fleet, officers steeped in the leader-follower mind-set would criticize what they viewed as the informal communications on Santa Fe. If you limit all discussion to crisp orders and eliminate all contextual discussion, you get a pretty quiet control room. That was viewed as good. We cultivated the opposite approach and encouraged a constant buzz of discussions among the watch officers and crew. By monitoring that level of buzz, more than the actual content, I got a good gauge of how well the ship was running and whether everyone was sharing information.
Turn the Ship Around! p103
Reading this reminded me how local culture can be. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. At Netflix, I’ve worked on three teams (and six managers!) and each team had very different local cultures, despite all of them being in the same organization, Platform Engineering.
I used to wonder, “how does a large company like Google write software?” But I no longer think that’s a meaningful question. It’s not Google as an organization that writes software, it’s individual teams that do. The company provides the context that the teams work in, and the teams are constrained by various aspects of the organization, including the history of the technology they work on. But, there’s enormous cultural variation from one team to the next. And, as Marquet illustrates, you can change your local culture, even cutting against organizational “best practices”.
So, instead of asking, “what is it like to work at company X”, the question you really want answered is, “what is it like to work on team Y at company X?”
Surfing Complexity 