Leadership Is Language

At my organization, we use black and red cards. We call them dissent cards and use them in a ratio of five to one. Five black for every one red. We shuffle the deck and people take a card. Here's the rule: if you have a red card, you have to dissent, and the card makes it safe and necessary to do so. You're not being a jerk-the card made you do it.

Doing is important, but action must be balanced with thinking. Just like Fred and Sue in the introduction-too much activity without thought results in wasted or erroneous actions and bad decisions, and too much thinking without action results in inaction and frustration.

The key to learning and growing, as a company and as a person, is correctly bal

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 em

First, failure to treat completion as a deliberate step in the process translates into a failure to see the work in discrete elements; this failure carries risks. One risk is escalation of commitment because we see longer production runs, longer operational cycles linked to one original decision. This makes the organization less likely to change co

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 languag

CONNECT

Connect is the enabling play that makes all the other plays work better. The Industrial Age play is conform. Connect is about caring: caring what people think; caring how people feel; caring about their personal goals.

Connect is not a superficial "friendship" but caring for someone else and wanting the best for them. Connect is lov

Like many organizations, the USS Santa Fe prided itself on its can-do culture. But can-do is fragile. As long as whatever we're candoing is right, things are fine, but in our take-no-prisoners enthusiasm, we can easily propagate errors throughout the organization. We needed to match our zest for can-do with a zeal for "can-think."

The point is that we do not want a "harmonious conversation." What we want is an accurate picture of reality. Harmonious and wrong means out of business or dead people. Harmonious means thìrty-three dead on El Faro, seven dead on the space shuttle Challenger.

The fear is that dissent equals disharmony and is to be avoided.

But in organizati

Because the two different kinds of work-decision-making (thinking)

and execution (doing)-take two opposite approaches to variability, they require two distinctly different mental processes and two different kinds of language. It's helpful to label these two different modes so you can clearly identify which one you're in. Let's call thinking, decisio