David Marquet on the Difference Between Red-Work and Blue-Work

Show Notes

• 0:25 - Introductions
• 0:33 - The central theme of his book - create organizations for the future that have the right balance of thinking and doing
• 0:45 - “Doing” in our traditional leadership style will not take us to where we need to be in the future
• 1:05 - Traditional Naval leadership was about being the person who knew the answers and could tell others what to do
• 1:20 - Being thrust into a role where he didn’t know everything about the ship and needing to change the approach
• 2:00 - The need to engage expert doers in thinking rather than just focusing on doing efficiently
• 2:25 - Retaining the expert doing and injecting thinking and communication about that thinking (“This is what I intend to do…”)
• 2:55 - The shift in thinking from top-down command and control to empowerment and decision making at the point where the decision is needed
• 3:50 - The person at the front has much more contextual information about the situation than any manager or commander
• 4:20 - The pattern of “decide-do, decide-do” – compliance and execution excellence still matter, so empower the doers to decide and communicate their decision before doing
• 4:45 - Blue-work (thinking) and red-work (doing) require different mindsets and have different languages
• 5:00 - The importance of being clear about when you are doing red-work or blue-work, and communicating differently based on the type of work you are engaged in
• 5:20 - Managers who want blue-work thinking but use red-work language which is around compliance, control and reduced variability, get frustrated because people don’t take initiative
• 5:25 - Common practices which result in red-work behaviours when we want blue-work thinking
• 5:40 - The need to make it easy for people to think differently from the group and be creative
• 6:00 - The issues with voting in meetings actually causing alignment and groupthink because of the way it is presented
• 7:10 - Using probabilistic and “fist-of-five” voting to identify patterns and trends rather than binary voting
• 8:00 - Relating this to the common agile practices, the sprint ceremonies and oscillating between blue-work (sprint planning, retrospective…) and red-work (delivery)
• 8:45 - Purple-work doesn’t work – be focused on one type of work at a time
• 9:00 - Make it easy to pause the red-work if you identify an issue and switch in to blue-work mode rapidly – the andon cord is an example of this idea
• 9:45 - The importance of making it safe to be vulnerable, to acknowledge when you don’t know something
• 10:40 - Empowerment on its own is not enough – strong technical/domain knowledge is a necessary precondition
• 11:35 - As a leader resist telling people the answer, even if you know it
• 12:20 - The value of testing people’s technical/domain knowledge to help them identify areas for improvement
• 12:35 - Decision making authority needs to be linked to technical/domain knowledge
• 13:40 - The importance of clarity for good decision making
• 14:10 - Clarity means understanding what the organisation thinks is important as it relates to the decision you are making
• 14:20 - The need for organisational story-telling to provide the context rather than trying to define rules for everything
• 15:05 - Alignment around purpose; communicating the “why”
• 15:28 - Match the language you use to the type of activity being done – thinking vs doing, blue-work or red-work

Mentioned:

• Agile 2017
• Book: Turn the Ship Around
• The Andon cord
• Simon Sinek – Start with why
• Leadership Nudges YouTube Channel