L. David Marquet shares the story that inspired a best seller

In this video in our Conversations with Leaders series, L. David Marquet shares an early mistake he made as a U.S. Navy submarine captain. It’s the story that inspired his best-selling book, Turn the Ship Around!

The captain and his crew were getting ready for an inspection, the charts were perfect. And irrelevant. Turns out the team based the plan on information that was not applicable. “We wasted so much time. We needed to start over,” David said.

The team was reluctant to show something that was only half ready in order to get early input. The captain thought everyone knew what to do.

It’s a common problem – especially in Agile ways of working where we want to show our potentially-releasable solutions early to get feedback. What if we’re wrong? What if our stakeholders don’t like it? From the leader’s perspective, we often assume people understand what we want and why.

As David learned, “Don’t assume everyone’s got the same picture…That’s not enough. You’ve got to do it TOGETHER.”

Get a free chapter or order the book “TOGETHER – How leaders involve and engage people to get great things done” written by Ole and Jenni Jepsen.