Chapter 10 of Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say – and What You Don’t is titled, The Red-Blue Operating System. Marquet starts this chapter with the cautionary tale of the Ford Pinto. The chapter highlights the outcome of the industrial approach to leadership going wrong. My wife had a Pinto when we first started dating. It was our only car and we both remember waiting for it to be recalled, even as we drove to work every morning. We discussed the potential of the fuel tank exploding. What we were oblivious to was the reason for the problem. The failure of leadership and the failure of the decision-making model literally sentenced people to death to achieve a goal.
The combination of strict goals, steep hierarchy, and impaired information flow (and dare I say greed) is a recipe for ethical failures. The example of the Pinto is common (more recent examples include the VW emissions and Wells Fargo scandals). Ethics are often only paid lip service to in corporate goal setting. A great poster for the office lobby, but not as important as the goal that feeds your annual review.
Marquet is not suggesting that goals are evil. Goals work by narrowing the focus to a task – redwork so flow states can occur. When you are working toward a goal it is easier to exclude work or ideas that are extraneous. That is great if there are no ethical wobbles or other problems. It is easy to go down a rabbit hole without the ability to stop and think. Building in pauses so that risks and plans can be examined (allowing time for bluework) in a collaborative environment reduces the risk of runaway unethical behavior.
Another idea in this chapter is the need for discontinuous adaptation. Time is required for redwork, a heads-down focus. Continuous change disrupts flow; every interruption shifts teams into bluework – i.e. thinking and planning. Identifying a red-blue cadence up front to address this issue is critical. Scrum is an example of teams switching using a red-blue cadence.
A third point in this chapter is a reminder that when decisions are pushed down to those doing the work they rarely are owned by those doing the work. However, in low trust-high fear organizations, avoiding making decisions is safer for those being directed. Decisions passed down hierarchies absolve people from making decisions. How many times have you heard, “I am doing what you told me to do”? That is a response that is a direct repudiation of ownership and screams fear.
The fourth concept in the chapter that resonated with me was the need to periodically re-invent myself. At some point during the last century, the idea that you could embark on a career and then several decades complete that journey without changing direction ceased to exist. Relevance requires a continuous dance between redwork and bluework; between doing and reinventing oneself. This requires discipline and self regulation which we have to own for ourselves.
Next week we save the El Ferro and add a few final notes.
Previous installments of our re-read of Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say – and What You Don’t (buy a copy)!
Week 1: Logistics, Introduction, Foreword – https://bit.ly/3sTqyu3
Week 2: El Faro – https://bit.ly/3RnkUue
Week 3: The New Playbook – https://bit.ly/3Llgmki
Week 4: Control the Clock – https://bit.ly/45UFp5Z
Week 5: Collaborate – https://bit.ly/3PzFiXI
Week 6: Commit – https://bit.ly/46DMmsF
Week 7: Complete – https://bit.ly/47aTDQe
Week 8: Improve – https://bit.ly/3FMT1Vw
Week 9: Connect – https://bit.ly/3QW05Wj
Week 10: Applying – https://bit.ly/3ufAq1K
