David Marquet took command of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe at the last minute, on a class of boat he had never served on. He knew the physics and the theory, he said later, but not the ship’s own systems. By his account, that made it urgent to drop the style he had been good at: make the right decision, then get the team to carry it out.
So the crew changed how they talked. Officers stopped asking the captain what to do and told him what they intended to do instead. Marquet stepped in only to stop them. “The rule was: unless I said otherwise, they were clear to proceed.”
One day an officer came to him with a plan to fix a torpedo tube. Marquet thought it was a bad plan, one that would have messed up other parts of the operation. He was tired and didn’t feel like arguing.
“Here, sit in my chair while I grab a coffee,” he told the officer. “When I come back, tell me what you would do if you were me.”
He came back 30 seconds later. The officer laid out a totally different plan, and by Marquet’s account it was a good one. He hadn’t consulted anyone. He had only looked at the problem from the captain’s side.
“Sounds good,” said Marquet.
“I intend to do this.”
“Go for it.”
Marquet told the story in a 2025 interview, as an example of what he had learned on the boat: “if I ask better questions, they come up with better answers.”
The approach had a history. Years earlier, as engineer officer of the USS Will Rogers, Marquet had tried giving his team intent instead of orders, and his website calls the result “a disaster.” On the Santa Fe the plan still came back to the captain, out loud, before anyone acted on it. In his book he describes how it sounded a year in, with Stephen Covey aboard: “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water we own, water depth has been checked and is 400 feet, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I’ve certified my watch team.”
The captain’s answer to a report like that was two words: “Very well.”