Control isn't Confidence: Building Teams with Trust

Jason Davis-Cooke: If you want to have zero risk and total control, you'll be left behind. All right. We've built a competent team that all trusts each other, that communicates well and understands what we're doing, how we're going to do it, and how to communicate through it. They're going to go take disciplined initiative to carry that out. I can trust them to do that at a risk level that is acceptable to me and I can accept that risk. Welcome back everybody. This is the Brainwave Exchange. I'm your host, Jason Davis Cook, joined as always by the immeasurable Anthony Torres and the rest of the BitHippy team as well. Anthony, how are you today? Dude, this is such a great feeling to see so many faces here. we've been working on this for a long time, so I'm feeling great, excited to have everybody. Is very cool. So if you haven't seen the last episode in sort of this series that we're doing, I recommend you go watch that because you'll understand who Mark is and a reintroduction to Michael. So we won't get into your backgrounds because we're gonna force people to go watch the other episode and get those numbers up so that so that they can figure out who you guys are. But Mark, Michael, welcome back. We're so blessed to have you here. Grateful that you're spending the time with us. How's it going today? Thank you. Great Jason. Thanks for having us back and I appreciate it. What I will say is that we are doing, you know, this series on sort of high performing teams. And so today we've got some Some more discussion on I think we're talking about some culture attributes that are very important to kind of force us to be a high performing team. Is that right? Very cool. I'm gonna turn the stage here over to you, Mark, so you can walk us through what those culture points are. And then I imagine we're gonna go into a deeper discussion on each of those points. And I encourage everybody who's here to speak up with questions so we can have a really engaging conversation and and build the team in the culture. Awesome. Thanks, Jason. Anthony, thanks for having me. So Anthony reached out to me and was through Michael. And essentially he wanted to build the the type of high performing and independent free thinking initiative, not just initiative taking, but initiative seeking team that the SEAL teams and the rest of the military has a has a reputation for. And based on that, we put together a program based on the Army's approach to leadership. It's called Mission Command. There are seven principles to Mission Command. And the Army's entire leadership handbook is simply titled Mission Command, ADP six tack zero, Mission Command. And who wants to guess how long this this document is? The entire Army's handbook for for leadership. How many pages is it? Torn between wanting to go really high or really low. No, same. I'm gonna go really low. I'm gonna say it's four pages. Anybody else? All right, I'll go I'll go on the high end, let's say fifty. It's twelve pages of content. Okay. It's twelve pages of content. So the army listened. Who has masters degrees? Show a hand. All right. You know what they say about all the reading in grad school? It's only a lot if you do it. So the the army finally listened and you know, even though people go to grad school and all types of, you know, leadership courses specifically for this and are assigned this and it's they they're given direct military orders to read it. It's it's still tough to get people to read. So they finally listened and they dropped it down to 12 pages. And the as much as the Navy SEALs have going for they they're very hesitant to actually codify a lot of their teachings and principles into what we call doctrine. They feel that I'm getting a lot of feedback. It's it's not from the Anyway, okay, there we go. We went away. Whatever fit whatever changed, that's that's what it was. But the the armies so army is much, much bigger. It's you know, thousands of times the size of the entire SEAL community. So it's much more important to have all of that codified and documented. And they do a really good job of that in in their publications. And they do a very good job of that through their postgraduate and other training program. So I attended two of their the postgraduate training programs, Army Command General Staff Officer College and School of Advanced Military Studies. And in both of those they were they were heavy on doctrine. That's why I went there in the first place was to was to get that because the steel teams have got a lot, a lot of really good things going for them, but they don't do doctrine and that type of specific instruction very well. So I had to seek it out and moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. to to do that, which is just as much fun as it sounds. So it's it's seven degrees there right now. So happy to be to be out of there. So the people who in who do you who do you think the the US Army based its entire Cold War military doctrine off of? So post-World War two, we just won a sweeping victory. Who who do you think we based? There's no dumb answers, no dumb guesses. Who do you think we base our entire military structure and doctrine off of, even down to A lot of our individual weapon systems. Who do you think we copied? The Brits. The the Brits lost World War II, which is a separate separate rant and separate podcasts. We did do a whole podcast on how the Brits lost World War Two. I don't know. I don't even have a guess. You yeah, you would think we think we copied the Soviets. We would have been a lot better off had we copied the Soviets. We copied the Germans. So the may maybe someday I'll write a book about how the the US military is obsessed with what what I call noble losers, right? For whatever reason, we US Army, but military in general, it likes the the Confederates and the Germans. And just they're a bunch of noble losers, but they looked really good while they lost. And we we based based our doctrine off of them. They they looked really good in their their Hugo Boss uniforms. they felt really cool. outflaking everybody in their panzers. For better or worse, we we copied the the German army of World War II for all of our doctrine, or nearly all of our army doctrine at least, not so much our Air Force doctrine. But mission tactics was actually one of the better, if not the best things we stole from from the German army. It was originally called the Germans called it Oxford Taktik. Thankfully we we shortened it to mission tactics. It's a lot easier to say and spell. And the idea is That the in the late nineteen thirties, early forties, the Germans developed Blitzkrieg based on their their Panzer divisions, right? So Blitz, Lightning, Krieg, War. So it's this lightning war where it all depends on moving so quickly that the the enemy doesn't know what's going on, doesn't know how to react, so they just completely fall apart and surrender. So basically with Blitzkrieg in your your panzer divisions, what you do is you either make deep penetrations or deep encirclements. And you are highly, highly exposed during these deep penetrations or deep encirclements. And if if your adversary has even a moment to compose themselves and realize what's going on, they would realize that you are extremely exposed. Right? If you're punching deep, deep into enemy lines, all the all of the so you've got an enemy line. punch straight through it and they're still super strong right here. But now you have tanks essentially in their backfield. And if you take a second and compose yourself, instead of saying, no, I need to retreat, you say, hold on, I'm still strong right here. All I have to do is I can outflank them and cut them off. And then they're done. So it all depends on acting so quickly and so decisively that they don't have time to get their wits about them and realize that they're actually in a decent position if they can compose themselves. So that relies on Individuals down at the lowest possible level to be empowered to act quickly and decisively to maintain that momentum and maintain that advantage. Even now, it's very difficult, if not impossible, with modern satellite communications and GPS and satellite imagery to have the level of command and control to facilitate that type of blitzkrieg, that type of maneuver warfare at the pace that's required to have that psychological effect. I certainly couldn't do it in the early nights. communications just weren't there. So when the technology isn't there, you have to change the the organization and the doctrine and the culture to to make up for it. And what they did is they created this this principle of mission tactics of empowering leaders at the lowest possible level to to push the pace and achieve the organization's goals at a at a speed that kept them relevant and kept them safe. And hopefully you guys are already starting to to draw the connections between that and you know the modern tech industry or biotech or whatever industry you're in if if you're listening on LinkedIn. I'll take a second, I'll pause there for for questions, comments. I think I see the the lines that are being drawn here, right? Like we as a sort of small, nimble organization need everybody to be able to think quickly and move quickly and decisively in order for us to both Like accomplish the goals that we have set, but also react to changes in the overall environment, especially now with with AI moving as fast as it is, if we're not in a position where any one of us can react and go where the market's moving to, then we're gonna get left behind. Exactly. It's the it's a grow or die. Now you probably hear that a lot in business, right? Either grow or die and in maneuver warfare and Oxford tactique, it is, you know, you you need to advance. or would die, quite literally. And this is the the doctrine, this is the organizational culture. This is the way of communicating that allows you to to do so. And I'm I'm excited to to share that with you today and expand on it over over future sessions. So one comment. If everyone on the team doesn't have a sense of autonomy, I don't think the team can be cohesive and communicate well. And like the general sense of purpose and happiness and fulfillment from doing your job without autonomy isn't quite possible. So I think that's a relation as well. Great point. Great point. I appreciate that. Okay. There are anything else? I I really appreciate the the engagement, interaction. That's exactly what we want. This is part of building the the type of trust and communication and empowerment that that we're For is this this interaction here. So feel free to just interrupt at at any point. No need to raise a hand. So there are seven principles of of mission command. Guess what some of them might be? If you've if you've cheated and done some of the homework and looked them up, all the better. More power to you. Never fight fair. If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. So it should be easy, right? So I'll go ahead and lay out. So I've changed the order a little bit from what the the army what the army lists and I've broken them into into three categories. So first category is build the team. Second category is communicate with the team. Third category is empower the team. So we could further simplify that to build, communicate, empower. All right, so build, communicate, empower. So under build the team, the first principle is competence. All right. So I'll I'll just go through all of them and then s get set the broad framework and mutual understanding and then we'll go back and dev out each one. So we've under build the team, we've got competence and mutual trust. And then under communicate with the team, we have shared understanding, commander's intent, and mission type orders. And then under empower the team, we have disciplined initiative and prudent risk acceptance. So one more time. Competence, trust, shared understanding, commander's intent, mission orders, disciplined initiative, and prudent risk acceptance. And those are those are sequential. They all build on one another. And I I put them in that order for a reason. So so any questions so far? So first one is competence. And competence was actually the last one added. It was originally six principles of mission command and it was the the seventh one added. And it's because the the foundation of all of mission command is mutual trust. And what's what's the foundation of mutual trust? That's right. Competence. Yeah. Competence. It's funny that it was the last one added, but it's the first one that we need to have. Yeah. And it's I I think they went back and they realized, wait, there's this missing piece. Right. We can't trust each other if we don't inherently trust that everyone's competent. That's both up and down the chain of command within an organization. That's it's three sixty. Everyone has to trust, and that trust is based on competence. So, you know, as As a team member, you're not going to be able to take initiative and go do what you think and feel and know is right if you don't have faith in your your project manager, your boss, and their competence to see the goodness in what you're doing and to back you up. So and as a leader, you're not going to be able to trust your team members to do what they need to do independently if you don't feel that they're competent. So you're saying that trust is like the number one thing. Wouldn't trust be the hardest goal to achieve? Yeah. Of course. I'm I'm just interested that it's like the number one thing, but you have to work towards it. Mm-hmm. What I'm usually good with movie quotes, but it's kind of the classic. I didn't say it'd be easy, I just say it just said it'd be worth it. So none of this is easy. If this was easy, everyone would do it, right? Every culture would be amaz you know. Would be awesome. Every workplace would be amazing to work at. Everyone would feel respected and trusted and empowered to take the initiative. Every military would be able to conduct Blitzkrieg and have all of their junior officers and junior NCOs, you know, make deep penetrations behind enemy lines without without oversight. And it'd be awesome. Right. But it's it's incredibly difficult, but it's worth it. And like you said, we're on point. Number one, trust. And you've identified how difficult that is already, which is which is awesome. You're exactly correct. Do you have any thoughts on on trust within trust and competence within the organization? You've shared with me that you feel that like competence is is very high. So we're we're off to a good start. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I was I was I think we might have talked about this in the last one where it's interesting that we have two different philosophies. We did a reading of a Netflix book that says basically No rules, rules, which actually kind of lines up with a 12-page doctrine, right? It's not, it's not 50 pages. And one of the things that they talk about in that book is a necessary prerequisite for success is high talent density, which is essentially competence. And then once you have that in place, then you can relax the reins a little bit because you know you brought on good people. And as I'm bringing it back to the dev shop and what we're doing, I think something that we Jason and I have been talking about is how do we what is the process for bringing on new people? How do we evaluate competence or talent density? And what is that? That's something I know that's important for us in the c in like the early parts of this year. D. Michael's raised his hand. So a question for you, Mark. I I could imagine that that the there might be one relation between competence and trust is that even though you might be competent, you could recognize that you might have full confidence in something and you want to be honest about it and get the help you might need to fill that gap. And that can also induce trust and also make sure things run smoothly, as opposed to pretending like you know it all and can do it all and then have some failures along the way. Great point. I think what what you're getting at, it sounds to me, is is humility. So one of the best ways to build mutual trust is through humility and transparency about your shortcomings, your areas where you need improvement. And we could continue to dissect this almost indefinitely, right? So okay, if we need trust, all right, what's the prerequisite for trust is competence. Well what's the prerequisite for competence is training. All right, what's the prerequisite for training? Right? It's, you know, self-awareness, the humility to say, hey, I need more training on this. Right. There's also that's at the individual level, there's an organizational level of where you need clear expectations laid out. You need the need to be built to train or you need recruit at such a level that everyone comes in pre-trained, which is expensive. It's like building a house, right? You could either pay quite a bit to to get something that's moving ready, or you can get a little bit of a fixer upper and fix it up yourself, train it in-house. And there are different different methods, different benefits to both, especially for startup. What are your thoughts on that, Michael? And we can keep going. Down from there, you know, humility, self-awareness. And you need to be able to trust the as an individual who is self-aware and humble and vulnerable, because it's a very vulnerable thing to do, to expose yourself and say, hey, I I don't know how to do this. you need to have trust in the organization that they're not going to turn around and flame spray you or throw you under the bus or or humiliate you. And that's so this this trust and competence, it's like I said, it it's 360. And it's it's throughout the organization. And when e when everyone gets it, when everyone's on the same page, you can you can really do some some amazing things. like historically I don't want to say amazing, at least tactically impressive things were done when when these principles were applied in combat. I'm hesitant to call them amazing, but they were they were impressive in their their scale and outcome. Anthony, I wanted to To give you give you a second to to bring it together and apply it to the company if you want, or I can also keep moving. Yeah. The phrase that came to mind a couple of times as you were talking about, you know, dissecting this indefinitely and people being willing to acknowledge that they need support and training is psychological safety. And then I started thinking, what do I need to be doing as the owner of the business to provide psychological safety to the people on the team? And I suspect, I don't know if that is we're still going further down the stack. I know when we talked earlier yes, we mentioned we want to do the broad sweeps of like here's the whole system from left to right. And then as we have the further conversations, we can go deeper on each specific topic. So Mark, I'm gonna give you the choice like, you know, do you wanna keep moving left to right? Do you wanna keep going down? I'm I'm excited to hear what you have say. This is No, so that's you're you're hitting on one of the principles of mission tactics, right? And maneuver warfare is It's it's completely open to to whatever the the terrain and the the adversary, whatever opportunities you're presented with. Right. You start with this broad goal in mind of, hey, we're here and we want to get to here, right? Or we're here and we want to get to here. And however you get there, just take the path of least and fast least resistance and fastest outcome, and we trust everyone on board. to to help us get there. And if we have to zigzag or anything else, that that's perfectly fine. So we're we're zigzagging while we get towards the the the desired outcome. And I think that's that's cool. It's a lot it's a lot more fun that way anyway. So this is, you know, maneuver warfare as opposed to trench warfare and trench warfare isn't fun. There's there's nothing nothing cool about that. So what what was coming up for me is he kept on talking about You mentioned a couple of times the talent density, right? And part of density is a big part of density is the denominator, right? So if you have a a large denominator, it gets tougher to to be dense, right? So you got you know, you've got your talent and then divided by the number of people on the denominator. Y'all are what, half dozen people about, plus or minus. So that that's a great opportunity. Right. Stay very talent dense there. And as things grow and scale, it it gets more difficult to maintain that that density. And then you get to be somewhere like Netflix, as you mentioned, or Google, where in order to maintain that high talent density at scale, you have to pay for it. You gotta pay a lot. And it's usually upfront fixed rather than the way it is with y'all. where it is more performance based and more of a profit sharing model. And there's there's pros and cons to each, but I think it's it's really exciting to be part of a small, small, flat, fast organization where everyone could be very high talent, very high motivation, and very high reward. Right. It's tied closely to your performance. And those are the kind of organizations I've always strived to be a part of. that's why join SEAL teams instead of big army, but still recognize the value in army training and doctrine and organization. So sort them out for training. But this is I think it's all super applicable to to what y'all are doing and the the culture you're building. So you can stay nimble and flat and fast and work towards these common goals together. I enjoy getting to know everybody. Sorry. Yeah, sorry for interrupting. I just I I've worked at the big companies before. And They're super impersonal, right? And they're super process heavy. And even sometimes you're like, I know I'm gonna stub my toe on this thing because I have to go through this process. And everybody just accepts that that's okay. Right. And so staying lean and nimble is really quite nice. Yeah. Okay. So getting back to our our framework, right? We've got build the team, communicate with the team, empower the team. We discovered build the team. Any any questions or comments there before we move to communicate with the team? So We've got three principles within communicate with the team. Shared understanding, commander's intent, and mission type orders. So first one, again, these are sequential and they all build on each other. Each one's a prerequisite for the next. So we had competence, which is a prerequisite for trust. Trust is a prerequisite for good communication and shared understanding. So shared understanding is touched on it a bit earlier. So hey, we are we are here. The enemy's line begins here, and we want to end up Far past the enemy's line, somewhere around here, in a way that compels our adversary to abandon their their fortified positions and either retreat or or surrender. In a way, it's it's kind of the same thing. And that that can easily apply to business. Hey, we're here. The competition is here, the customers are here. However, we need to get there, right? We're trying to get somewhere over here. This is like this is the promised land. This is profit. This is the exit that we all share in. And, you know, once that happens, we're we're all set and all of our kids get to go to private school forever and everyone lives happily ever after. And what that looks like, don't know. In a way, we don't care because we trust everyone. to work within this shared understanding. And there is there are several elements to an effective shared understanding. The first one is the goal, right? The destination. And that's often that's relatively easy, right? It could be, hey, we're we're trying to get to the adversary's supply depots or command post or capital or trying to get to this port. Anthony, over I'm excited to say that literally on Tuesday of this this this past Tuesday, We did a sh an OKR exercise. And one of the things that I did at the beginning of that was I restated the business objective. This is what I'm after. These are what the numbers need to look like. And I because I trust the team, I can share. Here's exactly what I'm trying to do. Help me get there. So I think I'm like doing some small part of this shared understanding. and I'll be curious to hear Perfect. Yeah. Like just what what else feeds into it beyond this is the like I'm gonna use the little air quotes North Star. Is that enough? How often will you revisit this topic? Like just what are your thoughts on that? Perfect. That that that's awesome. Right. That's probably the most important part. It's certainly the first part of a shared understanding is understanding the goal and the outcome, the objective. Within that, you have to know your organization's strengths and limitations, right? And especially relative to the environment. Right. So if if we're taking it back to to military examples, like, okay, We our environment ha we've got we've got open plains here, we've got forests here, and we've got mountains here. We are panzer division, right? We're good in open fields and we have to go through forests. We can. It's not ideal. We definitely can't go through mountains. If it's time to go through mountains, we need to request support separate separate entities and bring them in. Michael. Yeah, I'm just curious on the like the agreements around what the intent is where we're heading. and and I'm not being critical of you, Anthony, but just because something's misdead doesn't mean it's understood. And I mean I see this all the time and as a marriage therapist, like, you know, so how do you recommend that we all have the same understanding? And that's it's understood that we have the same understanding. How's that done? Okay, so I'll take a crack at this. One of the things that, you know, I started that conversation, this OKR meeting, our goal meeting with what I'm after. And the team came with their own objectives and said, this is what I want to do in service of this document that I started. So this is each individual taking accountability and ownership of a piece of the North Star. Haven't done this yet, but we'll put the monthly like follow up so we can check to see this is what we said was important in January. In February, is this still important? Has the landscape changed on us, right? Have the environmental conditions changed. But when we go through each person's goals, we did this all in one meeting at the same time. And people can ask questions about what other people wrote. I encouraged everybody. I was like, hey, look for where there are opportunities for two or more people to partner up. And that is my my first attempt at making sure that we all understand the same thing and what needs to be done to get there. Awesome. I I would say the way you being able to condense your as you as you put it, your North Star, your objective down to a bumper sticker, ideally a catchy one, it it may sound silly, but it's important. So being able to break mission command down to build, communicate, and power. Like you could if the if your goal over the next quarter was to do nothing but build an organizational culture. around, you know, the principles of mission command where everyone is empowered, you can you could start and end every meeting with, hey, remember everyone, we're here to to build, communicate, and empower, right? Until everyone is just thinking that in their sleep. And every time they they see your face pop up on a Zoom call or on a text message or a phone call, they they see Anthony's face and they immediately think, Build, communicate, empower. Right. And then then it's It's it's embedded in part of the organization and then as as Michael was saying, it's it's truly understood and not just understood but but embraced and adopted and then actioned. There's a big there's a big delta between understanding and and action. And there's even a big delta between action and habit. So s there's something has to be understood, then it has to become part of the culture before it's actioned, and then it needs to be actioned repeatedly and habitually before it bec habit and just second nature. So there is it it might sound silly, I might feel silly at first, but there's a reason that organizations, sports teams, militaries, high performing teams in general have certain principles that they just circle back to and overemphasize repeatedly. It works. And something's not silly if it works. That's great. Makes a ton of sense. So Anthony just a question. You mentioned the actions and what about the because the goal of the action is the outcome. So how you make sure that you're doing the right actions because you need to get somewhere. Like you're doing everything because of the outcome at the end of the day. what should what are your thoughts about that? Great question. Thank you. So that's why it's important to understand the organizations as we're discussing the their strengths and and limitations. So if you are a Panzer Division, hey, we're strong here. Yes, we're open to other opportunities, but we're really looking for opportunities within our band of expertise and capabilities. Now another option might open up and this this will be part of mission orders that we'll get to later and really expand on in future talks. But part of the The commander's intent, mutual understanding, shared trust is you have to have, it's like it's like bowling with bumpers on, right? A good commander, a good leader will put certain bumpers up, certain left and right lateral limits, as we call them, for their their subordinates, their team members to operate within, saying, Hey, within these conditions, within this box, right? Whether it's a geographic box, whether it's a budget box, whether it's a Capabilities box. Within this box, you have free reign to get from here to here. And if you need help, call me. If there's something outside this box that you think helps get us here cheaper, faster, better, call me. And other than that, update me when you can. I trust you to go forth and aggressively do great things within these lanes that are based on our capabilities, our funding. our timelines, our environment, and what other business units are doing parallel to us. And one of the benefits of DNA smaller company is you don't have a lot of different business units, but you still want to think about ways just like different military units that have their own slice of the of the battle space. It's similar with business units, right? They should be mutually supporting, but they very much have their own lanes. You don't want one business unit venturing too far into another business unit's lane. And if that's going to happen, it requires coordination. You absolutely want your your different business units mutually supporting and working together without without stepping on each other or duplicating efforts or having some friendly fire, which which happens. Good disaggregated subordinate initiative requires clear lanes and guidance set by set by leaders. Otherwise it's just a free for all. And then the then no one's happy, right? It's a free-for-all. There's friendly fire, duplicated effort, wasted effort. And then the boss comes back. It's like, I trusted you guys. And this is what this is what I get for trusting you. No more trust. I'm pulling it all back. And then and then no one's happy. Right. And then like, hey, we tried it. It didn't work. We're never trying that again. We're going back to what we know works, which is command and control. I command, I control, you listen, you follow. And then you get burnt out and go somewhere else in 18 months. And that's it's not what anyone at this organization wants. Thank you for that. Great addition. So that's shared understanding. So commander's intent is the next principle within communicate with the team. And we we hit on it a bit already. so a big part of the shared understanding. So you have to understand the environment, understand our own capabilities, understand competitors' capabilities, understand the customers' needs, and all these same principles apply, whether it's to military operation or to or to a business, you would just swap out the customer and the competition for different placeholders. Same with the environment, same with the the weather, essentially the the climate. We talk about different economic climates, different business climates, right? There's different geographic climates and weather patterns that affect operations and therefore need to affect planning and communication and and execution. So a huge part of shared understanding is not just that understanding of those elements that I just reiterated, but also commander's intent. Right. And we talked about that a bit already. Our intent is to reach this objective in order to have this effect on our customer, on our competition, on the environment, and it will have this effect on our organization, on our partners and our bottom line and our goals. And again, that shouldn't you just insert different placeholders for military operation or a, you know a tech startup. Michael, looks like you're about to hop in. Go for it. Actually, yeah, I mean I was it's actually like some of your research, direct mutation and how challenging that actually is. And, you know, if we have some time on what he did who has that 'cause, you know, a a lot of people can get defended or you very you go with or, you know, whatever word you want to use. and d don't necessarily aren't necessarily curious and you don't necessarily necessarily ask very powerful questions. And that could cause a lot of problems down the road to at least some miscommunication or forecommunication. At some point you could highlight how speaking to what reaches that you'd know. Awesome. Yeah, there's a lot of feedback. But I I think I understood that some point you want to work towards what what Lisa said of the importance of communication. And honestly, you're you're the expert on communication. So I'd love love to work with you more on that and encourage you to chime in as well. But you'll certainly as we get into the follow on. discussions, especially on the the communication block, we'll we'll definitely die dive more deeply into that. But the major component of commander's intent is sharing the the desired outcome, our our own capabilities, the the competition's capabilities where we anticipate different risks, different opportunities, different friction points, and then helping our the whole team understand that so they can best seek out, find, and then exploit and capitalize on. the opportunities that they find within within those bumpers that we talked about. All right. Big part of. So that's that's commander's intent. So questions there before we move on to to mission type orders. We cover that briefly. Another question. Do the SEALs, they have like a list of all of their capabilities. How how does that that work? Like how they know what they can do and what are the constraints of their own capabilities? Yeah, that's that that's the problem with SEALs, is that we you think we could do anything and everything. And that's the worst part of SEALs is we can do this can do attitude that we can do anything and everything. There is there's goodness there, but there's also also some danger there. But we've we've done a better job, especially with the last twenty years of saying, Hey, these are our core competencies, these are our core skill sets, employ us within these. We've we've not done that in the past. There are a lot of case studies where that has gone poorly. So one of those was Operation Just Cause, which was the invasion of Panama. That went poorly. So one of the one of the objectives that SEALs were tasked with was PTA Airfield. So basically there was a you know a small private airfield where there were private jets and aircraft, and SEALs were tasked with seizing that airfield and preventing it from being used by high-level individuals to to escape. That's not a mission that should have gone to SEALs, that should have gone to Rangers. And SEALs, they were just hesitant to say, like we're talking about earlier, having the the self-awareness and the humility to and also the the trust in their superiors to say, hey, I can do this if you need me to, but this isn't within my my realm of core capabilities, we either need more time to train on this, or I would suggest having someone else who is more qualified and this is one of their core competencies to give this mission to them. But that's I mean th those it's kind of the the military equivalent of career suicide back then. I mean it's it's a good problem to have, but they're just in in a military sense, this this might sound weird. but there wasn't a lot of work to go around back then. And it might sound silly, but people in the military, special especially special operations, they want to go get into the fight. They want to be employed. they do a lot of training, make a lot of sacrifices to go add value at some point. And it's it's the right thing to do, but it's it's almost not it almost wasn't reasonable to expect someone to say, Hey, no, thank you for finally putting me in coach in the Super Bowl, but I don't feel that we're up to to this. That's I mean, if you're you're in the Super Bowl and you're on the final drive to win the game and coach calls your number. So, like, hey, I need you to go run this play and you're gonna win the game for us. Like you're not gonna say, coach, I I actually don't feel up to doing that. Maybe you should put the other running back. In. That's just not gonna happen, even if that's the right thing to do. And it takes a lot of trust within, you know, up and down the whole organization to be able to say, Hey, sir, thank you, but I don't think we're the right ones to do this. Please don't let this negatively impact the next time you're thinking of calling my number and putting me in, but we're not the right choice for this. And unfortunately that didn't happen. Multiple SEALs died. another one was paralyzed. It wasn't good. And unfortunately Something similar happened in Grenada. Multiple SEALs drowned, which should just never happen, right? they there were mistakes in planning where they were supposed to free fall in onto some boats and then go take the boats in up the time zones. They were supposed to jump in as the sun was going down and said it was already dark. The sea state wasn't much higher than it was supposed to be. So they jumped into a severe C state after dark, and multiple SEALs drowned because they didn't feel That they could call back to headquarters and say, hey, I know you needed me to do this thing. I know that if I say no, I might not get another chance to be cool. And you may never call my number ever again. But if we do this, we risk, you know, guys dying. And there was just this can do attitude where it's like, hey, we're frog men. Let's go, let's go get froggy. And they jumped anyway, and multiple guys died. There's, you know, the whole Lone Survivor movie. We do a whole case study on the exact same thing. Hey, that was not there were a lot of things that should have been worked out in mission planning. They should have gone back and said, hey, this isn't appropriate. We need a bigger force package, so on and so forth. And they didn't do that. And then it spiraled into the a catastrophe that that was. So it it's a great question, right? And it gets to back to what we're talking about earlier. You need the the team with confidence and trust, both up and down the chain of command. You need to be You need to trust that your your leadership is competent and professional enough to not smash you when you say, Hey, this is outside of our lane. The leadership needs to have the trust in their subordinates and the team members that they're competent enough to speak up when when that happens and that they actually are competent in the other things. So you do give them another chance later and you know, just sideline them indefinitely or fire them because they did the right thing and and spoke up. And said, hey, this is outside of our lane, this is outside of our capabilities. Thank you. But in order for me to execute this, I'm either going to need more time, more support, more resources, or you should outsource this to someone else. And that's tough to do. it's it's what building a a culture of trust and and effectiveness is is all about. There's gonna be a common thread throughout all this. It's tough, but but it's worth it. I know that we're only about halfway through these points, but I know we're running up on time here. We've got about two minutes left in this session. So I think it might be worth Mission orders. we'll go through go into that in more detail. But the it's just setting those those bumpers, those expectations, those go no go criteria, the the points where like, hey, this is where you need to call back to me. This is where you're cleared hot to just push as hard and fast as you can, and then empower the teams. So disciplined initiative and prudent risk acceptance. So you guys have probably all seen the the YouTube videos back geez probably like fifteen years ago now of like Leroy Jenkins. Yes. So that was that was Leroy Jenkins was taking the initiative, right? He was pushed forward. Heinz Gadarian would have been proud of Leroy just taking the initiative and sending it, but that wasn't disciplined initiative, right? So you can only have disciplined initiative. With shared understanding and within the commander's intent and those those bumpers, those boundaries that should have been established during commander's intent, mission orders, and then pruning risk acceptance. And this is probably the biggest thing, right? As leaders, we we don't want to risk anything, right? And the way you risk nothing is by controlling everything. And you can do that, that's a method, but there's there's no growth, there's certainly no speed there. And especially in the modern Tech environment or the modern military environment, if you want to have zero risk and total control, you'll be left behind. And it's basically this entire system is a way of buying down risk to an acceptable level so that leaders can accept that risk. Right. We've built a competent team that all trusts each other that communicates well and understands what we're doing, how we're going to do it, and how to communicate through it. They're going to go take disciplined initiative. To carry that out, I can trust them to do that at a risk level that is acceptable to me. And I can accept that risk. Because it's no longer just risk. It's now prudent and a mitigated risk. And I can accept prudent and mitigated risk as a leader, as a business owner, as an investor, as someone who's looking to partner with another company that's doing something like this. Okay, it's risky, but It's mitigated risk, it's prudent risk, and I can accept that. This is great. This is exactly where I hope to be, where the team is taking smart risks and feels empowered to do so. So I'm really excited that, you know, this was the first part of a longer program. We'll spend more time on each of these topics and we'll share, you know, I'm excited to share what we learn with anybody who wants to listen. Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Michael, for your time again today. And we absolutely look forward to the continuing of of these sessions and getting real deep into each of these points. And I know that we'll take a lot of value out of it. And I just hope that anybody listening and following along will also get value and and bring that into their own organizations and own lives as well. I appreciate the discussion and engagement as well. It's what makes this so special. Appreciate y'all. Thanks for listening, everybody, and until next time. Be well.