Concept
Deliberate action
Deliberate action is David Marquet's practice for anything that cannot be undone: before acting, the person pauses, says aloud what they are about to do, and points at it. Saying a thing out loud is the cheapest review there is, and Marquet credits it with catching many errors on the Santa Fe before they happened.
On a submarine the practice was literal: an operator about to turn a valve would stop, vocalise the action and gesture toward the control, giving themselves and anyone nearby a second to notice a mistake. It sounds theatrical, and it works because most errors are not errors of knowledge but of attention; the person knew the right action and reached for the wrong one. Saying it aloud adds a second, deliberate check to a movement that would otherwise be automatic. Off a submarine, the practice belongs anywhere an action is hard to reverse: a production deployment, a payment, a message to a client, a change to a shared spreadsheet. The manager's role is to make it a team habit rather than a personal one, and to show that the pause is respected rather than mocked, because a habit that only one person keeps is soon kept by nobody.
A real-life example
At a payroll office in Izmir, the clerk who releases the monthly salary transfers now reads the total and the number of employees aloud to a colleague before pressing send, and the colleague reads back the figures from the approved sheet. In the third month the two numbers differ by one: an employee who left mid-month is still on the list. The transfer waits ten minutes, and nobody has to recover a salary.
How to use it
- 1List the three actions your team takes that cannot be undone, and attach the pause to those.
- 2Say what you are about to do, and what you expect to see, before doing it.
- 3Treat the pause as the team's habit, not one person's; thank the one who stops mid-sentence.