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 on the Santa Fe it caught most errors 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. Vocalising forces the slow part of the mind to check the fast part. 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
Ege's team adopts the rule that before any production deployment the engineer says aloud, on the call, what they are about to run and what they expect to see. In the second week a junior engineer stops mid-sentence: saying the command out loud showed it pointed at the wrong database. Nothing was deployed and nothing broke.
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.