Via Talks at Google

“Any change management that I’ve seen starts with ‘Well, we’ve got to create a mindset’ — blah blah blah. That’s “I’m going to think my way to new behavior,” which I don’t think is the way it works. We behave our way to new thinking.”

— Turn the Ship Around | L. David Marquet | Talks at Google, Watch at 31:06

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Traditional change management starts with mindset: get people thinking differently, and they’ll act differently. Captain David Marquet argues that the reverse is true. “We behave our way to new thinking.”

Google’s research demonstrated this. When they wanted more team interaction in lunchrooms, they didn’t send emails or run workshops on collaboration. They replaced small, separate tables with fewer, longer ones. People sat with larger groups, met more colleagues, and the team feeling emerged on its own. The behavior change came first. The thinking followed.

The “no more they” rule Marquet introduced on the Santa Fe, the submarine he commanded, worked the same way. Marquet didn’t run seminars on team psychology. He changed one word in how people spoke – banning “they” in favor of “we” in all communication. Six months later, the crew’s brains had been rewired. They felt more like a team though they couldn’t say why.

Marquet applied the same logic to decision-making: he required officers to replace “I request permission to submerge the ship” with “I intend to submerge the ship.” A stronger sense of initiative and accountability followed.

The examples above reframe the leader’s job. The question is no longer “How do I get people to think differently?” It’s now “What aspect of behavior or environment can I change right now that will produce different thinking over time?”

This change is bigger than “fake it till you make it.” That phrase puts the burden on an individual consciously performing a confidence you don’t yet feel. Marquet’s mechanism is systemic. Nobody on the Santa Fe decided to feel like a team. The “no more they” rule came, the behavior changed, and the identity followed as a byproduct. The Google lunchroom makes this clearest: nobody was performing team cohesion. They just sat at a longer table.

Don’t lecture people into new ways of thinking. Put them in situations where new behaviors are unavoidable – and wait.

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Things to Try

Audit your team’s language for “they”:

• For one week, notice every time you or your team says “they” in meetings when referring to another part of your organization. Count instances, don’t correct them yet.
• At the end of the week, replace one recurring “they” phrase with “we” in a meeting or written update. Observe how it changes people’s response.

Change the environment before you change the message:

• Pick one behavior you’ve been trying to shift through communication alone (emails, all-hands talks, workshops). Identify one physical or structural change that would make the new behavior the default.
• Run it for 30 days without announcing a mindset goal. At the end, ask the team what they notice. Don’t prime them with the answer.