Admiral John Richardson

Morning, everybody. You can do better than that, maybe. Good morning, everyone. Yeah. All right. Let's stretch it. Thank you.

I'd like to just start first by thanking Gene and Marguerite and the IT Revolution team. They just put on such a magnificent event here at DevOps Enterprise Summit every year. You talk to people around the floor, and the thing that comes through stronger than anything is how everybody feels like they totally belong here. There's just great work going on, collaboration at every level. It's so encouraging and affirming. So let's give a nice super round of applause for Gene and Marguerite and the whole team. Thank you so much.

I thought, since I've spent most of my adult life in the Navy, I would just tell you a sea story. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay.

So there we were, right? And all good sea stories start with, "There we were." All right.

So there we were on this submarine, the USS Honolulu. It's a nuclear-powered attack submarine, and we were on a deployment. We were on a mission, and we had worked our way in submerged, thousands of miles from our home port. We were in a very, very important part of the world that I cannot tell you about, and we were doing some amazingly interesting and important work that I also can't tell you about, but it was fantastic.

We were in the sweet spot of the world for doing the mission that we were doing, and we were scheduled to stay there for about a month. The thing about these submarines is they can stay submerged for months on end. We have machines on board that make our atmosphere. We take H2O and split it into hydrogen and oxygen, breathe the oxygen, and we make our own water.

We were on this mission, just getting settled in, doing great work, and our evaporator broke. Okay? Now, what's an evaporator? The evaporator is the thing that makes our water. And a submarine needs a lot of water. We go through thousands of gallons a day of water. Some of that is for people. Some of that is for the submarine. The machines of the submarine need fresh water to cool themselves and for a lot of other uses.

And so when the evaporator breaks, immediately it's a major crisis on board because you've got a bunch of water in reserve tanks, but the stopwatch is running. You're using that water. You're not making new water. And we did the math, and we figured that we had about two and a half days to fix this machine, start making water again. And if we didn't fix it in that amount of time, we had to leave. All of the work of getting in there would be lost, and our mission would pretty much be a failure.

So we first got organized. The operational teams kept operating the ship. We were there submerged, undetected, in that interesting place, so we had to keep doing that. But we also put together these mission-centered teams, just like you just heard about a little bit, which were a combination of electricians and mechanics that were dedicated to fixing this machine. And they went port and starboard. We call it like eight hours on and eight hours off. We had the part on board, but it was a difficult repair.

And we tried. Day one went by.

Let me tell you, the other thing you do is, to preserve water for the submarine, you absolutely minimize water for people. So there's no dishes being done. Everybody's eating their food off of paper plates and all of that. It's nuts. And we're not taking showers. So imagine, if you will, 150 people in a 40-foot tube underwater on day two with no showers. Sporty, sporty.

And in particular, I don't know why this is, it's a cultural thing, the sonar operators were particularly offended at this. I mean, they just have this need for cleanliness.

So day one went by, no success. Day two goes by, no success. Our teams, at this point, were starting to really get exhausted. And the time ran out, and we said, "Okay, we gave this our best shot. It's time to fold up the mission. We're going to head back home, and we've got to get this machine fixed."

So that's what we did. We started making preparations to leave station.

Well, then something remarkable happened. The thing that happened was Petty Officer Williams. And Petty Officer Williams had been on one of those two teams, but he just decided, of his own accord, that as we were wrapping up and getting ready to leave, he was going to give this thing one last shot, just by himself in his spare time.

And he went on back there, and he started tinkering with this evaporator. And wouldn't you know that he came through, and he got it fixed.

The thing that's remarkable to me is Petty Officer Williams had been in the Navy probably 17 years. He was a great sailor. He was probably not going to promote again. He was in his senior rank. And he just did this of his own accord. He was motivated intrinsically to own this mission and really spend every last molecule of his effort, almost literally, to get this thing done.

Has anybody ever experienced something like that, where somebody comes through at the last minute and just sort of saves the day on your team? Raise your hand if you've had that experience. A few people have.

It feels like winning a world championship when that happens. It feels like your team has won the world championship.

So I wanted to fast-forward now 15 years, when I took charge of the whole Navy. Now, 150 people, I wanted to scale that experience up to 600,000 people. And we did that by developing a framework that talks about how we're going to develop our leaders.

And we produced the Leader Development Framework. And it talked about what we want in our leaders: humility, dedication, a focus on their teams, a focus on the mission. And we talked about how we were going to get there, sort of three ways to go down the road towards that goal. We've got formal schools, we've got on-the-job training, and we've got self-learning.

The road to get there, we talked about, had two lanes that were going to characterize two major areas. One was competence. We wanted everybody to be an expert at what they do. And the other was character, because it's an all-volunteer force. And we needed to look everybody in the eye in America and say, "Your leaders, the leaders in front of your sons and daughters, are going to be people of integrity and character."

And so we developed this structure to the framework, and we issued it.

Now the Navy's a complex thing. How many people have seen Top Gun: Maverick? Okay, yeah, of course. So you get a sense of the culture of naval aviation when you watch that movie. It's brash, it's cocky, it's lots of confidence. You've got to have that to land on an aircraft carrier at night.

I'm from the submarine community. We have our own culture. It's nerdy. It's super technical. We're introverts. So that's our culture.

The SEALs have a culture. Surface warfare, cyber warfare, all of these communities have culture. It was complicated, and I knew I wouldn't get it right on the first try. And I also wanted to try and bring the entire Navy into the process. So I issued this with the label version 1.0. It's kind of a subtle invitation for everybody to participate. It was kind of new. Normally admirals don't do that, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

And I was a little bit nervous as to whether anybody would take me up on it. But wouldn't you know, almost immediately, as soon as this hit the street, miraculously, all sorts of feedback came in. They kind of got it right. I was thrilled we got this feedback, and I wanted to reinforce this flywheel that had started spinning. Almost a year later, we issued version 2.0, and version 2.0 incorporated the important, interesting aspects of—

Captain Emily Bassett

That's a great sea story. And I actually believe it's probably mostly true. Mostly true. I mean, for sea stories.

But Admiral, sir, I was in the fleet when you issued 2.0, and we used it on my ship. I was only in charge of 60 sailors on one ship, but we used it, and we had so much fun with it. And it was super effective.

Admiral John Richardson

Really? Well, why don't you come on up and tell us more about that.

Captain Emily Bassett

Well, I will. Thank you.

All right. Well, thank you, sir. And there's my ship, USS Manchester. So this is the ship. I had just taken command of USS Manchester when NLDF 2.0, which you just talked about, was issued.

And it solved a tremendous challenge for me.

Admiral John Richardson

Really?

Captain Emily Bassett

Yes, sir. So the challenge I had, like many of us are talking about so far today, is transition. We were facing more transition than I'd ever seen in my career.

This was the first ship for me. It was a brand-new ship. So we were building the crew, building new processes.

Admiral John Richardson

Yeah.

Captain Emily Bassett

It was a new class of ship. So no sailor in my crew had ever been on this class of ship. Every sailor had to learn a brand-new technical competency.

Admiral John Richardson

Almost everything's new.

Captain Emily Bassett

Everything was new. And not only that, the Navy was shifting the construct. So where we're very used to having pride in our crew, like a lot of us have pride in our companies, we had to be ready at any moment to shift from one ship to another. So we had a completely different definition of ownership. It was a crew-manning construct that was rotating at a whim.

Admiral John Richardson

So tremendous agility.

Captain Emily Bassett

Yes, sir.

And so this NLDF 2.0, we distilled it down, and we had a lot of fun with it. And we focused on an acronym we made. We made an acronym out of your 14-page document.

Admiral John Richardson

So you boiled down this whole thing into an acronym?

Captain Emily Bassett

We kind of did.

Admiral John Richardson

Okay.

Captain Emily Bassett

We did.

Admiral John Richardson

Tell me more.

Captain Emily Bassett

So we called it D2C3.

Admiral John Richardson

That sounds like a robot.

Captain Emily Bassett

Well, it's kind of what it was. We called it deliberately developing character, competence, and connections. The sailors thought it would be fun to make that an acronym, so I would end up with little R2-D2s on my desk from time to time, and they would call it D2C3. So we had fun with it.

Admiral John Richardson

Good. But there's another C in there. There's connections.

Captain Emily Bassett

Well, that's what happened.

So I wanted everyone in the crew to understand not just this theory of a lane that we had to go down to develop character, or a lane to develop competence, or a lane to develop what we added, connection. I wanted them to see what it meant.

So whenever we had examples of sailors who had done something that was deliberately developing character, or competence, or connections, we awarded them with a coin.

Admiral John Richardson

So tell me some of these examples.

Captain Emily Bassett

Yes, sir.

For example, when we wanted to acknowledge someone was deliberately developing character, we would, like I said, give him a coin. A good example for character was one sailor, under a tremendous amount of time pressure and stress, made a mistake and destroyed some highly confidential material that would take us days to recover.

So we had to go to some alternate sources, recover that confidential information. For that period of time, we were a little bit more vulnerable. This sailor could have probably not reported this, hoping that in that period of time we wouldn't have needed to use that code.

Admiral John Richardson

So nobody would notice.

Captain Emily Bassett

He could have. But that's not what he did. Instead, he reported it immediately, informed me. I had to make some reports to my superiors pretty rapidly to inform us of our reduced reliable state and let them know what we were doing about it.

But the first action I took was to get the whole crew together and to award this sailor with a character coin.

Admiral John Richardson

Yeah. It must have been hard, right? He did the right thing.

Captain Emily Bassett

Yeah. And I wanted sailors on USS Manchester to know, this is what we do here. This is who we are, and this is what we do.

And we created a culture by virtue of that framework that you set up, that we deliberately develop culture and we acknowledge that. And so we got more of that.

And then it continued. There were some other examples.

Admiral John Richardson

Like what?

Captain Emily Bassett

Well, for deliberately developing competence, you remember I had sailors who had to learn entirely new jobs.

Admiral John Richardson

Yeah. It was a new ship. Everything was new.

Captain Emily Bassett

It was a new ship. So when we learned that our mine warfare capability was going to be delayed, some of my minemen went looking for where they could build new talents, completely new, not based on their career training. And they saw that we had minimum manning. We needed more sailors on the bridge, and they learned entirely new jobs for themselves right there on the spot.

Admiral John Richardson

So the mine warfare person learned how to drive the ship, essentially.

Captain Emily Bassett

She did, yeah. I had a sailor do that, and I wanted to commend that. So we gave her a competency coin.

And then when the crew was having so much fun just developing and acknowledging character development, competence development, we added that third C, and it was connections.

Admiral John Richardson

Is there an example of that?

Captain Emily Bassett

Well, a great example of that would be, we had a sailor come in to work on the ship one day, and he was really shook up. It turned out he had been in a near-miss accident and did not actually get into a car accident, but he had been distracted driving and he had been texting.

Admiral John Richardson

Texting or something.

Captain Emily Bassett

Yes, sir. Texting while driving. And he wanted the whole crew to realize that the stress that we were under to perform and get things done was never more important than our own safety.

And so we got the crew together, and he gave a quick brief on his error and how he wanted to make sure we all could do this, and that we could all come to work safely.

Admiral John Richardson

So he volunteered to share this with the crew so they wouldn't make the same mistake that he did.

Captain Emily Bassett

That's right, sir. So we gave him a connections coin.

And there was so much fun with it. Those are just three quick examples, but we had so much fun as a crew measuring character, competence, and connections that all the other metrics that I was supposed to probably be measuring, as we've seen a lot of these data graphs go up and we measure improvement, we also found that those metrics just blew themselves out of the water.

Admiral John Richardson

So by reinforcing those three things, character, competence, and connections, all the other traditional metrics rose on that tide.

Captain Emily Bassett

That's right. Yes, sir.

So I just wanted to offer those stories to you, my own sea stories, and thought, I don't know, sir, if you'd be willing to consider adapting it to the whole Navy, adding that third C.

Admiral John Richardson

So you think, just from what you learned on Manchester, we could scale that up Navy-wide?

You know, it's funny that you mention that, Captain Bassett, because I just had a conversation with a fleet commander. And our fleet commanders are in charge of a huge part of the Navy, an entire fleet. They've got dozens of ships and thousands of people, a lot of maintenance, tremendous responsibilities and demands.

And I asked this person, "What is the top thing on your mind right now? What are you struggling with the most?"

And this person, who had a massive staff, said, "The thing I'm struggling with the most is that I don't feel like I can talk to people about what I'm going through right now."

So I think this idea of adding this connection C is exactly what we need to do. I think it's important enough that I'm going to issue version 3.0 of the Navy Leader Development Framework.

All right. So give it up to Captain Emily Bassett here.

Captain Emily Bassett

So what you saw here just now was a short little reenactment of what actually occurred. Admiral Richardson took my feedback, and I was one of only 60 sailors, and then changed pretty much the entire Navy for over half a million people, who now talk about connections with the same conviction that we talk about character and building competence.

This was meant as a teaser for you. We have an entire workshop this afternoon that will give you more examples for how you can develop character, competence, and connections in your own teams, for yourself, whether it's for a large organization or a small one. They're all scalable.

So we have workshop today at three. We hope you join us.

Admiral John Richardson

All right. We'll see you all there. Thank you very much.