I spent a decade in the U.S. Marine Corps as an intelligence operative and martial arts instructor. It was both some of the most formative and exciting years of my life mixed with excruciatingly long runs, incredibly high expectations, and several harrowing experiences.
And it was a blast.
After I resigned from the Marine Corps and landed in tech, I had no idea that what the Corps taught me would continue to serve me daily.
What the Corps calls leading Marines, the civilian sector calls agility.
Let me explain, and I’ll start at the beginning. Boot camp.
Marine Corps boot camp lasts 13 weeks, where two drill instructors and one senior drill instructor treat you and your platoon of recruits like dirt. It’s non-stop training day in and day out, no calls home, no internet, and zero autonomy. Your only job is to follow orders and suffer.
Most people think drill instructors break recruits down to build them back up. Others believe it’s a gut check to ensure the recruit truly wants to become a Marine. Neither is true.
It’s about teaching you to find the signal amongst all the noise.
When you first drop into your platoon with all your gear, drill instructors surround you, yelling and screaming about how you’re doing everything wrong or not moving fast enough. If you listen very closely, you can hear one quiet voice—your senior drill instructor—giving you orders.
Hold up your canteen. Find and stow your uniforms. Change your socks.
As you follow those orders, the yelling subsides, and the drill instructors move on to some other poor soul who isn’t listening. Every day of boot camp demands that you search for the signal, because failing to do so leads to misery.
So what’s this have to do with you?
OKRs. Performance metrics. Hell! Even sprint goals. All of these are the signal, but how much of your time goes to serving the noise? I remember a team that I helped years ago as a Scrum Master. As I was onboarding, I sat with them during their sprint planning and asked to observe silently. After they decided on their sprint goal and had determined their sprint backlog, I asked one question as we were ending.
How much of that work we just planned pertains to accomplishing the goal?
The answer? 20%-ish. I didn’t belabor the point, and I asked only to validate what I thought I saw. After they answered though, I had a product owner who felt it necessary to justify why this was the right thing to do as the team sat silently.
So let me leave you with some pragmatic ideas you can fold into your world:
- Know your signal from your noise. And make sure you validate that signal with leadership and those around you. It should be simple and succinct in the same way my senior drill instructor gave his orders.
- Pay close attention to the boundaries. Imagine your signal is a box. That box has a shape, edges, and corners. When someone crosses a boundary into the land of noise, have a conversation. The outcome should always be a reshaped box or a reinforced boundary.
- Demand to be questioned. If you’re a manager, your people should be rewarded for reminding you when you’ve become bewitched by the noise. Creating team-wide accountability for minding the signal cannot be overstated since wandering mindlessly into the noise happens to all of us. (Attribution: Corps Business)
The association between agility and my time in the Corps is near and dear to my heart. If you’d like to read others like this, I talk about more it here and here.
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