Silence.

A problem deeper than fear.

In 2012, a former US Navy submarine commander named David Marquet published a book that would quietly reshape how a generation of leaders thought about hierarchy and voice. Turn the Ship Around told the story of how he had taken command of the USS Santa Fe — the worst-performing submarine in the American fleet — and turned it into the best, not by becoming a more commanding commander, but by becoming less of one.

The moment that changed his thinking came early in his command, and it was almost embarrassingly small. Marquet had trained extensively on a different class of submarine — he knew its systems, its capabilities, its rhythms. Then, at the last minute, his posting was switched. He arrived on the Santa Fe carrying a commander’s confidence and another ship’s knowledge. In his first days aboard, he issued an order. It passed down the chain of command, each officer and rating relaying it to the next, until it reached the man responsible for executing it — who quietly replied that the Santa Fe didn’t have that capability. The order couldn’t be carried out.

What stopped Marquet cold wasn’t the error. It was the silence that had surrounded it. Every person in that chain had known the order was wrong. Not one of them had said so. They had simply passed it along, each waiting for someone above or below to be the one to speak, until the chain ran out of people and reality intervened. In a nuclear submarine, Marquet thought, that silence could kill everyone aboard.

The problem he had identified was deceptively simple. The US Navy ran on a leader-follower model so deeply embedded it had become invisible: the person at the top decided, the people below executed, and the information that might have improved the decision rarely travelled upward because nobody had been asked for it, and offering it without being asked carried risk. The system was optimised for compliance and for the appearance of competence, which are not the same thing as actual competence. So he changed it. He stopped giving orders and started giving intent — telling his crew what he was trying to achieve and trusting them to tell him how. Authority moved downward. Questions moved upward. The Santa Fe’s performance transformed.

Marquet’s framework spread far beyond the Navy, carried by a TED talk and a book that resonated with organisations that recognised the same pattern in their own corridors. The diagnosis felt right. The fix was elegant. The story was compelling.

There was only one problem — and it wasn’t with Marquet.

It was that someone had made exactly the same argument, in almost exactly the same setting, a hundred and nineteen years earlier. He had also been right. And it had ended very differently.

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On the afternoon of 22nd June 1893, the Mediterranean Fleet was at its most impressive. Eleven warships — eight battleships and three cruisers — moved in two parallel columns through calm, bright water off the Lebanese coast, their hulls dark against the sea, their ensigns catching the breeze. It was the kind of afternoon that made the Royal Navy look exactly like what it believed itself to be: the most powerful naval force on earth, disciplined, precise, and perfectly commanded.

In the lead ship, HMS Victoria, Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon stood on the bridge. He was, by almost universal agreement, the finest fleet commander of his generation — bold, innovative, and possessed of a tactical intelligence that had made him something close to legendary in the service. He had a habit of making manoeuvres more intricate by the introduction of the unexpected, of making the impossible look deliberate, of explaining afterwards in his cabin what his officers had failed to understand in the moment. His officers had learned, over years of service under him, that apparent impossibility was sometimes part of the design. They trusted him completely. What none of them could yet know was that this trust — reasonable, well-founded, earned over years of brilliant command — was itself the condition that would make the afternoon catastrophic.

Tryon gave the order to reverse course. Each column of ships would turn inward toward the other, execute a 180-degree turn, and emerge sailing in the opposite direction. The problem — visible immediately to almost everyone on both bridges — was the distance between the columns. At six cables, they were roughly 1,200 yards apart. For the two lead ships to complete inward turns without collision, they needed at least 1,600. The mathematics were not complicated. The collision, if the order was executed as given, was not a possibility. It was a certainty.

Tryon’s own Staff Commander saw it immediately and said so. He suggested eight cables. Tryon appeared to agree — and then, moments later, confirmed six. The number was written on a piece of paper and passed to an officer, as if the act of writing it settled the matter. On HMS Camperdown, Rear-Admiral Markham saw the signal and hesitated. He began to semaphore that he had not understood the order — that it seemed to him, as it seemed to everyone, that something was wrong. From Victoria came the reply: what are you waiting for? It was a public rebuke, sharp and unambiguous. Markham complied.

The columns began to turn. On both bridges, officers watched the distance between the ships close with the slow, grinding logic of a sum being completed. Someone gave the order to close the watertight doors sixty seconds before impact — sixty seconds, in perfectly calm water, on a clear afternoon, with plenty of time to have spoken. Camperdown’s reinforced ram struck Victoria below the waterline and tore a hole the size of a room in her hull. Thirteen minutes later, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet rolled onto her side and sank, her screws still turning as she went under. Three hundred and fifty-eight men went down with her, including Tryon himself. His last words, heard by officers standing nearby, were: it is entirely my fault.

The court-martial agreed. But it also concluded something more significant — that it would be, in its own words, fatal to the best interests of the service to hold Markham responsible for obeying the direct order of his commander in chief. The system that had produced the silence was the same system that officially absolved everyone who had stayed silent. It could not do otherwise. To find Markham guilty would have been to find the Royal Navy guilty.

Victoria still stands upright on the seabed off the Lebanese coast, her bow buried in the sand, exactly as she settled in 1893. A monument, in seventy fathoms of water, to what trust costs.

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Marquet and Tryon never met, separated as they were by a century and an ocean. But they had reached the same conclusion by the same route: watching highly trained, experienced, capable people stay silent in the face of an obvious problem, because the culture around them had made speaking up feel more dangerous than saying nothing. Both men had seen what that silence cost. Both had tried to design their way out of it.

Tryon didn’t just observe the problem — he wrote about it, argued for reform because of it, and designed a system specifically to break the deference chain before it broke his fleet in battle. He understood, with unusual clarity for a senior Victorian naval officer, that blind obedience in a modern naval engagement would cost lives. He was right about that. He just didn’t expect it to cost his.

Which brings us to the detail that makes this story something more than a historical curiosity.

In the Royal Navy of Tryon’s era, every fleet manoeuvre was conducted through an elaborate system of flag signals. The flagship would signal an intended movement, every other ship would acknowledge it, and only then would the manoeuvre be executed. It was precise, orderly, and slow — and Tryon believed it was fundamentally dangerous, because in a real naval engagement there would be no time for sequential permission-seeking. Ships needed to respond to a developing situation faster than the signal book allowed.

His solution was elegantly simple. When Tryon hoisted a particular two-flag signal from his flagship, it meant: stop waiting for instructions. Follow the flagship’s movements, use your judgement, act on what you see rather than what you’re told. The cascade of signals and acknowledgements was suspended. Captains were trusted to think. The Times called it unsound in theory and perilous in practice. Tryon called it the future of naval command.

It was, in other words, a system designed specifically to replace “wait for the admiral’s permission” with “use your own eyes and your own mind.” A system built, explicitly, to break the deference chain.

On the afternoon of 22nd June 1893, the fleet was not operating under that system. It was operating under the standard signal book — the old system, the one Tryon had spent years arguing against. And still nobody spoke.

The deference wasn’t in the system. It was in the men. And no flag signal, however well designed, could reach that deep. Tryon had understood the problem precisely. He had built something to fix it. And when the moment came, what his officers fell back on wasn’t his reform. It was everything the Navy had spent decades teaching them before he arrived — about what obedience meant, about what initiative cost, about what happened to the officer who second-guessed his admiral in front of the fleet.

Marquet succeeded where Tryon failed, not because his insight was sharper but because he had something Tryon didn’t: time, and a crew small enough to rebuild from the inside out, relationship by relationship, conversation by conversation, until the culture itself began to shift. The Santa Fe’s transformation took years of sustained, deliberate work — not a new system dropped onto an old culture, but a slow replacement of one set of assumptions with another.

Stories like that matter. They show what is possible under the right conditions. But those conditions are rarer than we like to think — and they sit alongside a much longer history of organisations that have understood the cost of silence without managing to escape it.

Which leaves a more uncomfortable question.

If the cost of silence has been visible for as long as it has — clear enough in 1893 for a Victorian admiral to design an entire system against it, studied and documented ever since — then why does it persist? Why, knowing what we know, do capable and well-intentioned people still stay quiet at exactly the moments that matter most?

The easy answer is fear.

We explored in an earlier chapter what power does to the information that travels upward — how people edit and soften what they say in the presence of authority, how the distance between the leader and the reality grows with every layer it passes through. And the dominant response to that has become equally familiar: create psychological safety, make it easier to speak.

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, has built a compelling body of research showing that when people believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks within their team, they learn and perform better. That finding is real and important. But it was developed in the context of small, close working teams — and the fear of interpersonal consequence is only one layer of why people stay silent.

Markham is worth sitting with, because his silence doesn’t fit that explanation.

He knew exactly what was happening. He saw the problem immediately. He prepared a semaphore signal questioning the order. He hesitated long enough for Tryon to rebuke him publicly. He had already worked out that the ships would collide. And he still said nothing.

What he said at the court-martial afterwards is more revealing than any interpretation we might offer. Asked whether he felt anxiety as he ordered the signal hoisted, he replied: “No, I felt no anxiety, having the fullest confidence in the commander in chief.” Asked why he had proceeded despite doubting the order could be safely executed, he explained that there had been many evolutions in the Mediterranean Squadron whose purpose, at the time, he had barely understood — only to have them explained afterwards by Tryon in his cabin. He had some idea, he said, that Tryon was going to wheel round him, come out on the other side, and reform the squadron. He thought Tryon had a trick up his sleeve.

Tryon had done what seemed impossible before. He had a habit of introducing the unexpected, of making manoeuvres more intricate in ways that only became clear afterwards. Over time, his officers had learned that apparent impossibility was sometimes part of the design — that confusion might sit not in the order, but in their own understanding of it. So when the signal came that seemed to make no sense, Markham’s mind reached for the explanation his experience had taught him to trust: that the man who had always known what he was about still knew what he was about now. His silence wasn’t the absence of judgement. It was the result of it. Faced with a contradiction between what he could see and what experience had taught him about his commander, he chose the latter. A safer room cannot dissolve that belief. It might, over time, create conditions in which it can be tested — but it cannot do that work alone.

The very qualities that had made him great — his brilliance, his habit of making the impossible work, his deliberate complexity — had actively trained the silence that killed him. His officers had learned, through years of experience under him, that what looked wrong was often right, that their doubt was more likely to reflect their own limitation than his error. He had made deference feel like wisdom. And no system, however well designed, could undo in months what the man himself had built over years. Leadership success, at a certain intensity, can generate the conditions for its own failure — by making dissent feel not just professionally dangerous but genuinely unnecessary.

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Marquet’s story is usually told as one of empowerment — he made it safe to challenge, he distributed leadership, and he created a culture of voice. That framing is accurate as far as it goes. But it misses the crucial structural move underneath. The problem on the Santa Fe wasn’t primarily a psychological safety problem. It was a structural one. The people who held the knowledge and the people who held the authority were different people. Information sat at one end of the organisation, decisions at the other — and the gap between them, however much you improved communication, was where the real damage was done.

What Marquet changed was where decisions got made. He moved authority closer to where understanding already existed — not asking his crew to send their knowledge upward fast enough to influence decisions being made above them, but asking them to make decisions themselves at the point of impact. That is not simply an empowerment story. It is a redistribution of authority. And in redistributing authority, it alters something more fundamental than the tone of the conversation: when the person who knows is also close to the decision, less depends on that journey upward — and with it, less is exposed to the distortion that power introduces in transit.

This is not a simple prescription, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. Complex organisations are not submarines. Interdependencies are real, decisions require coordination across multiple domains, and authority cannot always be neatly aligned with knowledge without creating different kinds of failure. Moving decisions downward does not eliminate the gap between understanding and authority. It relocates it. Someone still sets intent, allocates resources, and arbitrates between competing local decisions. Distributed authority has its own risks — of incoherence, of drift, of decisions made in isolation from a wider context. Captain Johnstone of Camperdown captured the counterpoint precisely in his testimony: that when an order is given by a competent officer who has likely thought it through carefully, there is “extreme danger” in acting against it on the spur of the moment. He was not wrong. Judgement without shared understanding can be as dangerous as obedience without thought. The question is not whether hierarchy is always wrong, but whether the people making decisions are close enough to the reality those decisions depend on — and how often organisations are willing to examine that seriously.

Tryon asked it. He built a system around his conclusion. And yet it still wasn’t enough — because his answer was designed for the moment of crisis, not for the ordinary condition of command. The habit was never built because it was never required. Marquet asked the same question and got a different result, not because his insight was sharper, but because he had time and a bounded system small enough to rebuild those assumptions from the ground up — to change not just where decisions were made, but what people believed about their own right to make them.

Speak-up channels, psychological safety programmes, open-door policies — these matter, and organisations that have none are in a worse position than those that do. But they are all, in different ways, attempts to improve the journey that information makes from the bottom to the top. They make the journey safer, smoother, and faster. They do not ask whether the journey should be necessary at all.

There is, however, another way organisations try to manage the same problem — not by moving decisions closer to where understanding already exists, but by trying to bring understanding closer to where decisions are made. Over time, that instinct has produced systems designed to surface what would otherwise remain local and fragmented, assembling a picture of what people are actually experiencing across the organisation.

I was trying to build one of those systems.

Harkn wasn’t a speak-up tool in the usual sense, and it wasn’t designed to encourage challenge. It was an attempt to make experience visible — to hear more of what was already there, more consistently, and with less distortion than the normal routes upward allowed. Anonymity reduced some of the cost of saying what was true. Frequency meant that patterns could be seen as they formed, rather than reconstructed after the fact.

It changed what could be seen. What it didn’t settle was what would be done with what was seen.

Tryon’s officers had spent decades learning to defer. When the moment came that demanded something different, the habit wasn’t there. Marquet’s crew, by the time it mattered, had spent years being asked to think for themselves in ordinary circumstances. The muscle existed because it had been regularly used.

That, I believe, is the shift we need. Not a safer journey, but a shorter one — and, in places, no journey at all. An organisation in which honest dialogue is so habitual that silence, when it appears, is recognised for what it is.

Silence, in the end, may not be the problem. Perhaps, instead, we should see it as the evidence of a system in which understanding and authority have become too far apart.