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Welcome to Lead Wisely by WonderTour.

We're back with episode 124 in our series on Trust the Process.

And we are talking about the movie, The Martian.

Last episode, we talked about personal responsibility.

So this episode, we're going to talk about distributing responsibility and kind of not
just looking at responsibility from a, I should have more responsibility over this

situation.

I'm not taking enough responsibility over my actions, but now looking at, okay, well, when
is it time to...

give up that responsibility to somebody else.

When is it time to not feel so responsible for an outcome or for an action that needs to
be taken?

So Brian, I'm gonna turn it over to you with our big question.

What does the Martian show us about when it's time to surrender responsibility?

Yes.

Awesome question.

So like you said, we, see in Mark Watney, a really good example of a hyper competent
individual, right?

He's got this terrible situation.

He faces it head on.

He solves one problem at a time.

He's got to the best of his ability.

He's marshaled all his resources.

He's got his stuff under control.

Mark is very clear that he personally can't solve the whole problem.

he's not going to.

drive back to earth in his Rover.

So he needs somebody, he needs a team, he needs a community, he needs people to come to
his rescue.

He needs to be part of a larger effort.

And he recognizes this very early on.

And so we see him in parallel with his self-care routine and parallel with his resource
marshaling routine is like, okay, communication is a priority.

I'm gonna go dig up the old Rover and I'm gonna bring it back and I'm gonna turn it on.

And that's gonna give us a way to do some synchronized semaphore taking photos of, you
know.

hexadecimal codes and eventually we'll get to the point where we can communicate.

So at this point, he's not really giving up responsibility so much as just trying to make
sure to get the right people involved.

But then he does, once he has this communication with his broader community, once he's got
back to NASA, then they're sending him all sorts of advice on what things to do and how to

do it.

And he is, you know, kind of salty about it, but also he's clearly complying, right?

He's happy to have.

support.

He's happy to have people tell him, this is the best way to do this.

Go run the numbers on this.

I've got the smartest people in the world working on my problems, which is pretty great.

Right.

And so that's, that's one version of this, like when to surrender responsibilities.

If you can get somebody who's amazing at something, helping you solve your problems,
that's really good.

The thing that I really like watching in this movie though is on the other side of the
story is our character Teddy, the NASA director, who is, I would submit is a very skilled,

very magnanimous leader throughout, right?

He doesn't always make the exact right decision, but he is, navigates very smoothly this
kind of series of terrible situations while keeping his eyes on the prize.

And what Teddy does over and over again is he takes the...

the big, you he does the, he does the map making thing that we talk about.

Like he has the big picture, like this is our challenge.

We want to get this person back.

This is how long it's going to take.

These are our options, right?

He's very good at framing the problem.

he's very good at taking the hard decisions on himself.

Now you're not going to decide, I'm going to decide which thing we're going to do, but
he's not ever presuming that he is the expert.

He's not ever presuming that he has all the information.

He's not ever presuming that he personally can solve all the problems.

And so we see him over and over again, like delegating to people he trusts, like

You tell me what my options are, go do the math and come back.

You tell me how long you're going to need to solve this problem.

You tell me what this, you what's available over here and you know, what's actually,
what's actually happening.

He's really good at staying in his lane, staying at his level of expertise and then
picking the best people in the world to solve individual problems and then sort of

trusting their responses.

Yeah, when they're trying to get the original rocket off the ground in order to provide
the supplies, he's saying that it's gonna take, you know, he wants it to take a certain

amount of time.

He set a milestone, but they're like, no, it's going to take 15 additional days.

And he's not doing the thing that I don't know if you've ever had happen before, which is
like, just do it anyway.

You just gotta just do it anyway.

It's like, okay, well, the problem with just do it anyway is that's not.

It's actually absolving yourself.

It feels like you're taking the responsibility as the leader.

It can feel like that, but it's kind of a fake taking of the responsibility because
instead you're just shoveling responsibility on somebody else to hit a deadline without

understanding if they have the proper resources, dependency management, all the things
that need to happen in order to do so.

And then what ends up happening is actually you're not really taking responsibility for
the overall outcome because now if they miss that deadline, all the dependencies that come

after that deadline are not going to be met anymore.

And so now the whole mission is going to be at risk.

And your idea that they should just be able to hit a certain target without rationale,
without managing the capacity of the individuals to do it, I think that's key here is the

leader is always responsible for the outcome, but for each individual piece of the
equation, handing off responsibility to the people who have the most information is

critical, even when they sometimes fail like they do in the example of the.

initial rocket that they send up.

Right.

Yeah, no, his, yeah, Teddy's relationship with Bruce, the leader of his team that's
building these resupply units, right, is really great.

Like we watch their dynamic and he's like, okay, how long do you need?

like, well, I need three weeks.

Well, you don't have three weeks, you only have 14 days.

you know, what do you really need?

Like how can, you know, he challenges him to keep pushing and keep pushing like that.

You're going to tell me if the overtime alone is going to kill you.

And I know, but anyway, you know, he's like, I'll find the money, I'll figure it out.

Tell me what you really need.

What's the minimum thing you really need and I'll go make it happen.

And then he goes and makes some other hard decisions.

Right.

So he, he is very open to expert feedback.

He's very open to delegating specialists, what to do.

and that is an essential part of sort of navigating through the kinds of problems we like
to talk about on Wonder Tour.

Right.

If you, if everything's going according to plan, like if you're on the production line,
everything's showing up on time, everything's coming out the backend on time and quality

is great.

Like that's a management problem.

That's not leadership.

Right.

That's, that's a, we know the process, we're turning the crank, we're trusting the
process, right?

We're, we're making sure that all the little details are going right.

Right.

But that's a management problem is managing small exceptions and making the process run
smoothly.

The time that you need a leader is when things don't go well, when you're trying to do
something new, or you're trying to solve a problem that you don't know how to solve, or

when the whole mission is in jeopardy.

Right.

That's when you need somebody who is skilled at bouncing back and forth between top level
mission.

my responsibility, making the hard decisions, but also engaging the experts, engaging the
skilled people, challenging everybody to give their utmost.

That's really what, you know, again, in classic giant big screen Hollywood fashion, right?

The problem we see here is a giant ridiculous enough problem that all of these examples
are scaled up.

But that's exactly the pattern that we're looking for.

And that is the responsibility, right?

It's like the responsibility of the director of NASA is to engage the people.

It's to make sure that they're informed and communicated to the latest situation.

It's to make sure that they have any critical milestones understood.

His responsibility is not to make sure that the thing, you know, meets all the quality
standards.

He can't possibly do that.

What is he going to go do?

Go down and inspect everything himself with his very limited knowledge, probably of what?

of what would actually pass because I love that example of the rocket because it's like,
well, he makes the call to bypass the quality inspection gate essentially, in order to

save the eight days or whatever.

Okay, cool.

So what could be tempting after you make that decision to bypass the QA gate is to then go
back and say, well, the team just didn't build enough quality into it.

And I should have just gone down there and I should have checked the quality for myself as
the director.

And that's my responsibility.

But the problem is how does that drive end to end responsibility of the whole mission?

Because how do you have more information than the people who are supposed to actually
build and assemble this thing?

How do you have more information than the quality engineers?

It might seem good to you to go micromanage the data scientist on who can't seem to build
a machine learning model that makes the prediction that you want.

But how is that going to actually help you if you don't have a background in data science?

And then we see this a lot of times with, like you said, managers or leaders that they.

After a failure, the tendency is to kind of fall back on, well, I'll just engage directly
myself.

And it's like, well,

there's a responsibility to engage directly, correct, to encourage the team, make sure the
team has the right resources, make sure that there's clarity on the vision and the mission

and the requirements and all that sort of stuff, that's on you.

But a lot of the other stuff, you actually have to divorce yourself from that
responsibility and say, this is on the team and is it okay?

Did the team learn?

And are they gonna need to be given another opportunity?

And is that really the best way to solve a problem?

So I don't know if we've this out loud on the, on the show before, but for me, the, the
aphorism, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself is one of the worst

leadership traps.

Right.

This is, this is an absolute fallacy.

If you think that sincerely, then you are not a leader.

You cannot ever get a team to peak performance with the idea that you're better at
everything than everybody else.

And that they can't be trusted.

And the flip side of that is if you believe in specialists, if you believe in local
insight and people know their own situations and their own specialties better than you do,

if you believe in empowering people to make the hard decisions, then what you take in as a
responsibility as a leader is to model the high level mission and to model the behavior

and to model the ways in which you approach failure.

Right.

And so he does this very effectively.

And I, so I think this will be really fun.

He models like, we're going to cut the non-essential corners because we have to, because
the problem is telling us that we don't have enough time.

Like this person's going to die unless I take some risks.

And so I'm willing to forgo some margin of safety.

Right.

And then when it doesn't go well, he doesn't blame somebody else.

Like he stands up and says, yeah, that didn't work.

And I made that, I was the one that made a decision.

But the high level mission is still there.

Like we still want to go save Mark Watney and now we're making plan C and D and E and F,
right?

So he models that taking the decision responsibility, taking the outcome responsibility,
but not taking the detail responsibility.

And I want to put a pin in that and hold onto it until after the intro, because the rest
of his team absorbs that very well, right?

And we see through the rest of this movie.

that commitment to the mission, it's okay to cut the non-essential corners is actually
what's required for this story to succeed.

hi, I'm Brian Notwell.

And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by touring fantastic
worlds and inspiring lore by going on a wonder tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story context because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast.com or on YouTube by searching Lead Wisely, all
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where we hope you are receiving this right now.

So yeah, so let's move a little farther along in the story here.

So we've got the example of the NASA director who is successfully marshaled people all
over his organization and eventually all over the world, right?

To try to buy into this mission of let's bring Mark Watney back.

And he is leveraging all the resources at his disposal and he's very clear on kind of how
critical this is and how they're gonna have to do some crazy things.

And so what we see is...

even when they're not exactly following his orders, everybody sort of absorbed this
mission very deeply.

Like they're all bought in and it's a compelling mission, right?

But we have the example of this astrophysicist, Rich Purnell, who's like, I've got this
crazy idea that's different than what you're doing, but that I think will work better.

I think we could reuse the mission that took him to Mars in the first place and we could
just send them another loop and have them go pick him up and just send them the...

resupply mission.

Like, so he steps outside of his lane.

He does a bunch of work that nobody asks him to do.

His boss actually complains about this.

He walks into the NASA director's office and explains it, you know, skillfully, if not
socially skillfully, right.

It gets kicked out, but that sort of plants the seed, right.

So he steps outside of his lane.

Then the Mitch, the mission director, steps outside of his lane and forwards this mission
to the Hermes team.

He's like, Hey, here's another chance that, you know, you, if you, if you guys take some
authority.

then you could do this thing, right?

And gives them the opportunity to take personal responsibility, but improvise on their way
to the mission.

And so the team takes them up on it.

They vote unanimously.

Yeah, we're going to spend another 500 days in space and go save Mark.

Awesome, right?

And so that gets us to the actual point of like, well, now we have to do the rescue.

And so I want to talk about this scene.

Like, does this look like once you get to the point of like actually closing the deal?

How does this movie strike you?

Yeah, so one of the things that sticks out to me is the lessons that the NASA and that the
team in the existing spaceship are learning from Mark, because they're getting to

communicate with him.

And originally that was the idea was like, no, no, no, don't let them talk to each other.

It's like, no, obviously they need to be able to communicate because they're needing to
work together and they're learning from each other.

And they were truly learning from Mark, right?

They're seeing this bare bones style, this use only what's required.

minimize energy input in order to get the outcome that we desire, like all of this that
Mark's using.

And then like you said, we have that same example coming up with the director of NASA.

He's kind of embodying that for them.

And then we see the team do the exact same thing as we get to the end where they're going
to have this rescue mission.

Their whole approach is they're taking the Mark Watney approach.

They're going to minimize, energy input, right?

The team that designed the MAV for the Ares IV mission is just stripping everything out of
it in order to get as much altitude as possible out of this launch.

And it's a great scene, right?

They're applying what Watney is showing them in practice.

And then you get the same thing with the crew of the ship.

They're considering like, okay, well, we're coming in and we're not going to be at the
intercept distance.

And so we're going to have to do something different.

Then they're initially, they're like working within the constraints of the existing
system.

They're thinking, how do we pilot the ship properly?

And they're like, no, what if we do something entirely different?

We use a different form of thrust.

Like we have to think like Watney would think the ship is expendable.

we have two things we have to accomplish.

We have to save Mark.

and have to get back to earth.

And these are the same mission.

These are not two different competing missions.

They're the same mission.

And so Brian, talk to us a little bit about our mountaintop here, where they kind of go
through this exercise in thinking like Mark Watney.

And so Brian, talk to us a little bit about our mountaintop here, where they kind of go
through this exercise in thinking like Mark Watney.

Yes, this is so yeah, so they're coming in the they're coming into Mars, but one thing and
another, the launch of Mark getting into orbit doesn't go perfectly as planned.

And they're like, great.

We're going to be 300 kilometers away from him.

Like that's not quite enough for us to do a spacewalk and pull them into the ship.

Right.

Okay.

So we're going to, we're going to burn some thrust.

We're going to do some other things, right?

You okay.

Now, now we're going to be close.

We're going way too fast.

no.

Okay.

So now we've got to solve this problem.

Right.

And so this is the same thing, sequential problem solving, like great.

Do the thing, burn the thrust.

Now we've got 36 minutes to solve the other problem.

Okay.

In those 36 minutes, like, what are we going to do?

And exactly as you said, they are, you know, they're kind of acting like one team, even
though they're separated now, right?

They're inspired by the example of Mark Watney, right?

You know, this guy is, you know, farm potatoes in his own excrement and driven 300
kilometers across the Mars desert to get into the convertible and launch himself into the

spaceship.

How could we do any less?

so this is actually one of my favorite moments in the movie, right?

Whereas is commander Lewis calls down to Vogel, the chemist of the ship.

He's like, Hey, whatever you're doing, and you just stop it come up here and build me a
bomb.

You know, and he has the exactly correction reaction.

He's like, you know that this is a really bad idea on the spaceship, right?

But it's this sacrificing their margin of safety, improvising with the resources at hand
and you know, not to make the analogy to.

you know, two-pointed, right?

But like, where he is.

Like, we need to match orbits.

We need to, the team and the individual need to come together somehow.

And this is what it's going to take.

We're going to have to give up some of the things that we thought were standard processes.

We're going to have to give up some of the things that we thought were margin of safety.

We're going to have to give up some of the things that are like, that's probably not a
good idea most of the time, because we're all focused on these higher level missions,

right?

And because we're all sincerely committed and because we're all inspired by how hard
everybody else is working.

Like, how could we...

do any less.

Like they couldn't just be like, yeah, sorry, that didn't work out.

You know, that's not really on the table for them.

Yeah, for them it's all about the purpose, this combined mission.

And I want to contrast this a little bit to the opening scene of the movie where they're
trying to collect these samples.

They're trying to get off the planet before the storm.

They're trying to save Mark.

And it seems very disjointed the activity between the team, right?

It's like you have the commander getting off the ship to try to save Mark, but she's
taking all the responsibility on herself and not distributing it across the team.

You have

Mark, who we don't even know what's happening to at this point, he's probably knocked out
already by this point.

You have the team members arguing about what the right thing to do is in that situation.

And again, it's not that they're doing a bad job necessarily, but they're not doing a
great job of managing that.

And you get the opposite happening here at the end.

We get all of them clear on one purpose.

Again, the purpose combines together all of the different missions of getting back to
Earth and making sure nobody dies collecting Mark, all of these things.

one seamless narrative that they're all telling themselves, that they all bought in on at
one point.

And then you have them all putting forth their effort and taking responsibility for the
areas that they have capability in.

Like this is how we achieve greater outcomes.

not, it starts with what we talked about in episode one of The Martian.

You I need to take personal responsibility in my life.

I need to take the right amount of personal responsibility.

And then it's, need to, in this episode, give

responsibility to others, where they are specialized, where they sometimes not even
they're specialized.

Sometimes you might be more competent than them, but they need to learn.

They need to.

the only ones that are there on the spot, right?

So, yeah.

part of their journey, right?

Like they're at some point you're not going to be there.

So you need to level their skill sets up.

And so you need to give them that opportunity to do something.

And then there's also the situation where, you know, you need to be the commander who
steps in and is like, no, I'm going to go out on the, I'm going to go out on the tightrope

or whatever that thing is that she like hangs herself out on to try to catch Mark.

It's very similar, right?

And it's a little bit on the nose to the first part of the movie where she's like, I'll go
down the ladder and save him when he's in the storm.

So we have to have that redemption moment for her, which is great, but it's reframed as
being done in a different way where she's not just doing it in order to be the commander

who makes the sacrifice.

She's doing it because she really believes this is the best way that the team can
interact.

because everybody else is doing a job, right?

Everybody else is doing a role.

so it, so it occurs to me, right?

the first half of this, the, our first episode, the, the personal responsibility, the, a
lot of that's about, about facts, right?

A lot about that's about facing reality and solving the problems that you have available
to you, right?

Just doing the, doing the problem solving, which has to be, you have to be very, very
clear-eyed.

This second piece about surrendering responsibility is more about trust.

Mmm.

Right.

It's, it's, it's all about getting the team to the point where you can say somebody else
is going to do this specific thing better than I would better than I could better than I

can right now, maybe because they're the only one there, maybe then I'm not there or
because they're hyper specialized or because I trust, but, but I trust their commitment.

I trust their effort.

I trust their willingness to be part of this team.

And so we see that playing out really well.

Like when this works.

It's because you're looking clearly around at the facts and like, okay, what are the
resources we have available to us?

Okay.

Well, I have a chemist and I need to, I need to make a whole bunch of force in a hurry.

That sounds like a bomb.

Like I'm going to trust him to do that in a way that doesn't kill us all.

think we see that over and over again in this movie.

And I think that's the, if you can imagine yourself right in a, in a practical
application, if you can imagine yourself.

in a situation of Mark Watney, all you can do is your best.

All you can do is give all of your effort and get as far in orbit as you can, right?

And then trust that everybody else is giving you good advice and trust that they're gonna
come meet you.

And it may work and it may not, but that's all you've got, right?

Your only option is to build real human connections and then trust that they're gonna meet
you where you are, right?

But if you're on the other side, building up that trust within the team and giving people
the opportunity to really do things that you couldn't is the only way to get there.

Like Jeff Daniels himself, Teddy himself is not gonna get in a spaceship and go rescue the
astronaut.

Like that's not how this works.

So you need these layers and layers of people that you engage that can do the things that
only they can do because they're there or because of what they know.

Hmm and it occurs to me too that even Mark Watney at the end there's a Needing to accept
other people's responsibility because he does a good job throughout the entire movie Even

when he's pissed off at NASA, he accepts NASA's expertise in certain areas He accepts the
help of others, right?

Think of the example with the rover where he has to put the hole in the top of the rover
and stuff like that But at the end he's like very eager to at this point

You know, he has nothing left to lose.

He's like, he's like, know what?

I've done enough cool things.

I can probably Ironman this again.

And he's like, let me just, let me be Ironman.

And they're like, no, no, no.

Like that can't be the primary way that we're going to solve this problem.

This isn't really your problem to solve, Mark.

You know, you're going to get as high as you can.

You've done all of this work in order to get here.

That would be the last ditch effort to solve the last mile of the problem, basically not.

And that's what we see because it's, they're going to be way too far.

It's gonna be so hard for him to be able to get all the way there using his hand thruster
that he makes but if we get him with Jessica Chastain on the floating chair together

they're able to meet in the middle.

Yes.

No, and that's something we should have talked about earlier, but I do.

One of the things I love about the Watney character here, one of the things about the
skills, the little skills that he deploys at taking personal responsibility is he is

amazing at reframing problems into opportunities, right?

You know, he's stranded on a desert planet and he's like,

Every day I go out and I sit and I look at the, you know, the sunset over the mountains
just because I can, right?

He's like, it would be really awesome to be the man who went the fastest of any astronaut,
right?

I could be Iron Man.

I think you got to consider how cool that'd Like he's really good about taking like, this
is a really difficult situation and turning it into like, but I could be a superhero,

right?

Framing in his mind at the aspirational goal of solving the problem and not the slog of I
have to go count potatoes, right?

I'm going to be Captain Blondebeard, space pirate.

This is an amazing skill that he deploys over and over again, right?

And we see that like, it's a, you know, it's a space movie.

Of course it's cool.

Of course, probably the experience of being in space isn't always that cool.

but that idea of framing yourself as the hero, when it motivates you to solve problems and
framing other people as the hero, when it motivates them to solve problems is really neat.

like that.

Yeah, and that's how we have to overcome sometimes.

And maybe one last practical application here, and this is obvious because it's a space
movie, but you got to be more attached to the mission and more attached to the team than

you are to a process.

So it can be easy to talk about a trust the process series.

And it sounds like what we're saying is, yeah, just keep running that same process.

That's not at all what we're saying.

The process is not the exact work instruction that we have to do the thing.

And we need to work that exact work instruction over and over again.

The process is

putting in the hard work every single day.

That's what we're talking about.

And that's what we see these characters exhibiting, putting that work in to help the team.

And oftentimes what it means to trust the process is going to be to violate the existing
work instructions, to violate the standards of how to do something, which when you're in

space, you just have to do because you're gonna run into situations that the standards and
the work instructions did not plan for.

Right.

When you're shifting gears from management to leadership, because it's no longer a
standard operating procedure and it's now problem solving or a challenge that we've never

encountered before.

Right.

Then of course you're going to have to build new processes or at least you're going to
have to solve.

the, evidence-based problem solving the what is going to work and let's do that.

And then let's learn from it.

And then the trust-based problem of solving of who can we trust to attack this little
piece of it and let's engage them.

That's the process we're talking about here is like looking for the resources that are
available to you and finding ways to spiral up.

Man, that's good.

Yeah.

I like how we took the first episode and it was very helpful to me to think of the
responsibility framing with the Scott Peck comparison to the road less traveled.

But then what's even more helpful, I think, is talking about it from a team perspective,
because, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, if you're a member of this

community, then you might already know a lot of the Scott Peck stuff and

We all can grow in that area, but we can definitely all grow in the area of figuring out
how to properly empower the team, how to make sure that the team is, that we're trusting

the team as a part of that process, that we're trusting the team to break the existing
standards when they need to, to make unorthodox decisions if it's in alignment with the

mission and the people are aligned with that decision.

Yeah.

And that is a, it's a deeply collaborative process.

It's a deeply human process of looking people in the eyes and making hard decisions and
handing off authority for critical things.

And we see, we see cool examples of that.

Like that's why we love these stories is right.

can picture yourself like, okay, great.

If I was the NASA director in this situation, if I was commander Lewis in this situation,
what would I do?

Which part of this, like who could I be?

Which useful person could I be in this environment?

Right.

Is a, is a cool challenge for us and as a, as a good way to reframe the, when I feel like
I'm stuck on a desert planet by myself, sorts of problems.

Great stuff, Brian.

What do we have coming up next?

we couldn't of course do a series on trust the process without a sports or athletic themed
movie.

So we are going to take a little detour into the world of boxing, which is going to be
kind of fun.

And we're going to be watching the movie million dollar baby.

And we will see what leadership lessons we can derive from a more sort of one-on-one
coaching.

environment where we have a problem that you have to solve by yourself once you're in the
ring.

How do you get somebody ready for going into the ring?

That's going to be a lot of fun.

forward to it.

Thanks for joining us everyone.

hope you enjoyed this as much as we did.

Until next time, just remember, as always, character is destiny.