Muster 018 debrief
Muster is an event by Echelon Front. Echelon Front is a company founded by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, both successful authors and Navy Seals. The company focuses on leadership. Jocko and Leif bring their interpretation of lessons learned on the battlefield to the civilian world.
I first read “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko and Leif in 2018. I got to practice the principles before the COVID-19 events, which was an even more important skill set during 2020- 2022. This allowed me to focus on my family and my physical health during these years, and even to thrive through the lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, and all the events. I even built a gym at home as a consequence of the two.
The physical aspect is great — but a more important shift is in the mindset of leading oneself; it is in the work, in the study, and at home — everything is about making decisions for you, with your loved ones, peers, and managers. Each has its approach, and it is all about
The path
The decision to go to Muster brewed a long time ago, and with some funds becoming available and my wife’s blessing, I went to the Muster 018. Visiting San Diego and not training Jiu Jitsu — is a sin of a kind; I spent two weeks overall and one and a half of it training at Victory MMA, a great place with great instructors, and had lots of fun learning from Craig Baker, Dean Lister, and Adam Mazin.
Here are my takeaways from the Muster; these takeaways are in the context of my industry. I work in software; I am a Software Architect. Relationships in this industry tend to be — “softer” due to the people who choose to work in this field, due to physical characteristics, and due to much of DEI “culture” around it. The majority of the industry is a very global community; there are many different cultures involved in every single project.
Muster — assemble (troops), especially for inspection or in preparation for battle.
The event is organized with acute attention to detail. There is a clear separation of concerns for each staff member; every act is thought through, with contingencies, and I am willing to bet other parts of the PACE acronym are covered.
One of the core observations is seeing many people eager to get after it; few are only in their words, not in actions. Most are fit, attentive, and full of intent to make the world around them better — or at least their own world. I found that to be a “renewed hope” for humanity. We live in a world of culture wars, of rejection of common knowledge, of rejection of care for physical health. I saw no hope for humankind until now — that community gave some glimmer of hope. It could be we will first have to crash as a society, and only then will we be able to rebuild.
Details
Reading “Extreme Ownership” and “Dichotomy of Leadership” is not mandatory before attending the event. The four core principles are covered for the first half of the first day (also called “the laws of combat”). For someone who did not read the books, in a way, that part feels redundant. It is like a boot camp — you have to bring everyone to the same level first. I wrote “feels” — we are not into feelings — I had two pages of notes from these introductory sessions, and I read each book twice.
- “Leadership requires balance not extreme techniques“— if the team has to rethink every detail every time they need to act on the plan — they are busy doing that, instead of executing the tasks. Avoid “supper complex plan”. Juval Lowy has a saying, “build a sand dial instead of a hand watch”.
- “Double check execution of requests (commands)”- this might sound trivial, and yet, from my experience in software, people tend to avoid that validation.
- “Culture of decentralized command”.
- “Leave the team a perimeter for decision”.
- leader-follower, lead from the back, know when to let the team lead.
- “Discipline falls apart gradually”; the process is always back and forth. In software, examples would be pull requests, code reviews, and code standards that are set at the beginning of a project — and degrade with time.
- “A guitar goes out of tune after a certain time; the leader must calibrate it”.
- Always work to build trust, up, down, and sideways.
- Gain leadership capital and spend it very carefully.
- Do not delay action and hesitate; this is the meaning of “Default: Aggressive,” and “Bias to action”. I state it as “Action trumps inaction”. The other side of that dichotomy — do not make grand decisions. Break them into granular ones that allow evaluation and observation (OODA loop)
- “If people cannot move, they stop thinking”.
- “Ruthless self-assessment”.
- “We can take ownership — on more than we think off”.
There were two sessions about personal leadership by Rob Jones and JP Dinnell; they definitely nailed it with the many takeaways. You will have to go to listen to them; below is a very small subset.
- “Your attitude is always under your control”.
- Look for ownership everywhere — even when it looks out of control.
- Ask yourself two questions: “What is the real situation I am in? Accept the truth” and “How can I help my environment with my situation?”
- “Desire and capability — the difference”.
- “I get to do this”, make a commitment.
- “Face to face, build leadership capital”.
- “Want and need are two different things” — that’s life
- “You can either make excuses — or make things happen”.
- “When you stop lying to yourself, you will impose that discipline”.
People tend to think about the military guys in general and the Navy SEALs in particular as brutes. They are — but they are smart brutes. Thanks to “Extreme Ownership” I found my balance and will.
The rest of the session had many role-playing, techniques for conversations, ways to get more details on the design, improve a plan that someone came up with — and general “soft skills”.
There is nothing soft about soft skills
Here are takeaways to consider about leadership and communication.
- “Act as if your leadership capital is empty”.
- Pick your battles. Reality is upside down the way most are used to thinking. 90% of the time we should go with others decision.
- “When trying to get the people around us to do the things we want them to do, we often assume that being direct with them is the fastest way to accomplish that” — False. Strive for an indirect approach and become a silent leader.
- “Straight line is not the most effective energy path”.
- “Detach from ego, perspective, emotions”.
- Accountability — the realization that there will be consequences; instead, you need to strive for people to have ownership.
- “Tunning using questions”, do not attach emotionally to any plan.
Making decisions is a skill — John Boyd
- Know they team — consider their bias, and your own.
- Any decision is a type of a guess. When guessing — state your decision boundaries. Execute iterative decision-making. Make sure it is iterative. The A in the loop is action — this is what makes the loop run.
- Invest in informal training; there is a very limited capacity for formal training, if any.
- Always train. Be disciplined about setting time aside.
- Train in the variety of activities you are engaged in.
- It is the last resort when someone needs to be terminated — the core of such a reason would be having different strategic goals.
- “Ownership is owning it all — not doing it all”.
- A boss who micromanages — solution: overload them with details. It means they care. Earn that trust. As a manager — look up and out, not down and in.
- Taking ownership means using “I” and providing a solution.
I had bad leaders in my service. It took a while until I found my way and met skilled leaders in civilian life (I work with such people now).
Non-formal sessions
Outside the formal sessions, there were great morning physical training (PT) sessions every day, an intro to Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) in the evening, and a meet and greet. All the sessions were well coordinated, with attention to detail, foreseeing the needs — and implementing lessons from the past, with the leadership of Jamie Cochran.
Morning PT
Over 500 attendees out of over 1,000 woke up at 4:30 and went to train under the drizzle. It was very motivating and encouraging. JP Dinnell took the lead on the event — and it was just great. It was not too tough, allowing every attendee to keep his own pace — but challenging enough for people who are used to training.
Intro to BJJ
We had Dean Lister among the coaches, which was pretty awesome. To my taste, there was not enough time to do rounds; some of the people were very solid. I wish that the people who had that as a first experience will keep doing it. Jiu Jitsu changed my life back in 2020; it all started with Jocko’s and Dean’s grounded podcast — for me, it is a loop in a way.
Meet and greet
The queues were long — as everyone wanted to have their photo and autograph. The execution was polished to perfection. It was a brilliant idea to put a note with each attendee’s name inside the book; it was very time-efficient. What is really a great lesson here — Jocko and Leif, just standing there, attentive, giving all the credit to each attendee — I am sure they hate doing it, but not a single one of the people in the queue will ever know that. To me, it was — “if they can stand there and do that — then who am I to feel arrogant about tasks in my life?”
Final thought
I would say that the only “complaint” I do have — is that they push the “Jocko” brand — just everywhere. I joked that we were not allowed to drink anything, but the Jocko fuel drinks (on the other hand, they were in abundance).
It is a great event, not a cheap one for sure — but it is luxurious. The key takeaway is meeting people that want to make a difference. It was a charge of optimism contrasted with today’s world.
