Stop asking permission. Start declaring intent.
A submarine captain changed one sentence his officers were allowed to say — and the whole crew started thinking again.
In 1999, Captain David Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine near the bottom of its fleet's performance rankings. Early on, he gave an order to shift the engine to a configuration the ship's reactor didn't actually have. The crew tried to follow it anyway. Nobody stopped him, because nobody's job was to think — only to comply.
Marquet's fix wasn't a new org chart. It was a sentence. Officers had always spoken to him in the language of permission: "Captain, request permission to submerge the ship." He banned that phrasing and required a different one: "Captain, I intend to submerge the ship."
The words look almost identical. The thinking behind them isn't. Asking permission means someone else does the reasoning; you're just waiting for a yes. Declaring intent means you've already worked through the decision, and now you're reporting it — which meant officers had to actually reason the problem out before opening their mouths, because their name, not the captain's, was now attached to the plan.
Marquet's role shifted too: from generating every decision to catching errors in decisions his crew had already made. Within about a year, the Santa Fe went from worst-rated in the Pacific fleet to first. The mechanism wasn't more meetings or more trust exercises. It was one verb, swapped out, that moved the thinking to wherever the information already was.