Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions Book Review by Trevor Blondeel book review by Trevor Blondeel
(Critical Thinking for Manufacturing Leaders)
| L. David Marquet and Michael A. Gillespie, 2025
Subscribe at manufacturinggreatness.com/subscribe
What Distancing Means for Critical Thinking in Manufacturing
Toyota solved part of this problem decades ago and called it an andon cord. Anyone on the line can stop production when something looks wrong, and the cord hangs in plants all over the world. What most of us have not solved is the part where people treat pulling it as an admission of failure, so they wait until they are certain before saying anything, and by then the bad parts are already downstream.
David Marquet and Michael Gillespie spend a chapter on exactly this. When a pause turns out to have been unnecessary, we call it wrong, and that one word sets the bar so high that people stay quiet. Marquet describes sitting beside a football replay referee who explained how his crew decides. If they cannot call the play clean, they stop it. The burden of proof sits on continuing, not on pausing.
Turn that around for your own line and you have the argument of this book.
What’s It All About?
David Marquet commanded the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe and wrote Turn the Ship Around! which a lot of plant leaders already have on the shelf. Michael Gillespie is an organizational psychology professor at the University of South Florida who runs a lab on human cognition and decision making. One of them has been responsible for a crew inside a steel tube underwater. The other studies why capable people decide badly.
We are told constantly to be present and be ourselves and sitting fully inside your own point of view is exactly what bends your judgment. You defend what you already did, and you protect how you look. They call that being immersed, and it is our default setting, not an occasional lapse. It reinforces what I call the Showing Up Gap, the distance between how we think we come across and how our crew actually sees us. Your own viewpoint is the only one you get for free.
The fix is distance, practiced three ways. Be someone else, taking the view of a neutral observer. Be somewhere else, zooming out until you are one part of a bigger picture. Be sometime else, judging today's call through the eyes of your future self.
The Big Idea
The mechanism they explain best is information asymmetry. We judge ourselves by our intentions, which only we can see, and we judge everyone else by their behavior, which is all we are given. The observation is not new, but their explanation of why it happens is worth the chapter.
Watch what it does on a floor. An operator is late twice in a month and picks up a write-up for reliability. When I am late, I know about the daycare that opens at six and the wreck on the parkway. When he is late, I have a timecard. Same event, two completely different files.
That is how a plant ends up with a discipline record where a conversation belonged. The information that would explain the behavior is the information you do not have, and watching harder will not produce it. You have to ask for it.
Favorite Quote
“The immersed self is our default state. We are our primary point of reference, the protagonists in our own stories.”
We have a word for that in manufacturing, and it is silos. Quality is the protagonist of the quality story. Maintenance is the protagonist of the maintenance story. Tooling, engineering, and production are each running an honest account of the same downed line with themselves at the center of it. Nobody is lying. Everybody is immersed.
Biggest Takeaway
There is a word in here I had never heard. Illeism means referring to yourself in the third person, and there is a real body of research behind it, much of it out of Ethan Kross's lab at Michigan. When you use your own name instead of I, your brain handles the problem more like it belongs to someone else, and the emotional heat comes down.
The authors add the caveat that makes it usable. This is for self talk. Saying it out loud on the floor would be strange and, in their words, really annoying.
Try it before your next hard conversation. Not “I am furious about this scrap rate,” but “why is Trevor so worked up about the scrap rate, and what should he do about it?” It looks silly written down. It works anyway.
Bonus Information
The balcony. I have used a slide in my own training for years showing people up on a balcony looking down at a dance floor, because when you are dancing you cannot see the dance. Marquet and Gillespie push the idea further by pointing out that useful distance is not only farther, it is higher. Step back from the tool and see the station. Step back again and see the whole line. Step back once more and look at all three shifts and what each one hands the next.
Then the rewind. The research they cite shows people make better long-term calls when they move themselves into the future and look back, rather than standing in today and imagining forward. It takes more mental effort, which turns out to be the point. So do not sit here in July weighing whether to defer the repair to protect the month. Stand on December thirty-first, look back at July, and ask what that decision cost.
If you want more like this, I review one manufacturing leadership book a month in the Manufacturing Greatness newsletter. Free, and built for the shop floor.
You can find Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions on Amazon.
Subscribe at manufacturinggreatness.com/subscribe
Reviewed by: Trevor Blondeel, July 2026