#120 - Thinking out loud!

27 Aug 26

The best problem-solving lesson I ever received wasn't a lecture. It was a Submarine Captain narrating his own thinking, out loud and in real time, while he worked through a genuinely difficult call. He wasn't performing for an audience, he was thinking and letting us watch him do it.

Trial Brief

Engineers are taught to show their working on paper. Far fewer are taught to show it out loud, in the moment, while the problem is still unsolved. That gap matters more than it looks, because it's the difference between junior Engineers seeing your answer and junior Engineers seeing how you got there.

Trial Execution

I served under a submarine Captain who had a habit that stood out from every other senior officer I'd worked for. When he was working through something complex, he thought out loud. Not for effect and not as a lecture. He genuinely used it to organise his own thinking, to talk himself through the logic of a problem in an order that made sense before he committed to a decision.

What he might not have fully appreciated, or perhaps knew exactly, was the effect it had on everyone else in the space. We weren't just watching him arrive at an answer. We were watching the order he considered things in, the factors he weighed and discarded, the moment he changed his own mind partway through, and the reasoning that finally closed the loop. None of that would have been visible if he'd simply announced his conclusion once he'd reached it in his head.

Trial Findings

Most senior Engineers solve problems well. Far fewer make that process visible to the people who most need to see it. The instinct, especially under pressure, is to go quiet, work it through internally, and deliver the answer once it's ready. That instinct is efficient. It is also a wasted opportunity, every single time.

Junior Engineers don't develop sound judgement by being handed correct answers. They develop it by watching how a more experienced mind approaches uncertainty; what questions it asks first, which risks it weighs more heavily than others, and when it decides it has enough information to commit despite lingering doubt. If that entire process stays inside your head, all they inherit is the output. The reasoning, which is the actual transferable skill, goes with you when you leave the room or the organisation.

This is where the responsibility genuinely sits with senior Engineers, not with training programmes or courses. Formal instruction can teach a junior Engineer the theory of decision-making. It cannot show them what it looks like to apply that theory to a live, ambiguous, real problem with something at stake. Only a more experienced Engineer, in the moment, can do that and only if they're willing to think somewhere other than in private.

There's a discomfort in this worth naming honestly. Thinking out loud means junior Engineers see you consider options you'll reject, hear you second-guess yourself, and sometimes watch you get partway down a line of reasoning before realising it's wrong. That feels like exposing weakness but it's closer to the opposite. Watching someone navigate genuine uncertainty in real time teaches more about sound judgement than watching them announce a polished, tidy conclusion ever could.

The Common Thread

Wisdom that stays inside your head dies with you, or at best leaves when you do. Wisdom spoken out loud, in the moment it's being formed, becomes something the next generation can actually inherit. The responsibility to pass it on doesn't sit with a course or a manual. It sits with senior Engineers choosing, deliberately and repeatedly, to let people watch them think.

Trial Sign-off

One practical action

The next time you work through a genuinely difficult technical or leadership problem with a junior Engineer nearby, narrate your thinking out loud rather than solving it silently and delivering the answer. Include the options you consider and reject, not just the one you choose.

One question for reflection

Where are you currently protecting your own thinking process from view and what is the junior Engineer watching you missing out on as a result?

Have a great week!

Steve