MModern Wisdom
← All episodes
Roderic Yapp13 January 2020

Lessons From Afghanistan & Capturing Somali Pirates - Roderic Yapp - #133

2Frameworks
14Insights

Listen

Frameworks in this episode

Leadership5 steps

Commander's Intent

Set the end state, leave the how to your people

Read →
Leadership5 steps

Know Your People

You can't lead levers you never learned exist

Read →

Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Hot Take· 3

Hot Take

Why he backs national service but not conscription

Yapp rejects conscription as expensive and self-defeating (you fill the military with people who don't want to be there) but favours voluntary national service with a choice of military or charitable work. The value is pushing young people out of their comfort zone and mixing them with people from completely different backgrounds, echoing the pride Israelis describe about their service.

  • Conscription is costly and produces unwilling soldiers
  • Voluntary national service, military or charitable, is different
  • The point is perspective and mixing across backgrounds
  • Israelis speak of their service with pride and value the shift in perspective

“I am in favour of some form of national service... push people out of their comfort zone, get them dealing with people that come from…”

Roderic Yapp
#national-service#policy#youth#perspective
Hot Take

What will your grandchildren judge you for?

Riffing on cancel culture and judging historical figures like the founding fathers by today's values, Yapp flips the question: what will your own great-grandchildren condemn you for? Williamson offers factory farming as a strong candidate, imagining a future of cost-effective lab-grown meat looking back in horror at how animals were treated. The pair use it to argue against snap moral judgment stripped of context.

  • It's easy to judge the past with the luxury of hindsight
  • The sharper question is what today's norms will look monstrous later
  • Factory farming is floated as the likely candidate
  • Context matters; people did what they were taught was appropriate

“What are your grandchildren, what are your great-grandchildren gonna judge you for?”

Roderic Yapp
#morality#cancel-culture#factory-farming#hindsight
Hot Take

Context shapes behaviour, and everyone is capable of violence

Yapp is wary of people who insist they could never kill; change the context, a knife to your child's throat, and the answer changes instantly. He cites the Stanford prison experiment and the shock experiments as evidence that normal people, given the wrong environment, quickly do terrible things. His conclusion: given the right situation we're all capable of violence, so be sceptical of anyone who claims otherwise.

  • Stated moral limits collapse when the context shifts
  • Environment shapes behaviour more than people admit
  • The Stanford prison and shock experiments show how fast it happens
  • Be careful when people say they could never do something

“All these are normal people within a relatively short space of time capable of doing some really unpleasant things to others.”

Roderic Yapp
#psychology#human-nature#violence#context

Explainer· 4

Explainer

Understanding Afghanistan as a different time, not a different place

To make sense of behaviour he found incomprehensible, Yapp stopped thinking about Afghanistan geographically and started thinking of it as roughly medieval, akin to feudal Britain 800 years ago. Isolation, mountainous terrain, little inward-outward migration, and never really reaching an equivalent of the Enlightenment left it at a very different level of development. The task in-country, he says, was to fast-track 800 years of development in four to six years.

  • Reframe the country as a different era rather than a different location
  • Geography, isolation and lack of cross-pollination drive the gap
  • Judging it by modern values yields no working model of behaviour
  • The military mission was compressing centuries of change into a few years

“It's more like traveling back in time than it is like traveling to a different part of the world.”

Roderic Yapp
#afghanistan#mental-model#culture#development
Explainer

Somali piracy is a business model, not fanaticism

Unlike Islamic fundamentalism, piracy is purely commercial: the moment risk outweighs reward, pirates pull back. Somalia's largely ungoverned space, easy access to weapons, and the huge volume of shipping running past its coast to the Suez Canal created the opportunity. A single $10,000 payout can exceed a lifetime's local earnings, which reframes the risk-reward entirely and is why Yapp declines to judge them.

  • Piracy is a rational commercial enterprise, not ideology
  • They retreat as soon as risk exceeds reward
  • Ungoverned space, weapons access and heavy shipping traffic enable it
  • A ransom can dwarf a lifetime's local income

“This is a business model for them. The moment they feel that the risk outweighs the reward, they'll sort of pull back and they won't…”

Roderic Yapp
#piracy#somalia#economics#incentives
Explainer

How pirates actually board and take a ship

Two skiffs, 20-30 foot speedboats with 50+ horsepower motors, shadow a vessel on port and starboard, trying to make it turn so one side goes calm. They come alongside a low-freeboard deck and simply put a ladder up. Countermeasures like barbed wire are defeated with a grappling hook, a bucket and the ship's own drag. Onboard they head for the bridge, take control, sail into Somali waters and ransom the ship over months.

  • High-end engines on a 'fishing' boat are a giveaway
  • They target low-freeboard vessels with no armed security
  • A grappling-hook-and-bucket trick clears barbed wire cheaply
  • The endgame is anchoring in Somali waters and months of ransom talks

“They'll take a grappling hook, chuck it onto the barbed wire, attach the grappling hook to a bucket, put the bucket in the water... incredibly…”

Roderic Yapp
#piracy#tactics#maritime#somalia
Explainer

Why promoting your best doer creates a bad manager

Organisations promote people because they're good at doing the work, which reinforces the doer mindset just when the job requires the opposite. Yapp's frame: you were promoted for playing the instrument, but now you must conduct the orchestra and stop playing. He and Williamson note the classic sales version, where a company loses a top salesperson and gains a poor manager, and that not everyone should be pushed into leadership at all.

  • Being good at the task doesn't make you good at leading it
  • The shift is from playing the instrument to conducting the orchestra
  • Promoting a star salesperson often costs you the sales and the manager
  • Some people should be offered money, not a team

“You have been promoted because you're good at playing the instrument, but now you've got to conduct the orchestra to stop playing the instrument.”

Roderic Yapp
#management#promotion#leadership#sales

Story· 2

Story

The compensation scheme that got a girl shot repeatedly

In Afghanistan in 2007, Yapp's base paid US dollars to civilians injured in firefights as blunt compensation. A family exploited it by shooting their own daughter and bringing her in for cash, spotted when 762 rounds (not the unit's 556) appeared during a period with no contact. When the payments stopped, they hit her with an RPG. It taught Yapp to be very careful what you measure and how you incentivise people.

  • Well-meant incentives get gamed in ways you don't anticipate
  • The tell was ammunition type and a lull with no firefights
  • Perverse incentives can produce horrific outcomes
  • Applies directly to how leaders set targets and rewards

“This was kind of when I really early on learned that lesson of be very careful what you measure and the way in which you…”

Roderic Yapp
#incentives#afghanistan#unintended-consequences#metrics
Story

Recapturing the MV Montecristo from pirates

The 55,000-ton container ship MV Montecristo had pirates aboard and an unarmed security team that locked the whole crew in the engine room, which can control the ship and isolates hostages from captors. That made it a 'level three' boarding rather than a special-forces hostage rescue. Yapp's team went in with body armour and firm-not-aggressive control, cuffed the pirates, and freed a crew overwhelmed with emotion. It became one of the first successful piracy prosecutions in years.

  • Locking the crew in the engine room isolates hostages and retains ship control
  • That downgrades the operation from hostage rescue to a level-three boarding
  • The team used firm, respectful control, never gratuitous force
  • Pirates were prosecuted in Italy, a rare successful conviction

“It was probably the only time in my career there was a real tangible sense of we've delivered some real value for people because they…”

Roderic Yapp
#piracy#royal-marines#rescue#somalia

Tool· 1

Tool

Bond about anything that isn't work to earn buy-in

Williamson, who runs a nightclub business with young first-time managers, tells his team to connect with staff over anything unrelated to work, favourite drink, the gym, a Netflix show, because work-framed communication gets mentally filed as low-value 'email'. Shifting the relationship outside that category makes people feel cared about, and work achievements then arrive as a byproduct. He ties it to how real friendships form around vulnerability, not the shared task.

  • Work-framed messages get filed as low-value regardless of channel
  • Connect over non-work interests to escape that category
  • Feeling cared about is what drives buy-in and effort
  • Work outcomes come as a byproduct of the outside-work relationship

“Taking an interest in someone in everything that isn't work pays disproportionate dividends.”

Chris Williamson
#leadership#team-building#management#rapport

Takeaway· 4

Takeaway

Choose the hardest path, and take your risks young

Faced with a fork, Yapp advises picking the most difficult route because that's where you learn most about yourself. He frames the Marines as unmatched development: 15 months of leadership training then line-managing 30 people in combat, something no graduate scheme offers. He argues your 20s are the time to take risk because you haven't been playing the game long enough for it to matter, and you can always join a grad scheme a year later.

  • The hardest path teaches you the most about yourself
  • No corporate grad scheme rivals leading 30 people in combat
  • Risk in your 20s is cheap; you're not meaningfully behind over a 40-50 year career
  • You can always fall back to a conventional path later

“If you're faced with a series of sort of paths, choose the one that's the most difficult because then you're going to learn the most…”

Roderic Yapp
#career#risk#self-development#twenties
Takeaway

Hold gratitude and the drive to improve at the same time

Williamson asks how to hold two truths at once: that we live in the best time in one of the best places, and that we can still do better. Yapp says they aren't mutually exclusive; you start from genuine gratitude, then harness that thirst to improve the status quo, rather than ripping the system apart. He points to falling infant mortality, rising literacy and declining violence as reasons to be thankful while still pushing for incremental change.

  • Start from a sincere 'it's actually pretty good right now'
  • Gratitude and ambition to improve can coexist
  • The data (mortality, literacy, violence) supports optimism
  • Favour steady incremental change over throwing out the system

“You can be grateful for what you've got, but harness that thirst and that ambition to improve the status quo.”

Roderic Yapp
#gratitude#progress#mindset#optimism
Takeaway

Friendly vs friends: the line every leader must draw

Yapp warns that leaders must distinguish being friendly from being friends. Cross into genuine friendship and performance-management conversations become painful, and people may exploit the relationship to get away with poor performance. You usually only learn the boundary by overstepping it once. His broader rule: it doesn't matter exactly where the line sits, only that there is a clear line everyone knows and that consequences follow on either side of it.

  • Friendly is fine; becoming close friends muddies accountability
  • Friendship can be exploited to dodge performance conversations
  • You typically learn the boundary by getting it wrong once
  • What matters is a clear, consistently enforced line, not its exact placement

“You very early leading a group of people have to work out the difference between being friendly and friends.”

Roderic Yapp
#leadership#boundaries#management#accountability
Takeaway

Direction and accountability: what the military does that offices don't

Yapp identifies the two elements people most need to perform: direction (knowing where you're going) and accountability (being answerable if you don't get there). Accountability is what he misses most about the Marines, where a request was simply going to happen, with people working through the night out of ownership rather than clocking off at five. The stakes there were literally life and death, which is hard to port into corporate life but explains the difference in commitment.

  • The two performance drivers are direction and accountability
  • In the Marines a request was delivered without needing an order
  • Ownership meant people worked through the night, not to five o'clock
  • Life-or-death stakes create commitment that's hard to recreate in an office

“You need to know where you are going, and you need to be accountable to someone if you don't go in that direction.”

Chris Williamson
#leadership#accountability#performance#military