Marines training opens with two to three weeks of induction and almost none of it is military. Values, a new language, and demonstrations of how to iron, make a bed and wash, which is the point at which the 18-year-old Dane wondered what he'd joined. You won't change people who've worked one way for thirty years, but you can change what every new starter is told on day one. Challenge gets designed in from the start too. The commander lays the plan out over a model pit and takes questions, and the questions are real: a troop officer two years in commands Marines with fifteen years on them, and they're expected to say when it doesn't make sense. Respectfully challenging, at the point where it's still free.

Amy's standing line about her other half running round a field going bang, bang, bang gets corrected. "The actual shooting bit isn't the bit that you're practising." What's rehearsed is who's in command, who has the radio, which way the team moves. Everyone has a named role, and everyone trains one rank up, sometimes two, because the person in charge gets taken out. Nobody in your organisation is getting shot, but people get ill, burn out, or are on holiday the week it lands. Same gap, same answer... and most companies can't get people to rehearse their own job, never mind someone else's.

Then the friend who ran the response to a cyber attack that landed just before Christmas. He briefed the leadership team and thought he'd handled it well, until someone rang to ask if he was all right, because he looked terrible. Inside his head it was keep it together. Everyone else could see it. Which is why there's a second in command and a proper handover, because incidents run for weeks. And the annual test? The Marines have those too, and Dane rates measuring yourself on one test a year as pretty poor. Thirty-two weeks of training, almost none of it sitting down, snow holes in Norway, icebreaking drills. "You can't read about it. You physically have to do it."