How One F-35 Fighter Pilot Makes Decisions Under Pressure

I always enjoy reading about how people in real-world impact professions build high-performing teams. There’s a lot of food for thought in the whole article. As I was reading (well, listening) I just had to stop and pause and reflect when it came to debriefing (or what we might call retrospectives and post-mortems):

the debrief is one of the best tools that people can use to help improve their decision-making, their assessment phase, because if you debrief, you’ll be able to see where the errors came from [..] It is a sacred place for us. It’s a sterile environment. It’s nameless, rankless, faceless. We’re not worried about the person. We’re worried about the action that happened.

The sheer amount of time dedicated to analysing, reflecting, and learning is incredible:

we’ll fly for about an hour to an hour and a half […] And when we come back, we will debrief that sortie for two to six hours […] Ultimately what you’re trying to do is trying to see what you did well and then what you did wrong, and then not make those same mistakes twice.

Too often I see people dominate conversations because of their perceive seniority or expertise. If the Air Force can manage this, then so can we:

rank is stripped in the situation, so nobody outranks anybody in the debrief.

As leaders, we must participate in ways that encourage others to speak up:

The debrief is critical and there are a lot of best practices associated with it because it is not a stable system. We have egos as people, as humans. You don’t like to call yourself out for making a mistake […] It needs to start with the highest ranking person in the room or the most experienced pilot. They need to be willing to call themselves out because as soon as one person starts trying to shirk their responsibility, everybody clams up.

It’s not just enough to talk about what went wrong, we need to understand why, and critically, at what stage of the decision-making process it went wrong:

did they make a mistake during the assessment phase, did they hear the wrong radio call and then made the right decisions after that? […] Did they assess the problem correctly and then choose the correct course of action incorrectly? […] Did they choose the correct course of action, and then did they just botch it?

Find six things to take away, three that went well, and three that went wrong and over the course of a year or two, you’ll be surprised at how much improvement you make:

try to isolate it to three things that they did well because as we talked to you earlier, confidence is really important. You don’t want to just tear them down because they need to be engaged and they need to be excited about learning more about being a fighter pilot. It’s not just a two-week course, it’s a 10, 20-year career […] also finding three things that they did wrong and writing those things down. Anytime I have my flight suit on, I have a small black notebook in it, and I have those three mistakes that I’ve made on each flight

Let me finish by repeating this quote because I think it’s so important, and powerful:

It is a sacred place for us. It’s a sterile environment. It’s nameless, rankless, faceless. We’re not worried about the person. We’re worried about the action that happened.