There are two types of checklists: a normal procedures section and the black-striped pages, or the emergency procedures section.
The normal procedures checklist is pretty straightforward. It’s how to do everyday things—how to start the engine, how to configure the aircraft for takeoff, the air-refueling checklist, the landing. Gear down. Flaps down twenty degrees. Three-and-a-half degrees on the glideslope. Basic reminders, but good ones. On every mission, they literally open the checklists, balance it on their kneeboards, and, like little children, go through each item as if they’ve never landed before. It sounds incredibly unnecessary but it drops the stress levels instantly, and that helps hold task saturation at bay. Landing checklist; landing gear. Flaps. Hydraulic pressure. Fuel state. Weapons secured. Winds. Final approach traffic? Runway clear? No matter how many times they’ve landed, they go through the pre-landing checklists because it takes away a big hunk of the workload and saves them the stress of forgetting something critical. (To this day, highly experienced pilots still forget to drop the landing gear!)
Everyday procedures are difficult to take seriously—you think you know them and to have a checklist seems absolutely juvenile—but because they’re repetitive, they tend to numb you. Why allow task saturation to creep into the system when you have an out? If fighter pilots can humble themselves and go through a checklist on how to land an airplane, can’t you? In business a normal-procedures checklist would be things like how to open the store, how to stock the store, how to close the store; everything, step by step, based on your standard operating procedures. The Batesville Casket Company relies on checklists in their everyday operation. From pre-funeral arrangements to meeting with the grieving family, Batesville has a check list that helps its customers maneuver through this difficult event by using time tested methodologies of a successful funeral experience.
In other cases, common business etiquette, like a meeting agenda, masks the powerful tool of a checklist hidden within. A well-organized PowerPoint presentation hides a lifesaving checklist parading as bullet points and talk points. People often scoff at our insistence on checklists, but they can get you through the flurry of activity that inevitably precedes a meeting (did you remember to configure a back-up computer for the biggest presentation of your career?) with something to jog your memory, lower the need to remember, and lower the stress.
Training is an area where checklists are an absolute. Do you incorporate a checklist in the training of a new hire? When you’re training a new store associate, do you have them walk along with your favorite manager in the hope that they’ll pick up good habits? But is that person really learning the standard operating procedures of your store, or is he or she picking up the good (and possibly bad) habits of that person they’re training with?
At Afterburner, we introduce checklists to new hires on their very first day, and we use them in every facet of our business. New hires start with our standards manual, and then we have them “walk the store” with an experienced team member. When they’re done, they’re on their own, but they have a checklist to fall back on when it gets too busy. Why leave anything to chance? Will the new hire remember every detail about conducting our seminars from his training, or reading our 260-page standards guide? Checklists reinforce this training and leave nothing to chance.
One of our clients uses a checklist to ensure that the first day of work for new hires is a positive and rewarding experience. Instead of losing the time to chaos or solitude, the new hire has a “passport” that has to be stamped as he meets critical people or is introduced to important functions. At first it seemed trivial, but, after the three days of a well-thought-out flight plan through the corporate headquarters, the new hire felt confident and part of the team. He knew how to get around, who did what and how to conduct the functions of the company. His passport was his checklist.
The black-stripe pages are known as the emergency procedures section. This is the checklist that comes into play when the problems are life threatening. These are one-liners that can be read in an instant. Pilots go right to a page that fits the problem and they see memory joggers and actions to take to solve the problem quickly.
In a simplified form, you have black-stripe pages posted next to the fire extinguishers and near complex machines—and if you dissect your business, you’ll see the need for them at cash registers and other “choke points” in your operations where delays, compounded by the absence of a supervisor, can grind your operation to a halt. Find your choke points and build in a stress-reducing checklist that the everyday employee can revert to.
CROSS-CHECKS
The pilot’s second tool is cross-checks. Imagine, if you will, what it’s like for single-seat fighter pilots monitoring 350 switches and dials, all at one time. How do they assimilate all the data? How do they keep everything straight? How do they stay focused on the overall mission objective and still fly the aircraft?
That’s where cross-checks come into play. Cross-checks are so important that pilots call them their “Cross-checks to Success.” Among those 350 instruments in the cockpit are four or five instruments that they really pay attention to. The primary aircraft control instrument is called the attitude indicator. Some of you may know of this instrument as the artificial horizon. It is basically a ball in fluid. The lower part of the ball, the brown part of the ball, represents the ground, while the blue part represents the sky. If a pilot sees more brown than blue, the aircraft is in a dive. If he or she sees more blue than brown, the aircraft is in a climb. And if the ball is tilted left or right, the aircraft is in a banked turn.
Another key instrument is the altimeter. Am I at 2,000 feet? Well, yes, I am. Back to the attitude indicator. Everything okay? Yes. Are my wings still level? I’m in a slight bank; I fix that. Then I go to another instrument. The heading indictor—am I on course? Am I heading 2-7-0 degrees? Yes, I am. Back to the attitude indicator. Okay. Then VVI—the Vertical Velocity Indicator. Am I going up or down? Up? Okay. Back to the attitude indicator. Back to the altimeter. Back to the heading. And so on.
This is the hub and spoke of a cockpit cross-check. Back and forth to the key instruments, always including a regular scan of the attitude indicator in between. Eyes moving quickly from one instrument back to the attitude indicator, never channelizing, always scanning.
How does that translate to business? For most companies, your attitude indicator is customer satisfaction. You read this every day, every hour. Are your customers happy? Do they rate your service highly? Then on to the rest of your instruments. These are determined by the priorities of your business. Maybe it’s the sales funnel—how many prospects are working their way toward a sale? Or maybe it’s click-through on a website or perhaps it’s your seller feedback on eBay. If you own restaurants, it may be the wait time, the table turns, and beverage sales as a percentage of your total sales.
Have you defined your instrument panel, do you get data inputs from your instruments with regularity, and then, do you have a smooth, disciplined cross-check, just like fighter pilots do in the cockpit? Are you maintaining aircraft control? Are you taking care of the customer? Are you getting too focused on a new marketing plan or spending too much time on human resources while customer service is waning? You have to have an instrument panel. Every company needs one. And the data displayed on that panel needs to be updated with absolute regularity. Then it’s up to you. You have to watch it and adjust, and that means you must have some form of a consistent cross-check, just like we do.
MUTUAL SUPPORT
The last tool that we use to eliminate task saturation is called mutual support. We never go anywhere—anywhere—without a wingman. We fly as a team, usually in two-ship or four-ship formations. My wingman is my partner. He’s physically positioned where he can assist me if I get into trouble. He’s checking my six, my blind spots, my tail. All we have to do is turn our head ninety degrees, and we can check our wingman’s six or pull one another back into formation.
Do yo
u know enough about the other person’s role in the cubicle right next door, in the office across the hall, across town, or across the country, to be their wingman and check their six? Do you know enough about what’s going on in other people’s cockpits to help them?
Mutual support requires that we learn each other’s roles and rely on each other. The more I know about your job, the better I can provide mutual support for you.
But far more importantly, you can eliminate task saturation and improve your fighting odds if you literally go into major meetings as teams. Words are the swords in the combat of business, and two people do a better job than one of “hearing” what’s said and fielding questions. Operating as a team allows for latitude in negotiations and role playing in the meeting, and gives you someone who’s backing you up and hearing what you miss.
Any discussion on task saturation wouldn’t be complete without a comment on communication. Fighter pilots support each other by being concise. They call it combat communication. Combat communication involves speaking with clear, concise words, without a lot of filler material. They say what they need to say, concisely, and then get off the radio as quickly as possible. Why do they insist on this? Chatter distracts us from more important messages, and if the radios are being used for extraneous conversation, the really important messages are blocked out.
How do you communicate? Are your really important messages being blocked out by extraneous conversation—chatter? Are you really communicating in a clear, concise manner, as if lives depend on it?
Then consider data. Data is communication; in fact, data is one of the areas of communication that needs to be cleaned up first. Are you generating reams of interesting but time-consuming data? Spreadsheet software is a wonderful convenience, but it is easily abused. Most businesses we see are passing around spreadsheets that would take a week to unpack. Few people realize the extent to which they’ve allowed data to clutter communication and trigger task saturation.
In business, in the execution engine, have at least two people in any important meeting. You hear one thing, while your partner picks up something you missed.
Have a checklist—an agenda—to keep you on point.
If you’re closing a sale, have a checklist with your contract lest you fill it out and need to go back for a re-sign. Re-signs are a good way to lose a sale.
Create your instrument panel and steer your company by it. Time and again, customers will ask for variances. If everyone knows the instrument panel, you can rest assured that bad variances, an overly discounted contract, and the like won’t creep into the system.
And take the time to talk about task saturation. You’d be surprised how much change you can engineer by simple education. This is it; this is how to overcome it—and your people are one step closer to Flawless Execution.
CHAPTER 14
Debrief
It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right.
I think fighter pilots were born to debrief. Consider their training. As fledgling pilots, they are so green they don’t hope for much more than to survive to fly another day. That’s why they are debriefed after every flight.
As they blossom into tactical fighter pilots, they debrief to improve their skills.
Finally as they approach the point of the spear and become combat pilots, they debrief to win.
Survive-improve-win. That is what it’s all about. The same thing applies to you in the business world. When you start a company, your first debriefs allow you to survive your inexperience. As your market share expands, your debriefs help you hold on to what you’ve got and pass around best practices. And when a competitor throws everything at you, the debrief is already in place and you have a mechanism for rapid response. Maybe for saving your entire company.
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of companies in corporate America have any system for looking back and evaluating execution errors and successes. Debriefs don’t occur at the end of a project, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, or at the end of the fiscal year. Why? Two primary reasons stand out. First, because time is money. In the world of billable hours, it’s on to the next project, the next week, the next month, the next fiscal year, or the next client. Second, there is an understandable perception that, in business, rank and egos impede a true debrief.
Consider this: You cannot afford to skip debriefing. For a fighter pilot, it’s life or death. Rank or ego? You think fighter pilots don’t have egos. And rank? That’s the name of the game in the military. The debrief is the most powerful tool that you can bring to the business world. It is where information feeds back into the company. It’s where things done right—and things done wrong—are identified. It’s how companies truly learn from their experiences and react, just as we fighter pilots do, almost in real time.
How does one put debrief into proper perspective? Theorists would hold that execution is the most important part of business. I don’t disagree, but as we discussed earlier, the brief and the mission should be one and the same. Brief the mission, visualize it in your head, fly it. That’s the way pilots do it. The execution should in some ways be largely anticlimactic. If you’re doing things right—which is the goal, after all—you’ll know the outcome before you execute.
That certainly doesn’t mean that pilots don’t have problems or that a well-trained hostile aircraft can never get the better of us. Fighter pilots get shot down, antiaircraft fire takes out our bombers, and things do go wrong. In the unfolding of a play, actors will miss their cues, musicians miss a beat, and a light might not turn on at exactly the right moment. We did well in Desert Storm—nearly as flawless an air campaign as can be—but we had losses. That’s why I argue that in the fullness of the Flawless Execution Model, from the 30,000-foot perspective, the most important phase is the debrief. It is at once a squadron’s critique, its training, its intelligence gathering, the transfer mechanism for lessons learned, the catalyst to accelerate the learning process and increase experience, the foundation of the next mission brief—it’s all these and more. Pilots do it after a good mission, a great mission, a horrible mission, or an abort. They find out why the actor missed the cue or the light did not turn on at the exact moment, and they fix it.
First, let’s get the lay of the land. Pilots fly their mission, come back to base, land, taxi to the shelters, and get out of their jets. Mission over? Not a chance. While it’s all fresh in their heads, they walk straight to the briefing room and tear apart the mission. They immediately begin their debrief—a process that is utterly thorough. Their philosophy? Even the tiniest mistake could kill someone if we don’t put it on the table and hash it out. Lives are on the line, and even on a good mission bad things happened. They’ve got to nip those things in the bud. They’ve got to prevent them from happening again. So they debrief. They also have to ensure that the ingredients to success are shared as well.
Let’s look at the mechanics. First, in order to have an effective debrief, you bring into the room those, and only those, who were on the mission or took part in the planning of the mission. Then you must have open communication. Now, I know what you’re saying. “Murph, we’ve got open communication. We go to communication seminars. We work very hard in our company on open communication.” But does that mean you talk openly to a vice president above you in the company? I bet you don’t. Fighter pilots learned their lessons the hard way. Covering up a problem is idiotic, so when they talk about open communication, they mean open—nameless, rankless debriefs. When they cross the threshold of the briefing room door, they throw away their name and rank. All they bring in is truth, an open mind, and open communication. If there was a mistake, they want to freely admit it, in front of their peers, supervisors, or subordinates; if they’ve forgotten a mistake, a fellow pilot is going to point it out to them. A two-star general or a green lieutenant, they’re all on the same side of the table. They’re one team determined not to die doing something wrong twice. Egos are absolutely gone; rank is irrelevant.
/>
I know. You’re thinking, “Must work great in the military, but I don’t see it working in the civilian world. We have a rigid rank structure in our world.” No question that you do. But in the fighter pilot world they have rank, too. In fact, everything done in the military hinges on rank: saluting, coming to attention, beginning sentences with the word “Sir” or “Ma’am.”
But even the highest-ranking officer in the squadron is subordinate to the mission. Even the person they salute outside the debrief is objectively criticized in the debrief. Truth has to be sacred. There’s simply too much at stake. Jets are volatile mixtures of fuels, bombs, and thundering, fiery afterburning engines. Surviving a flight, let alone combat, can be tough. So even the highest-ranking officer is subordinate to a truthful debrief.
Yes, it’s hard to put rank aside in business. Probably for this reason and this reason alone, business has been remiss, reluctant, and perhaps shortsighted when it comes to debriefs. Thankfully, this is changing. As the message spreads and people understand the values debriefs inject into the company, companies are debriefing. What’s overriding rank is a simple truth: People show their greatness in their humility, their approachability, and their ability to put the goals of the organization above their egos or rank. Winning the battles of business has priority over one’s feelings. NFL officials strive for excellence, for Flawless Execution, and without a doubt are some of the best officiating crews in professional sports. Guess what one of their most important tools is? Yes. They debrief every game. Pfizer has woven full debriefs into the daily processes throughout their research and development group with great results, speeding new drugs to the market. In both cases, rank gets checked at the door.
Flawless Execution Page 12
