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00:00:01
Why Fighter Pilots Debrief Everything
37 Plays14 days ago
In this episode, Eric talks with former fighter pilot, entrepreneur, and Afterburner CEO Boo Boucousis about one practice that separates fighter pilots from nearly every other profession: the debrief.
Every mission, whether successful or unsuccessful, ends with an honest examination of what happened, why it happened, and what should change next time. Boo argues that this simple habit explains why fighter pilots improve so quickly and why so many organizations fail to do the same.
The conversation explores how bias shapes decision making, why perception often matters more than data, how John Boyd’s ideas influenced modern leadership, and why structured reflection may be one of the most overlooked competitive advantages in business.
Eric and Boo also discuss curiosity, intentionality, red teaming, AI, strategy, meetings, organizational culture, and why technology is making disciplined thinking more important rather than less.
At its core, this episode is about replacing assumptions with reality and learning how to improve faster by making reflection part of the work itself.
Questions Answered
- What is a fighter pilot debrief?
- Why do fighter pilots debrief every mission?
- How does debriefing improve leadership?
- What is the ORCA method?
- Why do organizations keep repeating the same mistakes?
- How do biases affect decision making?
- What is red teaming?
- How can teams make better decisions?
- How should leaders use AI?
- Why are meetings often ineffective?
- What is the difference between goals and destinations?
- Why is curiosity more valuable than certainty?
Episode Links
- Boo’s website: https://callmeboo.com/
- Boo’s business Afterburner: https://www.afterburner.com/
- The Just Think study: https://as.virginia.edu/news/doing-something-better-doing-nothing-most-people-study-shows-0
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
Boo, thank you for joining me. Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? Because we had some discussion coming into this or right before we started recording, but not everyone's going to be familiar with you. So can you give me a little of your background?
00:00:18
Speaker
ah You must have interviewed Father Palos before, mate, because it's our favorite thing to do is talk about ourselves or so every everyone thinks. Uh, yeah, look, um, you know, ah just very simply, know, I just feel like I've been put on this earth to, uh, to help people really understand and do leadership.
00:00:39
Speaker
And when I talk about leadership, I'm talking about people who take other people into the unknown. who are committed to growing themselves and growing others, who are 100% committed to what they can control and intelligent enough to adapt to what they can't, who managed to release themselves from the death grip of perfection and embrace something that I call flawless instead.
00:01:04
Speaker
ah And it's you know strange how life works. I mean, today i own a company called Afterburner. Afterburner is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. And it is an organization that has for three decades taken the fighter pilot culture, our ethos, our methodology, and adapted it for use in business. We call it kind of like an agile origins story. ah And, you know, I think in what I'm observing today, and i know there's a a body of work around this for many people, is
00:01:44
Speaker
As we become more digitally driven, yeah the risk we run is that we lose our humanity. And I think it's important for us now to learn as leaders the strengths and weaknesses of technology.
00:01:57
Speaker
And as fighter pilot, You're trained to do that because everything you fly is new, great, fantastic technology. And even though the brochure says it should always work and even though the brochure says it's fantastic and even though the brochure says everything, you're going to be fully aware and make great decisions.
00:02:15
Speaker
The reality is technology is only as good as the person that operates it. ah And, you know, we've gone from a world that protected time where we had human collaboration, where we problem solved and thought critically.
00:02:27
Speaker
ah so there was sort of a two-way engagement of humanity. There was input and and and and transmission to really now mostly just input. An overwhelming amount of input. I was reading a statistic a few years ago that we we consume almost the equivalent of 12 movies worth of Netflix content a day. yeah Almost 120 gigabytes of information.
00:02:50
Speaker
ah The same amount of information our grandparents consumed in their entire lifetime. So here we are. Most humans are well-intentioned. Most humans are good.
00:03:01
Speaker
ah But something happens when we start to work together. yeah we can We consume data that just reinforces our biases, that creates a level of curiosity that that we perceive as curiosity because I'm constantly looking at new things.
00:03:14
Speaker
But really, it's anchoring you even deeper into your existing beliefs. And then we're losing that. I mean, this is blatantly obvious in the politics, not just of the US, but everywhere in the world where no one can find a middle ground.
00:03:27
Speaker
You know, you you've got the the way you get popular on Instagram and and Facebook is by using the word hate. Hate is the most algorithm friendly word. It gives you more traffic by about 20 to 30% than any any other word ah we are indoors and but behind laptops all the time thanks to COVID. So it's it's almost like we have this perfect storm where we went from nothing to the internet.
00:03:52
Speaker
We went from internet to technology and platforms that notify you of every single thing that's going on in the world that keeps us hyper-connected to people in our lives we probably should grow out of ah and creates these dislocated weird communities that are all about attention. they're not about depth.
00:04:09
Speaker
And now we're layering layering in a whole new form of consciousness and intelligence with AI that yeah humans is just, we just aren't equipped to evolve and grow at the speed of the, of the world, of the digital world.
00:04:23
Speaker
ah But what's really cool. And we were talking about John Boyd and OODA loop before, and this whole idea of iterative thinking. The whole idea of iterative thinking through the lens of a fighter pilot was engineered to thrive in an environment that's high speed overwhelming and where you conquer the battle of attention. i mean, the human attention spans eight seconds. We get distracted every two and a half minutes. It takes 23 to 26 minutes of uninterrupted time to actually reach your full mental potential and um ah and free up band cognitive bandwidth.
00:04:56
Speaker
So here we are. kind of ignorantly trundling into a world that the human being is not engineered for. And I'm pretty confident because I've applied it in my own life, as well as for hundreds of organizations that if you start thinking like a fighter pilot, you start working like a fighter pilot and you embrace our rituals and procedures that actually pretty cool things start to happen. Yeah. You transition from from overwhelmed to impactful. You find the space to breathe a little bit more. You're more present when you're at home with your family. you know We're not living at the at the edge of our what they now call the cognitive economy. We haven't spent every dollar of our brain power during the day and have nothing left to invest in in our families at home. So
00:05:42
Speaker
That's a very long answer to your question, but you know here to build great leaders, taking 11 years of experience as a fighter pilot and two decades of experience in business to bring those two worlds together.
00:05:53
Speaker
But the the way we think and work, for me, it's not just a business thing. It's ah it's a life thing. like If you show as a good person, if you constantly iterate life, iterate yourself, strive for a different version of yourself, a better, more contextualized, relevant person, you're going to be okay no matter what happens in the world.
00:06:11
Speaker
Well, thank you for that first and foremost. So it was definitely not long and you planted a few seeds that hopefully will sprout throughout the conversation. So one of them I'll pick up from the mention of John Boyd, because as you said, we were talking before we started recording about John Boyd, at least briefly. And, you know, one of the things that I recall that he talked about was speeding the or shortening the time to be able to make a decision and essentially the faster that you can make an assessment and then make a decision if you can do that in a faster loop or faster cycle than your opponent then you get more results and you can take more actions and
00:07:01
Speaker
I think that that has been expanded upon and has been leveraged pretty significantly. But, you know, knowing that John Boyd was a fighter pilot and then really got into decision making and all that and picking up from some of the just brief examples that you gave,
00:07:22
Speaker
First and foremost, what is it that you see that in fighter pilot culture or behaviors or training that you have been able to use in training or working with your clients? And then what is it that you feel has been able to add something to what your clients do?
00:07:45
Speaker
In my, yeah the book I just wrote after better advantage and I expand on it in flawless leadership that comes out this year. ah you mentioned the word decisions, right?
00:07:56
Speaker
And some people can, they're like, confuse speed with velocity, and You know, speed is fast, velocity is fast with a vector in ah in a specific direction.
00:08:11
Speaker
And one of the traps I see, and I see this a lot, where we work with big technology groups and I've done massive technology advisory programs, is even when you're you're using tools like Agile or Scrum, is that people are using iterative processes in a linear way.
00:08:28
Speaker
ah The, the, because the the most important part of an iterative process is the open and honest feedback ah that you get in, in the process.
00:08:39
Speaker
So when you look at decision-making and you look at OODA, The thing about making a decision is in reality, most of us make decisions around assumptions and perceptions. We don't make decisions better in reality.
00:08:54
Speaker
And this has proven over centuries, not not just decades, centuries. And it constantly, constantly reinforced that when a human makes decision, the first, the origin of the decision is your perception.
00:09:05
Speaker
So everything is about me looking out, right? and how I perceive the world. The second step we we take in a decision is we process that reality. So we process what we what we feel, which usually means we find the data to support us. So if you think of if you think of ah an executive that's having a lot of problems at home,
00:09:27
Speaker
ah they'll come into the workplace and they'll perceive data through a negative lens because there's this idea of attention residual. And when you pay attention to something, you you bring residual baggage from what you're paying attention to before.
00:09:41
Speaker
So you'll see a set of data and if you're at a bad place, you'll see the data through a negative lens. But equally, you might have just met someone, your personal life is fantastic and you come in and you see all the data might be bad data, but you see it as a blip as ah on the radar. You don't see it as a catastrophe, right? So when you look at perception, perception is largely largely driven by bias.
00:10:07
Speaker
And every human has a bias. Whether you think you're biased or not, you are. I mean, a bias is just an autopilot. So our perception is our biases. We process it is for our biases to become cognitive. So in the processing phase, we start to generate beliefs.
00:10:24
Speaker
And then we project into the future. ah and And those are the three steps to make a decision. and Then we make a decision. And none of those steps does anything start with reality, right? So you you we always see it. Like in Afterburner, we have around 20, 30 pilots. We've worked with three and a half thousand businesses.
00:10:43
Speaker
And within... 10 seconds of having a conversation of things not going well, it's always based on assumption or thought this, or we thought that, or we thought this. No one, no one ever says, oh, this is what happened.
00:10:55
Speaker
Oh, this was the tangible deliverable that we wanted. It's very generic. So we make a decision. So I call this the decision-making loop because whether you think linearly or not, there's always a loop. Every decision or action you make has a consequence, whether you want it, like whether you realize it or not.
00:11:12
Speaker
So the next step is the decision. The decision drives actions. So that's either your your action, the way you behave, or the way a team behaves. And then the actions deliver results, or statistically, they don't. More often than not, we fall short.
00:11:28
Speaker
And those results create an impact. And I call the impact of decision-making is the emotional residue of a decision.
00:11:38
Speaker
So if you hit the result, you feel good. If you miss the result, you feel bad. And then that emotional impact feeds into your perception in the next decision-making cycle. So if you don't break the cycle, you will inevitably spiral, right?
00:11:53
Speaker
ah Some people just make great decisions all the time They're very clear. They're very successful. Those people seek out reality, not perception. They live their entire life being curious and asking questions.
00:12:06
Speaker
So when we look at the world of the fighter pilot, this is separate to UDA. We actually have an iterative model that's called debriefing. And the iterative model in debriefing is not making decisions in the moment, but it's reflecting on the decisions that we made and the actions that we took.
00:12:24
Speaker
And we call that the ORCA method, O-R-C-A. ah The O is the objective. so So when we're reflecting... We reflect with intention. We reflect relative to our destination where we're going. And that creates a lot of context for the conversation, right?
00:12:41
Speaker
The second is result or reality. And this is where we test what we thought was going to happen to what actually happened, right? And if you're dealing with the future, which you are as a leader, if you're not dealing with the future, you're a manager, you're not a leader, then there's going to be a gap there.
00:12:59
Speaker
And the C in Orca is curiosity or the cause of the gap. So now we've got context. we We know where we want to get to We know where we are. And we reflect but backwards. We look in the rearview mirror and we ask ourselves, what did we actually do that got us to where we are right now?
00:13:18
Speaker
And then the A in Orca is the action. And it's based on what we've learned about what we did that didn't work. This is what I'm going to try first thing tomorrow. So you turn feedback into action forward.
00:13:29
Speaker
And if you look at the four steps, they're pretty neat in the way that they craft time. Because humans... aren't good at time management. They don't, we don't comprehend time.
00:13:41
Speaker
We sit in a doctor's surgery waiting. Every minute feels like an hour. We doom scroll. Every minute feels like five seconds. So we we have no natural time compass.
00:13:54
Speaker
And the more digitally engaged we are, there's a great body of work on this, a great book called Stolen Focus by Johan Hari. And in the book, it talks about how with technology, we've lost the plot with time even more.
00:14:06
Speaker
So here you are in a conversation and you're looking to the future. You're connecting it to today. You're reflecting on yesterday and then you're driving back into the future. So you you pinpoint the three elements of time, unless you're a fourth dimensionalist,
00:14:20
Speaker
But if you look at yeah the way most of us and work, you've got your three levels of time and you and you feed it forward. So that that particular step is the break between the impact of a decision and the perception you have for the next one.
00:14:32
Speaker
ah Because on a mission as a fighter pilot, you debrief after every mission, win, lose, or draw. Even if you don't go flying because of weather or your jet breaks, you still debrief. Uh, so it's, it's, as it's more important than the mission, and the time to debrief, which is the opposite of human life of life, where we just keep going.
00:14:51
Speaker
We make a mistake. We cringe. You're like, Oh my God, I hope no one saw that. No one's going to keep going. Uh, we have fights with our partners. We argue, we have personality clashes because we never just reflect on the perceptions. It's like people who have problems with other people at work. It's just because you've never bothered to sit down together and map out your expectations.
00:15:10
Speaker
yeah People who who are nervous of their boss and, I don't know what he wants. That's just a massive leadership fail because all it means is you just haven't sat down with your people and together crafted what the expectations are. And Brene Brown talks about, you know, disappointment is ah bred in an unmet expectation.
00:15:30
Speaker
and So for most of us, when we feel bad, it's always because something happened we weren't expecting. So two things, two things, There's two issues there.
00:15:41
Speaker
One, we haven't created an expectation or it's not clear enough. Or two, we're just living in a completely reactive framework, frame of mind, a completely reactive world.
00:15:56
Speaker
ah And I think, you know, if you if you map out some of the mental health issues in the world, Instagram and social media establishes Fake expectations, right?
00:16:10
Speaker
Everyone's an entrepreneur. Everyone looks great in a bikini or a pair of swimming trunks. Everyone's traveling the world. Everyone's, everything's amazing, right? And real life is not that. So it's very easy to sit there. So, you know, what the world of the fighter pilot, whilst our mindset and the methods we use is created to not die on a mission, let's be honest. That's the first priority. The second one is win.
00:16:34
Speaker
The rules apply elsewhere. Replace jet with life. Replace mission with life goal. It's all the same. It all requires working together with other people.
00:16:44
Speaker
It all requires being highly competent. It all requires investment in learning and growth. ah It's just the story's a little bit different. That's all.
00:16:56
Speaker
Is Orca something that you developed or did that come from someone else? It's the way we work, but ORCA itself is, I created that mnemonic to kind of, you know, explain what we do in debriefing. We don't, we don't call it that in the Air Force. We just debrief, right?
00:17:13
Speaker
Um, but when you get in the room with a debrief, the first thing you do is you put the three mission objectives, then you put the results column on the other side and we, when we put good things that happened and then we have other things, we don't have bad things, just other things happen.
00:17:27
Speaker
Then each individual comes and says, well, I achieved what I had to achieve to achieve that mission. And then we have a discussion for an hour, sometimes three, where we unpack everything all the way down to the sequence. We push the buttons. What were you thinking three seconds before that moment?
00:17:43
Speaker
Because we understand a point of failure is the end of a of a link of chain. So there's always something else. You don't just, you don't just, something doesn't just break without something leading up to it. Right.
00:17:54
Speaker
And then at the end of it, we put lessons learned, ah but really the actions that we take. So I just turned that into actions. ah And actions are, if you think of, if you act differently, you behave differently.
00:18:08
Speaker
So what happens here is if you look at how a human engineer is engineered, biases are the unconscious programming. So that's the that's the program of your life up to date.
00:18:20
Speaker
Beliefs are how you take your biases and manifest them in your mind. And then behavior is how you act on those beliefs. So if behavior is the byproduct of bias,
00:18:31
Speaker
Then to reprogram a bias, you have to reprogram the behavior and work back. Uh, so it's, you know, let's say for example, um, you know, I don't like Japanese people. Let's just say like, um, I have a bias, right?
00:18:46
Speaker
Well, you go to Japan, you spend time with them and you go, these people are amazing. you you're you're in the real world. So you're behaving in the real world. And all of a sudden your bias gets changed and you move back to whichever country you started from when when you had this bias.
00:19:01
Speaker
And all of a sudden it's been reprogrammed, not not through thinking, but through behavior and activity. and So you can apply it to absolutely everything. if And companies have biases. you know My company has two avenues, leadership development and events.
00:19:15
Speaker
So the bias is in summer, no one has events. So business must be bad. so So for me, I'm real careful with that. I'm like, well, Is that a story we just tell ourselves? and And as a result, we just put our foot off the gas.
00:19:27
Speaker
And really it's quiet because we act in a way that that is a quiet market way of behaving. So it's like, no, there is 365 days of potential here.
00:19:38
Speaker
People are still doing things on a Saturday. Christmas day, people are still scrolling on their phones. We have these 10-hour blocks, 365 them.
00:19:48
Speaker
that we can influence and we can control that. Whether people read it, buy from us, do anything with us, I don't know. But they're certainly not going to be engaged with us if we're doing nothing because we think they're not going to engage with us.
00:20:01
Speaker
ah same Same with what running a marathon. you know it's i want to run a marathon and i everyone goes for their first run and it's like, oh, running's hard and I'm tired and of exhausted. It's like, yeah, because you went from...
00:20:13
Speaker
you know, step one in the marathon, you you jump straight to step 20. You tried to do today what you really, where you really should be 20 days from now. And that's the problem. That's the whole time thing. and and And the same thing happens in business. It's like three day offsite, build our strategy. And then everyone comes to work on Monday and tries to execute the whole strategy in a day.
00:20:34
Speaker
And then, oh, it doesn't work, bad strategy. It's like, whoa, you just got to try one thing and then iterate it and then iterate it. You know, just keep, just keep kind of shifting as you go because reality is the true judge of, of, of performance.
00:20:49
Speaker
So one thing that you're bringing to mind as you're talking about a number of these things is intentionality. And it seems like, you know, Tell me if you disagree with this. It seems like with when we talk about having an objective and then we get to the end of this this process and we get to action, and I think I understood you saying sort of, what's the next action you're going to take?
00:21:17
Speaker
I should, if I was you know writing this up on a whiteboard, let's say, my action should be driven by some intention. But then when I start that process over again, i need to, as ah as I'm doing the debrief, for example, I need to assess why did I take that action? or I need to remind myself why I took that action.
00:21:39
Speaker
And as you as I'm thinking about that and you're talking about a number of these things, what's coming to mind is that It sounds to me like a lot of people do not act with intention or when there is a stated intention, like we have our three-day offsite and we do company strategy or whatever else it is, we will state some intentions, objectives, goals, whatever they are.
00:22:07
Speaker
But then we will not necessarily act in accordance with that. We won't act with intention. And when we assess our performance, we'll not tie back to why did we even do all of these things? So I suppose first and foremost, I'll ask you I'm thinking if some of the the right things are coming to mind, but then also Do you agree, i guess, that acting with intention maybe is a common problem?
00:22:37
Speaker
Without intention, I should say. Yeah, it it is because intention is a story mode. So very rarely do people have bad intentions. if you think of a righteous person, a righteous person's intent is to do right. Yeah.
00:22:54
Speaker
But the way in which they behave can be quite prejudicial and quite negative and quite judgmental. So the way they're behaving, it doesn't really align with their intention.
00:23:07
Speaker
and So the way in in which you get better at achieving things is to start writing down intentions as destinations. Yeah. Because a destination, if you think of when you fly on an airliner and you go to Cancun on vacation, you get on the airplane and the captain says, welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. Our goal is to get to Cancun. They don't use that word, right?
00:23:31
Speaker
And if you heard the word, our goal today is to arrive somewhere, you'd get off the airplane probably. ah See, what what happens is a goal is an intention. It's something nice to achieve. Or destination is somewhere you must arrive.
00:23:43
Speaker
So when you start to think about destinations, which is a fixed place in time, it's clearly defined as to what arrival looks like. If it's a sales figure, it's ah it's a it's a revenue number. If it's a product, it's a living, breathing, working product that doesn't break. Like there's always something tangible.
00:24:01
Speaker
So you can be well-intentioned, but highly ineffective. ah That's quite common. and And that's generally how most businesses run. Well-intentioned businesses where everyone's focused on, you know, do I have beanbags? Do I get free Coca-Colas? You know, I'm i'm being a good person.
00:24:18
Speaker
So what we've kind of replaced achievement because a human is designed to ah achieve and release dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins as a reward for effort.
00:24:29
Speaker
That's what it's designed for. But we've taken that away and turn that into a, into a right. Like it's your, you're entitled to feel good all the time.
00:24:41
Speaker
You're entitled to a comfortable life. Yeah. that is counter human humanity. That is not what we're designed for. We're designed to be very, just very uncomfortable and to problem solve and work together. i mean, oxytocin is released when teams work together on difficult things and, and, and overcome them.
00:25:00
Speaker
And we've gone the opposite way. We're like, Oh, you know, don't say anything, can't upset anyone, you know, tell me what you feel, how you're going. Let's talk about feelings. I'll tell you right now, if you're winning all the time, you don't have any any conversations about feelings because everyone feels good.
00:25:15
Speaker
Uh, but, but we've just lost that in, in this, like, know, in this generation. and and, and I sometimes have to check myself and I'm like, am I just kind of grumpy old man? You know, when I used to go to school, I used to have to walk five miles. Your kids don't know how good you have it today.
00:25:29
Speaker
Or is there something to this? And there's a great book called the fourth turning that explores over millennia, their Every fourth generation post a catastrophic event in humanity creates the next catastrophic event. And we're we're now in the fourth turning of post-World War II.
00:25:49
Speaker
And at each generation, what happens is it becomes less about community and more about me. and And obviously when you have a ah population of eight, nine billion people on the planet or worried about themselves in a, not embracing an abundance mindset, like in a scarcity mindset, then there's just not enough to go around and you have a fight. Right.
00:26:09
Speaker
Uh, so, you know, when there's not enough money for people to buy a house, when there's not enough money to buy groceries, all of a sudden everyone gets angry. ah They're not necessarily angry at their neighbor because it's their neighbor. They're just angry because they're in a scarce mindset.
00:26:24
Speaker
So, you know, and that's these, i want to build leaders who are selfless. Like that's the key. yogi yeah you Life becomes a joy when you're in service to others. Because why? Because that's,
00:26:36
Speaker
that's what we're designed to do. I mean, if we weren't designed to be in service to others, we would all be dead. Like there would be no human species. Like it's not even a human thing. It's the animal kingdom. Everyone is engineered towards, you know, community and and working together. Uh, so, you know, technology is the differentiator though. Like we'll,
00:26:57
Speaker
Only the human species interacts with technology. And in a way that we don't really understand, you mean you gave a laptop to a lion, it's, you know, if it fed it on time and it gave it a nice juicy steak, it's going to go, wow, I love technology. I'm going to do whatever it tells me.
00:27:13
Speaker
But at the same time, it doesn't understand technology. We don't understand technology either. We just understand that it gives us stuff and it gives us stuff quickly. And for some reason, when I deal with human beings, they don't give me stuff and they don't give it to me quickly. So they're annoying. Yeah.
00:27:26
Speaker
Uh, you know, so it's, it's, so it's almost like we're just through this culture of immediate meeting of expectations. You order an Uber, six minutes for an Uber. You're kidding me. like, God, it's like, ah, yeah, you, you, so we subconsciously translate that across into,
00:27:41
Speaker
you're You're my team. This is our objective for the week. And why didn't you give it to me this afternoon? You're you're a bad person. you're You're not a competent human being. So, you know, i think we I think humanity has a few challenges ahead.
00:27:54
Speaker
I think we're certainly going to ah experience one of the most profound shifts in humanity with now we've created a so ah source of intelligence that replaces us at the top of the food chain.
00:28:08
Speaker
ah So it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be going to be interesting. I suppose before I hit you with a question or another thought, I'll say that the two books that you've mentioned so far, Stolen Focus and The Fourth Turning, i have both of those on the bookshelf behind me. And I only buy the physical copy of a book if I really liked it. So I think you and I are probably in similar book clubs.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, they're great books. I guess what I'm wondering, Boo, is... I want to come around to AI here in a second, but it, I feel like something that is underneath a lot of what you've said is not having to live with immediate consequences.
00:28:53
Speaker
So like you, you talked about our perception of time. So If I sit for five minutes in the doctor's office and it feels like an hour, but I scroll for an hour on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and it feels like five seconds, that there are consequences for both of those, positive or negative. I'm not meaning to say that consequences are necessarily negative as we tend to refer to them you know when we use that word.
00:29:25
Speaker
But at work, if i do a really great job, then people are quick to say, hey, great job. Hopefully, at least in many cases.
00:29:40
Speaker
But if I do a poor job, A lot of times with poor leadership, we tend to just ignore that. Or if you really meant well, you know, like one reading on one interpretation, right? On the word intention is thinking about the psychological state. Like, well, did you mean, did you intend to do well?
00:30:01
Speaker
Even if the outcome was you really did terribly, then There are a lot of situations in life, I'll put it as, and in work, where I think we're allowed to not have to deal with the consequences things. And so whether we want to come around to a fighter pilot mentality or something else, is this a little bit of what you have experienced with, i guess your consulting is, you know, trying to bring your clients around to, we have to, we have to live with consequences, but also we have to learn from them.
00:30:43
Speaker
It's interesting in, you talk to a lot of executives and in the quiet time, they're like, well, yeah, the problem with this organization is if people do a bad job, there's no consequences. And it's like, well, there cause you're late and you're over budget. So there's a consequence there. You're the leader. You just don't care that you don't, you're not making it an issue. Right. It's like, if you went to a ah swimming pool and you said to somebody, swim to the end of the swimming pool,
00:31:08
Speaker
Or you said to somebody, and you've got the potential of your gold medal winning Olympian, run to the swim to the end of the swimming pool. Who's going to get there faster?
00:31:18
Speaker
You know, at and that's the intentions. ah The intention is the same. It's to swim the length of a swimming pool, but the framing is different. And when you're busy, you don't have the time to create context.
00:31:34
Speaker
You don't have the framing that people need to understand urgency. yeah So really, if you look at a fighter pilot and you strip the airplane away, what you're looking at is a human reprogramming system.
00:31:48
Speaker
Because everyone comes in, no one has the skills, like everyone is skill-less. So you have to take unskilled people and turn them into highly skilled people. And you have to shed the way normal people think. You have to shed the fear, the comfort. you have to you' you know You're never comfortable. You're always anxious. not You don't have anxiety, but you're anxious because being anxious is what makes you perform. that's that's That's how you fire up the parasympathetic nervous system is to be anxious about something.
00:32:21
Speaker
You know, we we have fear and adrenaline for a reason. ah So as a fighter pilot, you learn and to reprogram all of that. You learn that emotion is a given.
00:32:32
Speaker
You cannot stop an emotion from an uncomfortable situation. But what you can do is you can control how you respond to that emotion. You can put it in a box and open the box later on the ground when you're in the crew room, certainly not in the air.
00:32:43
Speaker
And because everything in in the fighter world happens on a seconds basis, winning and losing can be just one second, you value time. So you so you you value that the one second moment of a decision means I have to master the 68 seconds leading up to it.
00:32:59
Speaker
And we call that we call that the the timeline. So you're in the world of fighter pilots, we're always talking, this is the timeline. You have to stick to the timeline. In life and in business, the timeline is measured in weeks,
00:33:14
Speaker
maybe months. Yes. Quarters. Yes. Years. Yes. Daily, virtually never. Uh, you know, so think Elon Musk famously said, you give me a day to clean a house. It'll take me a day. You give me an hour. I'll do the same job in an hour.
00:33:30
Speaker
Uh, so we, you know, we, we constantly set goals that are way too far in the future and we don't missionize each day and we don't say today's mission to achieve that destination at the end of the month is is this.
00:33:45
Speaker
Let's create the work together and this is where we, you know, you always start your day with what do I need to achieve today, not what do I need to do because humans are fundamentally engineered to doing.
00:33:55
Speaker
There's this great study done in 2016 called Just Think and and in the study and they just put people in a room just by themselves and the room was white and the chair was white. There was no stimulus stimulus at all.
00:34:10
Speaker
And all they had to was sit there for six to 15 minutes. And it was a broad spectrum. It was sort of age from 18 up to the people in their 80s. And they asked, you know, how did you enjoy that experience, sitting in a room six to 15 minutes? And generally speaking, it was not a great experience.
00:34:28
Speaker
So the folks running the study decided it was the environment that was the problem. they did it They ran it again. And this time they said, sit at home on the couch, do nothing for six to 15 minutes. just Just sit with your own thoughts.
00:34:40
Speaker
And the expectation was there to be a better result. And it wasn't. It was the same. But one of the gentlemen on the study put his hand up, admitted to cheating, and he turned on the television, which gave them an idea.
00:34:52
Speaker
So they went back into the white room again, but they wired everyone up with some, you know, some wires and a button and a car battery. or battery of some description, I'm assuming. And if you hit the button, you got an electric shock. And and before everyone came in the room for the final study, they said, okay, you're going to go in the room.
00:35:10
Speaker
you can You're going to get electric shock. How much would you pay to not have an electric shock today? And they're like, ohll I'll give you money to not have an electric shock. So the same people sat there one at a time, white room, white chair, big buzzer, electrics, electric, or like, uh, electrodes attached to their leg.
00:35:28
Speaker
And at the end of the study, 67% of men and 23% of women would rather have a electric shock than just be left with their own thoughts for six to 15 minutes. And 17% of the study hit the button twice. Uh, and to me, whilst that wasn't the point of the study, what it kind of highlighted by accident was we would rather be busy doing something that hurts us than be left with our own thoughts for six minutes.
00:35:56
Speaker
And that's why you look at the world of busyness today is that as long as we're doing something, we feel fulfilled. As long as we're putting in a massive effort, I'm i'm doing a good job.
00:36:08
Speaker
But without the intention, without the the laser beam focusing in the right direction, you're just going all over the place and bumping into each other. you're like ah You're like a pinball in a pinball machine. Right?
00:36:21
Speaker
ah because every time you hit the flipper, that's just someone's knee-jerk decision. And then we wait and see what happens. And then it comes back down to the flippers and someone makes another decision. And then everyone just sits and waits what happens. So meanwhile, there's all this activity with the pinball.
00:36:35
Speaker
But the the leader who's got the flippers is barely doing anything, just responding to the chaos. So you've got to break that cycle. In any way you can break it was with intention. Doesn't mean everything's going to be perfect. doesn't mean you're always going to make great decisions. it Doesn't mean everything's going to be on time or on budget.
00:36:51
Speaker
But on the balance of probability, you're going to earn more towards that side than the chaos and overwhelm that you're trying to lead in at the moment. So you've mentioned artificial intelligence, I think at least twice. Where does that come in?
00:37:04
Speaker
Well, I call artificial intelligence actual intelligence. i don't I don't call it artificial. And I guess that's the point, right? Like if if you look at something not as a piece of technology, but as to what the outcome it derives, then you look at it in a completely different way. So as a fighter pilot, you know i was a mission commander, which meant I would lead large complex packages of airplanes that might include the Navy, the Army, Marines, fighter pilots, helicopter pilots, transport pilots.
00:37:33
Speaker
But I'm still the leader of all that, right? So I've got two options. I can walk into a room and tell the Navy how to do their job, tell the Army how to do their job, tell the helicopter pilots how to do their job. Or I can come in and go, hey, this is the problem.
00:37:46
Speaker
What's the best way we can all solve this together? what do you How can you do it? How can you? Okay, now we know everyone's strengths and weaknesses. Let's come up with a plan together. In the corporate space, it's just a whole bunch of people the top that come up with an idea, push it down for people to figure out how to turn that into action, even though they're not 100% sure it got to the idea. They're sitting there saying, you want me to do this?
00:38:06
Speaker
You want 800 miles per hour get you know eight hundred miles per hour to get to here I'm a ship. I don't do that, but you're telling me that's what I have to do. All right. going to make up some garbage strategy and get all my excuses locked in, ready to go.
00:38:22
Speaker
so when they say, Hey, why aren't you there? Then I go, I'm a ship. And they're like, but you said you could get here. Well, you told me i had to get there. So, so it's, you know, and that's the curiosity piece. So as a fighter pilot, you always start at the target and work backwards.
00:38:34
Speaker
Right. The helicopter, you've got to go to the target. So yeah we're all here in service to you. we How long is going take you to get to the target? It's going to take me two hours. Cool. All right, everyone. We've got two hours. What can we all achieve in two hours?
00:38:45
Speaker
You know, so it's, it's this lens of we linear thinking is this is, this is what we have. This is who I am This is my job because I'm the leader. And then you bumble through, whereas destination opens the conversation. Like that's the end.
00:39:01
Speaker
How do we get there? Totally destination-driven thinking is starting with the end in mind. So if you look at artificial intelligence... well, it's just a helicopter or a transport airplane or not. It's just a thing, right? And it it does stuff. Like it can get a little bit creative, but right now it's probably really good at doing stuff. But it is an iterative model. Like AI is iterative. that's That's what it does. So it's going to take what you give it and it's going to iterate it. And technically it's going to improve it. Or just like a human being, a smart person might go off on a tangent, which means you've got to bring it back.
00:39:35
Speaker
So if you look at, and and that you know AI is a big term for a lot of different things, right? You've got AI is is as something that's thoughtful, it can research. You've got ai as something that can design.
00:39:48
Speaker
You've got AI as an agent that can do stuff automatically. Right. Yeah, you've got agents that can take plain language and turn it into a tool or a piece of technology.
00:39:59
Speaker
ah So you've got all these. so So the best way I, i ah and I learned this from Dan Martell. I'm not going to take credit for it at all. But he said, you know, if if you want AI to work for you, just like a fighter pilot would ask AI how can help.
00:40:14
Speaker
tell it what Tell it what the deliverable is and then get it to explain to you what it can do and what it needs. And we've built a whole AI native business on the back of that.
00:40:24
Speaker
Like we don't, and that's, you know, um, I have some business partners and they're like, we've got to get into the space of helping companies build AI. I'm like, no, we don't. Cause it already does it.
00:40:35
Speaker
Like it's, we're we're going to do exactly what you shouldn't do with AI is put a human in there, tell AI what to do when in fact it's the best advisor of how it can serve you. So You know, and that's, that's what we're going to struggle with as humans. We're going to look at ai through the lens of what it can do for me rather than how can it get me to where I want to go? And that might sound like the same thing, but it is very different.
00:41:01
Speaker
Because if you're a linear thinking, it's just going to do what you already do. Probably better, maybe not. and And then you're going to sit there and say, oh, it hallucinates, it drifts, it's it's not doing what I told it. I'm like, well, that's because that's not because it's intelligent. It's it's learning.
00:41:16
Speaker
it's not It's not drift, it's just an iteration. So just like a human being, If you give it a bullshit destination, it's going to drift away from it. But if you're very clear as to where it needs to get to, it will get there.
00:41:30
Speaker
It won't drift. It won't hallucinate. We don't have this problem with our AI platforms that everyone keeps telling me, oh, it hallucinates, gives me gas. No, it never does. It gives us ideas.
00:41:42
Speaker
But also within our AI platforms, we've built two iterative processes in all of our agents. The first one is red teaming. So when it comes up with a plan and comes up with an idea, it it will always ask us to red team and vice versa.
00:41:58
Speaker
If we have an idea and we want it to do something, we'll ask it to red team us. And then the second one is it's we built Orca into all our all of our agents. So we've given what is naturally an iterative process,
00:42:10
Speaker
our iterative process. And it doesn't drift because every time it does something, it says, this is what I did. This is what the objective was. This is why I did it. Do you want me to execute? And then we, on all of our automation and our agentic framework, we run the same thing. We get the agents to debrief themselves every day and then send us an email as to what the debrief results were.
00:42:34
Speaker
I suppose for those that are not familiar, can you explain red teaming? So red teaming is no one likes criticism, generally because criticism is uncontrolled. It's not asked for.
00:42:45
Speaker
Red teaming invites challenge. So it asks for the criticism when you're ready to receive it. And it's also testing the plan before reality tests it. And because we're because we are biased and because we plan based on perception, it just invites external perceptions, external and an external set of eyes. So it it just challenges your blind spots. And because you know it's coming, you're more diligent in the way that you plan because you know that it's going to be checked. ah you know
00:43:17
Speaker
we We suffer from two specific biases, optimism bias and the planning fallacy, which And I think we have these biases to propagate the species because we always perceive everything's easier than it actually is and that it takes less time and effort than it it really does.
00:43:34
Speaker
And then when we plan things through the act of planning, we just assume it's going to get done because I planned it. So, and neither are true. So debriefing and red teaming, they manage some of those biases. There's there's plenty more biases to manage as well.
00:43:50
Speaker
ah And I certainly know it as a fighter pilot, just living, just going to barbecues, sitting down with friends that most of the conversations, there's no reality.
00:44:02
Speaker
Like it is purely opinion-based. It's everyone's perception of something they read, saw, experienced, Um, so what, you know, as fighter pilots, we got to be careful that we're not constantly challenged, challenging people. Like what's your source? Where did you read that? You know, you just kind of nod your head and go, yeah, that's great. But equally, we're very careful to not really share our opinions unless they're, you know, challenged in, in, in academia. You it's called peer to peer review in, in science. It's the scientific method, like organizations where credibility and authority is important. They already do it in a different way.
00:44:38
Speaker
But that's not the majority of people. Most people aren't in academia. Most people aren't inventing a cure for cancer. yeah Even a doctor, even doctors don't really debrief. you know A surgeon will will well conduct a ah ah heart transplant and they won't debrief it. And we know because we've worked in those hospitals.
00:44:59
Speaker
and to instill debriefing as a practice. um You know, very rarely do surgeons red team. They brief, they say, okay, this is the patient's left leg, confirm left leg, dah, dah, dah. They go through all that, but they don't really red team. Okay, with left leg. So this is what I'm going to do. going to do this incision, this and this and this before someone can point them out and go, oh, hang on a minute. Why why are you doing that?
00:45:25
Speaker
You know, that that whole God complex. So it's, you know, it's everything that was invented in the world of the fighter pilot is to manage the human condition because the human condition does not equal effective fighter pilot.
00:45:43
Speaker
And if you want to use fighter pilot analogies, you know, The Western world has a 99% success rate in combat of of delivering the mission. Everyone else on the other side, they're not trained like us.
00:45:56
Speaker
So you see it in in in in the way in which we operate that people that think and work like us absolutely dominate and people that don't get whipped.
00:46:07
Speaker
So it's, a you know, in a world that doesn't really like that sort of language, that's the reality of of what happens. We see it in business. You know, we helped Fannie Mae build the biggest forecasting tool on the planet for so a $4 trillion, dollar two years of trying to do it in six months with us.
00:46:24
Speaker
You know, companies that have increased their sales quotas by 25% in one quarter, companies, smaller companies that have grown 400% in a year after being stagnant for 10 years. ah Because it's through the intentional practice of debriefing that you invest time and effort in reality, not in aspiration.
00:46:43
Speaker
I suppose sticking with AI just for a moment, it sounds like you're using it internally to challenge some of those assumptions or to get people to question, is this thinking based on an assumption? Am I making an assumption or am i thinking about actual data, empiricism, reality, whatever else? Are you also doing that with clients, whether it's with artificial intelligence or some sort of consulting?
00:47:11
Speaker
ah Yeah, we we have a product called the Orca Report ah where we go in and we debrief with a client. We put all the leadership team in a room together and we debrief every KPI, not in any order, just because most of them aren't cascading anyway. We just go, give us all your KPIs.
00:47:26
Speaker
we've We've done this with companies with 200 KPIs and we just sit there and go, that's the KPI. What's the reality? Why is there a gap? Boom, boom. And we do it really fast, right? We don't spend an hour per 200. We can get through 200 a day Then we go and do it one-on-one and we just take the KPIs that that particular leader owns we do it again. And you probably would be surprised to find out that the debrief in the room is quite different to the debrief one-on-one.
00:47:48
Speaker
So the debrief on the in the room practices what we define as artificial harmony. And the the one that we do one-on-one is reality. The problem is we're trying to make collective decisions based on artificial harmony, but the way we lead and drive a team is based on our reality. So that's where there's always a disconnect in in business.
00:48:05
Speaker
So our job is to break is to work with leadership groups collaboratively to get them red teaming, debriefing, and practicing what we call nameless and rankless, which is doesn't matter who you are. We're in the hierarchy. We're all in service to the KPI. And anyone can everyone has a voice. So we take the and we do all of that via transcripts.
00:48:23
Speaker
It's all recorded. Then we upload all the transcripts into our Orca tool, Orca agent, and it then goes through and effectively builds the next quarter strategy based on the actions that are derived out of the debrief.
00:48:36
Speaker
And the agent automatically finds duplicate effort ah where there's vague roles and responsibilities. And it produces like um critical, essential, and important, we call them HDDs, high definition destinations.
00:48:51
Speaker
So critical means in the next month, essential means in the next quarter and important means by the end of the year. And every one of those is linked. Everyone has an owner and then here's a strategy away you go.
00:49:03
Speaker
So that's effectively a strategy agent. We have another layer that we then add, which is like, well, That's the current strategy being executed. Let's layer over that now the aspirational strategy and what's the stuff that we're not doing that we want to do But what's really important about approaching it this way when you approach strategy is leaders start to realize we don't actually need something new to solve the problem. We just need to solve the problem.
00:49:29
Speaker
Often we try and find new technology. We find a new person. if we Let's just find something new and shiny. That'll fix it. you know When I grew up, when the washing machine broke, a man came and fixed it.
00:49:40
Speaker
Now you just replace it. And that's how humans are with each other as well. It's like, oh, well, that's not working. Must be that human. Replace it. Or, you know, what I kind of frame up is we've embraced personality and the interest on personality is mediocrity.
00:50:00
Speaker
ah as opposed to investing in um metrics where the payoff is performance. ah So, yeah, we love AI. We we certainly, you know, there's, if you think of AI as a human,
00:50:18
Speaker
There's three elements to it. There's the knowledge base. So the, the, the core kind of strategy and knowledge that it has to work on. Then there's the memories that you create through the execution of it. And that's where the drift lives, right?
00:50:34
Speaker
And then there's the way you interact with it. There's the inef interface. So if you create discipline on your, if you create discipline in your knowledge base, you you debrief, which means the memories are crafted in the context of the intention, not just generic memories, then the way in which you interface it becomes quite binary, done, not done, do, don't do, rather than just ideation, um which just creates more chaos, right?
00:51:02
Speaker
So most companies have poor knowledge bases. I know, by the way, you know, if we run within our, um, agentic framework, a lessons learned database.
00:51:15
Speaker
And at the end of every month we say, what were the lessons learned and which documents do we need to update in the knowledge base? So the core knowledge is there and the lessons learned themselves reside in the knowledge base as well.
00:51:30
Speaker
ah But as a reference, not as something to be used. Just the same way as a human, if you just leave them to do their own thing, they're going to create their own memories. They're going create their own way to do it, right? And you're going wonder at the end of the quarter, what the hell has everyone been doing?
00:51:45
Speaker
because they don't have the knowledge base to work with. They don't have the reflection and the right memories, which are collective memories that drive a collective group of people in the same direction. And therefore all the actions are aren't right. Behavies aren't changing. Biases are being reinforced. Beliefs are being reinforced.
00:52:01
Speaker
And, you know, we, we just find ourselves stressed, overwhelmed, frustrated, and wondering what's the point? What's the point of it all? I guess on that point, if I come back around to the idea of a debrief, when you talk about people are doing things in their own different ways, and a lot of companies don't really have, you know, they have poor knowledge bases.
00:52:26
Speaker
It seems to me that by having some form of debrief and doing it frequently, that we're increasing the amount of communication and not just the amount, but also the frequency such that we have the opportunity to increase links between different points in our organization.
00:52:49
Speaker
We increase knowledge sharing. But also, we give ourselves a chance to become familiar with how people are doing their jobs, why they're doing it, the challenges that they're running into, and so on.
00:53:03
Speaker
And that if we don't have that communication in the form of a debrief or otherwise, we have fewer checkpoints and we are more likely to end up in that situation where we don't understand what people are doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it, and so on.
00:53:20
Speaker
The opposite occurs actually less communication, less frequently. ah The reason why we have so much communication at the moment is because we don't know what's going on. And meetings are a form of comfort blanket for a leader.
00:53:35
Speaker
in that their anxiety is tempered because they had a whole bunch of people in the room saying, I'm doing the job. but yet every week we're having the same conversation where it's not getting done. With our methodology, you can run pretty much any business on 15 minute meetings and about eight, eight a month, eight a week.
00:53:54
Speaker
Uh, that's how we run our company. We have, we have a 15 minute meeting in the morning and a 15 minute meeting in afternoon. Um, Then we have things called planning sessions, which is not a meeting.
00:54:05
Speaker
It's a very intentional design. It's design of two things. One is the plan, but the other is also the decision matrix. You design the decisions.
00:54:16
Speaker
And that's what AI needs, right? AI requires decision architecture. It's not going to make decisions. But if you create if-thens for AI, it will work better for you.
00:54:28
Speaker
So, The reason why we create agendas, if you think about it, think about it. Why on earth do we we create an agenda for a meeting? Well, we create it because we don't have a plan. We don't have anything to talk to.
00:54:42
Speaker
We don't know what we're doing. So we have to create something every week to talk about what we're reacting to. Rather than what we're delivering against where we want to go.
00:54:53
Speaker
So when you build an architecture that is destination led, that's objective driven, all your meetings are, are debriefs because every, every person in that room is a participant in the execution of the plan.
00:55:10
Speaker
So you can create, you might, you might have 12 objectives. That's okay. You just create 12 execution pathways, 12 sets of debriefs, 12 planning sessions, and 12, 15 minute meetings is a lot easier to manage than 24 one hour meetings, which is what it ends up becoming.
00:55:29
Speaker
And every time you're meeting, you're not doing, right? Well, you are, you're actually doing, you're communicating, but you're not thinking like at no point in there. Is there any time to stop and think? And that's what planning is. Planning is the think before you act stuff. So you can plan for a year. You can plan for a month. You can plan for three minutes worth of time.
00:55:48
Speaker
and So when, when you use the word intention, we would say plan a destination and replace intention with plan your destination. and then work backwards to work out the actions.
00:56:01
Speaker
And yeah for us as an organization, you know we we're an organization that has nearly 15 people's worth of output every day delivered by four people because of AI and because we actually get stuff done.
00:56:16
Speaker
To support my statement about more communication, I suppose I would clarify by saying that really I was thinking more about a signal-to-noise ratio. Yeah, more high-quality communication, more awareness.
00:56:30
Speaker
Right, and actually, as you were talking, this reminded me of, I've mentioned this before on the podcast, so forgive me anyone who feels like you've heard this, but Robert Putnam, who you know he he had a very popular book in Bowling Alone, but then he wrote a number of other books that were popular as well. One thing that didn't get turned into a book, but was a very controversial study was this study that found that in the most diverse communities in the united states the average level of trust for your neighbor was half of what it was this was in the early 2000s but it was half of what it was in the least diverse or most homogeneous communities
00:57:19
Speaker
And they spent a lot of time looking into why was this because it you know there were a lot of sort of headline tweet like, you know, um just sort of jumping on the the the high level statements from this study that like, see, diversity has failed sort of stuff.
00:57:41
Speaker
When in reality, what they found was that if you just take two people who are seemingly different from one another, whether it's skin color or sex or you know socioeconomic background or whatever it is, if you take two people who are seemingly different from one another and you just put them next to one another, then without any meaningful interactions,
00:58:05
Speaker
the whatever biases that they have will just get reinforced because they will see like, you know, if if I had whatever biases that I have about people from Australia, you know, or Japanese people, like you mentioned earlier, if we don't have any meaningful interactions, then when we walk by one another on the street or I see you do something or whatever, I'm going to say, see, people from Australia are like that.
00:58:31
Speaker
But if you and I live next to one another and we feel like we're part of the same community because we have to do something together, we have to clean up the trash, we have to uphold standards, we have to build something, then by working towards some shared goal, what we'll learn is that you know those things that make us different, like an accent or a skin color or ah whatever it is,
00:58:58
Speaker
Those things don't seem to have much of an impact on whether or not we feel like our community is important. And now you go into an organization and let's say you go from four people to 400 people.
00:59:12
Speaker
Well, if everyone's connected on Slack or Teams or whatever it is, you can have all the quote unquote communication that you want. They can get all the updates about what people did ah you know over their weekend.
00:59:27
Speaker
They can see all of the status updates in Asana or whatever it is, you know Microsoft Project, about everything that's going on. But if it's only surface level and it's not really something that's meaningful and difficult, you mentioned oxytocin is released when groups work on things that are hard, right?
00:59:46
Speaker
If there's not some sort of meaningful interaction where we feel like we're working toward a shared goal, then all of that, again, quote unquote, communication just reinforces however it is that we tend to feel already and doesn't help to break down barriers, first and foremost, about biases and all of that.
01:00:07
Speaker
doesn't help to build a shared culture, but also the signal to noise ratio is way off. where you have people, you don't know why they're doing their work, how they're doing their work.
01:00:18
Speaker
You know, are they working towards goals? Yeah, you just create noise. But all all of that requires leadership. Like, for example, in my neighborhood next week, there's like a walk and talk, it's called. It's run by ah one lady on on one of the houses of the street. Without her leadership,
01:00:33
Speaker
the community wouldn't come together like that. It's not going to, it doesn't come together by accident. Right. So within, that's why leadership is so important because leaders are aware, right? They don't exist. If you exist, you're not leading. You need to be aware and being aware means that you pick up on all these signals. You're like, I'm, I'm aware that this community could be tighter and it's not.
01:00:58
Speaker
So I've got to do something about that. Right. And that's, that there is intentional action, not just, uh, things aren't great in the community. I'm just going, I'm walk, talk to door, introduce myself.
01:01:11
Speaker
You know, that doesn't, that doesn't work. Even better is when you solve a problem, like you said, trash. Like in Australia, we had this thing called clean up Australia day. And every year, every community in the whole country would come and clean up their street. You're right. And ever everyone would be talking and you'd be in the river and pulling out bikes and, you know, and it was fun because it was hard and it was, it was done together.
01:01:35
Speaker
i don't know whether everyone knows this as well, but in Rwanda, every Saturday morning is community cleanup day. So every community, if you go to Rwanda, there's no litter.
01:01:46
Speaker
You go to any other country in Africa, is it looks like a get trash, trash dump. That's a country that had one of the most horrific genocide events of genocide ever.
01:01:58
Speaker
And now it's a strong, robust community. But the word that you said, and and I'm sure you said it subconsciously, but you said it a lot because I'm dialed into the word, is meaning.
01:02:09
Speaker
you're you're saying meaningful and meaning and meaning that that's the Pope, that is the purpose of communication is giving something meaning. And when you're dealing with multiple people,
01:02:23
Speaker
what is meaningful Jeff is different to Sally, right? Which is why you need to be curious. ah So, you know, we we build strategies and we create statements, right? And and you're going to come, you have these vision statements and mission statements and values.
01:02:39
Speaker
And, you know, we'll all say to someone, okay, so your mission is to do this. What does that mean? And they're like, what do you what does you what do you mean what do you mean? What does it mean? I'm like, well, those are words. What do the words mean?
01:02:51
Speaker
And people can't answer the question. they don't They don't know how to answer it. And that's, you know, so so so companies get into a room and they think they're get it with us and they think they're going to spend the whole day building what what does this person do every hour of every day?
01:03:08
Speaker
and you end up spending the whole day in search of meaning. but But it's the meaning of the words and the meaningful way in which we go about delivering them that is what drives engagement and, and passion. And that's what people are looking for.
01:03:25
Speaker
You know, we, we, people won't do the work if it doesn't mean anything, you know? Yeah, sure. You got to work to pay the mortgage. So that's a good one. Um, but you know, that's scarcity thinking. Scarcity thinking is, well, this person needs the job. They need the money. Therefore I can get them to do whatever I want. And if they don't like it, they can leave. Like,
01:03:47
Speaker
There's cultures that are like that. Often we come in at the, at the level of which it's all about high performance and excellence and precision and fighter pilot stuff. But really the subtext to that whole story is unlock the potential of any person that you can find.
01:04:02
Speaker
And, and there are high performing people out there. And the reality is people who are high performing are, are in the minority and they're slightly dysfunctional because they, that their satisfaction is achievement. And they typically trade that off for,
01:04:16
Speaker
a meaningful existence. And and I know, cause I am that person, one of those people. Uh, so it's, it's a case of, you know, the way a high performer works, which is success has always felt through results is not the way how most people think. So if you try and bring that and high performers get promoted because they're really good at doing stuff and then they're terrible leaders because everyone's hopeless.
01:04:36
Speaker
Um, But that's that's not true. Everyone's different. And your job as a leader is no longer the execution of the strategy. It's unlocking the full potential of everyone in the in the team.
01:04:49
Speaker
And the best way to do that is to give everything they do meaning. And for them to be in the engineering process to give it meaning so they understand implicitly what they do each day, no matter how mundane it is, contributes to the greater good. that That famous story of John F. Kennedy walking through NASA and walk past the janitor and said, hey, what do you do here? I'll put man on the moon.
01:05:10
Speaker
You know, that's that's a meaningful existence. Boo, if you could plant a belief or thought in some group's head that would have a meaningful impact on how they act tomorrow, you know not that you are going to persuade this group of something, but rather they wake up tomorrow and they think differently.
01:05:35
Speaker
What group would you pick and what belief would you have them hold tomorrow such that they act differently? I would start with what do you need to achieve today?
01:05:47
Speaker
Don't, don't even go into the doing bucket. Don't even look at your emails. Don't get on your phone. Don't react to anything. Just write down the three things that you need to achieve today. And then the next question would be, how's it going?
01:06:05
Speaker
And when you're finished at the end of the day to reflect on that, and what happens is when you're intentional, when you're intentional about that time but and what you want to achieve and you replace the to-do list with the achieve list.
01:06:19
Speaker
Is the actions will morph over time because they will be contextualized towards delivery. I don't can hear a mower going off in, in the, in the corner, right?
01:06:30
Speaker
So someone with a mower comes with a specific mower and they mow the lawn. Let's say you're going push mower. I live in the mountains and you're on a hill. They're always going to look at that problem as like, oh, that's a hard problem because I've got to push my mower up the hill. Whereas someone that's looking at at my job is to mow the grass will come at it and say, well, I need a mower with an engine I can sit on that can go up there, right?
01:06:50
Speaker
The doing evolves. And then the person... who's looking at the problem with a open mind, all of a sudden starts to get all the jobs all around town because he's doing it faster. He's charging less money and he's doing it in a way that's more efficient.
01:07:07
Speaker
Um, so it's, yeah you know, it sounds, it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. Yeah. It sounds like, well, and people probably think they're like, there's like, I do achieve stuff. I do this.
01:07:20
Speaker
But if the evidence is to the contrary, the evidence is that you will show up each day and despite the best intentions, you will be highly distracted, reactive, struggle with prioritization and be exhausted by the end of the day.
01:07:36
Speaker
And there's ample studies and research that, that, that evidences that that's the way that you are. It's interesting. So for you, we're on a podcast, right?
01:07:47
Speaker
So is your intention to do a podcast today? is your or Is your intention to make sure that this gets in front of 100,000 people to touch 100,000 people's lives? Two totally different ways to frame the same action.
01:07:59
Speaker
Oh, 100%. So the simple the simple act the simple achievement is I want to do a podcast. I do a podcast. I achieve, right? There is no impact in that statement. Yes, it's achievement, but it's not impactful.
01:08:13
Speaker
The impact of the podcast is to influence 50,000 lives. So what does that do? It drives the staging. It drives the questions. It drives the iteration. Oh, I only touched 5,000 people.
01:08:24
Speaker
I've got to you know got to get curious. Why is it only 5,000? What platforms did I put out? And all of a sudden, you create hundreds of micro tasks that that are guided towards the impactful achievement, not just the achievement of the activity.
01:08:40
Speaker
They're two totally different things. In the military, we call it the effects-based planning, in that what you're setting out to achieve is the effect of the action, not achieving the action itself.
01:08:52
Speaker
ah the The most famous story that comes out of war here is, you know, in ah in the Iraq war, they wanted to take down the power grid. So the way in which we did that historically was go and blow everything up, go blow up all the power stations. And I know we would do that because I used to plan that mission. It's very it's very hard to do. But during the planning process, one of the colonels said, hang on a minute, is the objective here to blow up all the power stations to take the power out or is the objective to take power out?
01:09:24
Speaker
And it's like, you take okay, what are some non-kinetic ways we can do that? And what they discovered was the, you know, yeah We have this thing called chaff and what it is, it's all these little graphics, got graphite, little tiny, ah little shards. They're really, really small and they're the same ah wavelength as a radar. So if you're getting targeted by a radar, you put chaff out the back and it looks like there's another airplane or it's a much bigger, juicier one.
01:09:53
Speaker
And they realize if you drop that stuff onto a substation, it shorts it out. So what happened was the effect they wanted was to turn the lights out. The action they did was to put the chaff over everything, short circuit everything. So the power was out for a few days and then they just had to go in and flip the circuit breakers and you had it again. You didn't have to spend five years rebuilding a power station.
01:10:16
Speaker
That's what achievement is. That's what impactful leadership is. It is the impact of the achievement, not the achievement itself. Okay, there's a lot that I want to add to this, but I know that we don't have all the time in the world. So hopefully we'll leave people wanting more.
01:10:34
Speaker
Boo, where should I go to connect with you, learn more, follow you, or or otherwise inform myself about you and your business? Yeah, afterbetter.com is how we interface business to business. ah If I just live on ah in an environment called cornleyboo.com, or if you just type my last name, which is spelled B-O-U-C-O-U-S-I-S into an AI chat or a Google, you'll find me because I am the only one on the planet that does this. So it's not difficult.
01:11:07
Speaker
Boo, I appreciate you being here. I've enjoyed the conversation. so thank you for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Eric. It's a real honor to have the opportunity to be on the podcast.