Beating complexity with a disciplined, collaborative process of a diverse, aware group

Whatever business we’re in, we face more disruptive technologies, more regulations, and more competition. No one person can keep on top of all that. People are anxious, curious, distracted, overconfident. Given the speed of change and the complexity of our environment, there are more ideas, possibilities, initiatives, and challenges coming at us all the time. Some people are better than others at keeping focus. We need to open up our thinking to a broader awareness. But we need to do so in a simple, disciplined way, so that the focus is on the substance and not the process.

Change isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s always been with us. The telling points now are the speed and novelty of the changes, and the uncertainty of whether and how they will happen: we just don’t know what will happen because we’ve never had these technologies before.

To perform well in a complex environment—that is, to solve problems, make decisions, plan, execute, and learn—you need the disciplined, collaborative process of a diverse, aware group.

Let’s take a look at those elements.

A diverse, aware group

To take on complexity, one person is rarely enough. Edgar Schein, the father of organizational culture from MIT, states: in a complex environment ‘managers as individuals no longer know enough to make decisions and get things done.’ They need a team, and for the team to do their job well.

There are too many traps for an individual to fall into, in both planning and performing. These are the cognitive errors that we mere mortals keep making day after day. We are optimistic by nature and, research suggests, systematically overconfident. Can we build it? Yes we can, no matter what the facts say. If we’ve already invested time and effort, then we’ll spend even more to get our job done, ignoring advice to cut our losses.

What evidence do we hold onto to support these decisions? That’s when we toss objectivity aside. We reach for data that supports our hunches, and downplay the rest. We hold up our personal experience as indubitable proof, far more powerful than what thousands of others may have seen or done. And data from yesterday has to be more relevant than data from last year, right?

The fact is we regularly rely on a number of biases to make poor decisions in the face of contrary evidence. So it makes sense for a team to get together to work out how best to pull off an important mission. What then if everyone in the team had the same background and skills, and thought the same? We’re a bit nervous when it comes to talking about diversity. There is no doubting that fighter pilots are not the most diverse group of people on earth, and equally that our training draws our thinking and actions even more tightly together. Within the bounds of our fighter pilot circles, we do push to call on as diverse a group as possible for our ground and air missions, and include people who are ‘outlier’ personalities within the force.

Diversity can offer any number of perspectives, across gender, age, technical expertise, education, personality type, ethnicity, social interests—anything that can offer your team an alternative view of similar facts. If you want to perform well through complexity, you want diversity on your team.

Creativity through a disciplined process

With all that diversity, you can expect differing opinions on how to act, and how to begin that action. That’s where a disciplined process comes in. A disciplined process (like Flawless Execution or “Flex” for example) brings diverse ideas to a common objective focus. At each stage of the process, there are clear questions being asked, and clear answers being sought. The source of those answers doesn’t matter, objectivity does. It’s like making a strong cable out of thin wires. The process laces the diverse strands of facts and opinion together into one strong plan of action.

It’s hard to overstate the power of a disciplined process. Studies have shown that the process used to make decisions (and empower decision making) can have over six times the impact than the analysis it’s based on. This really rams home the point that teams and companies often overplay data analysis. It explains why we often suffer from ‘analysis paralysis’, spending more time than we should on analysis, and delaying the decisions we need to make. Perhaps it’s because analysis is the easiest thing to do, and the one thing that business analysts are trained to do well. Getting accurate data is hard. Making good decisions is harder.

Making good decisions consistently is harder still. We’re as much of a fan of Jim Collins as anyone. In Great by Choice, Collins writes that ‘the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change: the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency’. That’s again where a reliable process comes in—to drive consistent quality in your decisions and actions.

People sometimes misunderstand processes, and give them a bad rap. The objections are that they’re a straitjacket, that they stifle creativity, that they take the fun out of work. Bad processes can do that. Good processes don’t. As Jim Collins calls it: ‘The great task, rarely achieved, is to blend creative intensity with relentless discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it.’

Are pilots concerned about creativity? Not so much. Are we concerned about the creativity of our clients? Very much so. We know creativity is a necessary ingredient of their success.

But we are more concerned about our clients’ productivity and working culture. A good process (such as Flex) does one big thing to help enormously: it reduces friction. In every meeting, people know what they’re aiming to do, and how they will do it. It saves a heck of a lot of time, a heck of a lot of argument, and a great many working relationships.

Untimely, people may have different personalities and different world views. They may not even like each other. But give them a clear, disciplined, collaborative process to be guided by, and they will beat complexity each and every time.

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/diverse-aware-group-beating-complexity/

How to create a High Performance Team

Almost any group of people can become a high performing team. How? By adopting a process that ensures you create a common purpose, create desire and confidence, create trust. It’s about your role in that team—be it as a clear team leader or as an essential follower—in creating a team that performs its mission, consistently and reliably, every time.

That’s a challenge. There are many components to a team, and many things that can go wrong. We’ve cut the idea of a high performing team a million times over from every which way we can, and it boils down to these three things: the team’s mindset, its skillset, and the processes that bring those two together. When you define these three things, you define your team.

Your hand-picked team

Startup companies are in many respects the new classic team. Small, nimble, focused—and hand-picked by the company’s founders. They have to succeed to get paid, and can’t rely on a corporate machine to generate bonuses. Technology startups can amaze with the speed with which they take hold of an idea, and spread it through our digital lives. Equally impressive are new companies that take on the traditional market for physical goods.

How do they do this? From the outset, the leader uses the three things that mark out a team: mindset, skills, and process. Like all good teams successful start-ups have a clear mindset of identity and purpose. For the team’s skillset, the Navy SEAL rule for team recruiting is highly effective. In SEAL platoons, at least two men can do any task, and each man has to have at least two specialties. ‘One is none, and two is one,’ is a spec ops saying. The first team of any startup should have diverse but overlapping skills. They should be able to cover for each other, and test out their ideas. People should have accountability, as well as support. And to keep the team’s mindset responsive and its skillset sharp, test and reset plans. It’s the only way to stay on top of the dynamic marketplace of today’s business world.

The team you’ve just got to work with

That’s all very well when you’re able to pick your own team—pick who has the skills, who’ll get along, who loves the mission. But it’s a different story when the team is already picked, and the mission is upon you.

What do you do if the team has established skills, their own versions of culture, and their own idea of process? Good operators they may. Teams they are not.

In this scenario, the lever to work with is process. Introduce a solid and unified process – a framework for action and a way of thinking – that encourages robust planning and uses the disciplines of briefing (effective communication) and debriefing (a unique form of objective review) to form individuals into solid, effective teams.

An effective planning framework and clear communication of the plan will ensure collaboration and accountability within the team, and alignment. By debriefing, teams can identify new steps to improve their performance and operations. And those steps can became new standards. Slowly, as the teams’ shared processes take shape, the teams’ shared culture will too. The learning will be clear to those involved: use debriefing as the process to meld both the processes and culture.

The respectful truth of a high performance team

It’s not easy to create such teams. Not because the processes or principles are hard to understand, but because we find them hard to commit to and stand by. A high performing team cares for and respects each other, starting with the leader’s care for the rest. For their professional time and goals, team members share a common culture and purpose. The phrase that rings throughout their experience is ‘Respectful truth over artificial harmony’. High performing teams do not gloss over the difficult, just to be polite or avoid conflict. But they manage these situations with respect, because they have a clear framework and established standards to deal with them, and an ability to learn to do so.

The team-based approach that gives fighter squadrons their agility, security and performance can achieve the same results in any organization. They out-think, out-plan and out-maneuver the opposition. They have everyone involved to the fullest possible extent. They achieve a competitive advantage because everyone is helping to achieve it.

Early in my military career, I learned the value and necessity of strong leadership and commitment, and the value of using teams to build the people within them. To lead a team is not just to decide the right things to do, but to creating the dynamics in which people commit themselves, energetically and enthusiastically to bring those things about.

Do you have the right processes and culture in place to create high performing teams inside your business or organization?

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/create-high-performance-team/

Go All In: How to Create and Nail Your Goals Like a Fighter Pilot

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/podcast-go-all-in-how-to-create-and-nail-your-goals-like-a-fighter-pilot/

BEHIND EVERY GREAT LEADER IS A HIGH PERFORMING TEAM

It’s hard to imagine a serious endeavor that is not taken on by a team. Every person that does something special and ‘solo’ is the first to recognize the team behind them.

The entrepreneurial celebrities of our times—Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Oprah, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Lucy Peng, John Mackey, Anita Roddick, Herb Kelleher, Diane von Furstenberg, Muhammad Yunus, Howard Schultz, Arianna Huffington, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Fred Smith—all acknowledge their greatest achievement as being the team they put in place to realize their dreams.

Good teams don’t happen by accident. There are a series of decisions to be made, on the team’s makeup, it’s culture, and the way it makes decisions and gets things done. High performing teams have to have a good leader, but equally they have to have good followers, sharing the same purpose and vision, and able to step into the leader’s shoes at any point, which at some point they will.

What’s in a team?

Teams are those groups of around five to twelve people who share a common mission. They are big enough to have the skills and diversity the mission needs, and small enough for each team member to know and rely on each other, and to care about each other. Selection, training, and shared experience allow team members to appreciate the culture, standards, and processes that enable the team to work. They are different people, with different personalities, perspectives, and life values, but what they do share is a common purpose, a desire to achieve that purpose, and mutual trust.

What’s important for now is that almost any group of people can become a high performing team—with the right tools, techniques and commitment.

It’s about creating a common purpose, about creating desire and confidence, about creating trust. It’s about your role in that team—be it as a clear team leader or as an essential follower—in creating a team that performs its mission, consistently and reliably, every time.

That’s a challenge. There are many components to a team, and many things that can go wrong. We’ve cut the idea of a high performing team a million times over from every which way we can, and it boils down to these three things: the team’s mindset, its skillset, and the processes that bring those two together. When you define these three things, you define your team.

The Fighter Pilot Factor

Fighter pilots are some of the most efficient operators on Earth, and all operate in teams. However, what’s interesting is that the majority of fighter pilots are average individuals. Very rarely will you find elite athletes, academic genius or groundbreaking theorists amongst trainee fighter pilots. However something very special happens once these average Joes walk through the door to pilot training. From day 1, they are taught a unique operating system that transforms groups of everyday people into elite and high performing teams. This system is what we call the Flex Methodology – a simple, repeatable and effective tool that delivers some extremely useful outcomes.

The good news is: this process has a universal application which means it can be used by anyone, and applied to any group of people.

My team and I understand the processes that build high-performing teams. And we have built one of the most impactful, engaging, and memorable team transformation programs in the world using the inspiration and experience of elite military teams. Contact us today to discuss taking your team to the next level!

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/behind-every-great-leader-high-performing-team/

We Can’t All Fly Jets, But We Can All Put Ourselves in That Frame of Mind

How to Put Yourself Into the Fighter Pilot Frame of Mind

When you look at a jet, three things stand out: the cockpit, the fuselage that houses the engine, and the wings. The smooth things off to the side that stay quiet and hardly get a mention, want to try flying without them?  Not only do wings keep us airborne, they keep us steady at speed and through turbulence. As basic as they seem, we don’t get far without our wings so we invest to make them strong. Strong wings are essential. Apart from keeping you in the air, which is nice, they keep you steady when there’s turbulence. They also set boundaries for what you try out in the cockpit: you can’t do anything that the wings can’t handle. The whole machine may fall apart.

The wings of a jet are like the standards we set in business for our processes and culture, the training we gone to meet these standards, and the systems we use to access them.  A high performance way of thinking allows you to rely on your wings, the simple certainty of your standards, so you can take on complex uncertainties. Keep your mind free for the hard stuff. Albert Einstein was famous for saying,‘Never memorize something that you can look up,’ when he couldn’t tell a colleague his own phone number. That was sound advice when you were living in the 1920’s, tackling the hardest problem known to mankind, working by yourself, surrounded by the few reference books you need, with all the time in the world.

Whether or not we’re in a jet fighter, our reality today is a little different. We work in teams, under time pressure, with infinite data available. If we stopped to look everything up, we would slow down the team, and most likely embarrass ourselves.

The layers of standards and learning

To understand how a company can best build and use standards, we need to make a few distinctions:

• There are organizational standards that have to be memorized, and training is essential to help them sink in. Training equals habits and new habits equal new behaviours. Essential for the continuous change we see in the world today.
• There are organizational standards and knowledge that you can look up, as long as there’s some way to look them up in a hurry. This includes all the

lessons learned and situational awareness that your company can draw on.

• There are personal standards—habits and techniques—that we rely on individually,but that can’t interfere with the organizational standards.
• There is personal initiative and creativity, all that goes on in the cockpit, which is what everything else is there to support.

That’s how high performance is built. We layer one set of abilities on top of the other, and keep learning.

Why have standards?

Standards ensure that each person on the team knows the process, and relies on the others to also know the process. They cut about two-thirds of the time needed for any discussion, and two-thirds of the risks from any mission.

Working to standards gives a team enormous confidence in facing new situations. When those standards are known and trained across an organization, they are powerful. They don’t have to be complicated: their power comes from being able to rely on them, absolutely, any time. As fighter pilots, our common standards allow us to work with pilots from other squadrons, bases, and air forces, if need be at a moment’s notice. We can trust the other pilots with our lives, because they know the standards.

This commitment to standards is generally not as common in business as it is in the military,but that only makes it more powerful when it’s used. It is a competitive advantage that can be used everyday, in every business.

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/fighter-pilot-frame-of-mind/

What’s in your high-definition future picture?

What’s in your high-definition future picture? Defining your purpose, setting your mission and guiding your actions

It’s not easy to paint a vision of something as complex as an organization, with all the uncertainty of the future, and all the possibilities available. What would you include, and what would you leave out?

Your organization’s vision, or what we call the ‘High Definition Destination’ (“HDD”), is your mountain. It answers your purpose, explains your mission, and guides what you should be doing now. It defines fundamental goals that together make certain what you’re offering to what market, how you’ll be perceived, who works for you and how they’ll do it well, how you’re structured,and what your financial performance will be. It’s not so detailed that it limits people’s creativity; nor is it so fuzzy that it allows creativity to prejudice performance. Just right, so that a team leader on a mission can make a judgment call that their mission may no longer be heading for the HDD.

The HDD: Elements

There are certain elements and considerations that will help define an organization’s HDD.  Here are the five elements, and their component dimensions, that can be used to guide us through what may be important to an organization. It may not be the only way of looking at things,and your own organization may have more or less elements, or express them differently. But I offer them to you as a strong place to start:

1.   Competitive position. The markets we’re in (businesses and geographies) notionally multiplied by our profile in them (our business model, competitive advantage, brand).
2.     Productivity. The skills our people have (their lived experience,and inherent and learned abilities) notionally multiplied by their will in using it (the culture, engagement, and benefits we can offer).
3.     Entrepreneurship. Our capacity for innovation (culture,autonomy, R&D) notionally multiplied by our appetite for risk(controls, standards, processes, ratios).
4.     Capital productivity. The financial capital we invest (debt,equity, reinvested revenue) multiplied by the return on that investment (ROIC, margin).
5.     Asset ownership. Our legal structures (legal entity, employee shares, mergers and acquisitions growth) for the assets we own(businesses, property, infrastructure, intellectual property).

Elements such as these define an organization and can guide focused planning and action. A traditional, broader vision complements the HDD well: you do not have to replace what is treasured. But you will find it extremely hard to execute your strategy unless you have an HDD in place. You can use a performance framework like Flex to develop an HDD, or you can test the vision you have and fill in the gaps. Either way there’s work, very achievable work, to be done.

The elements: Clear, measurable and achievable

Just as a mission or project objective needs to be clear, measurable, and achievable, so too do the elements of the HDD. That’s the surest way to prepare for the mission objectives to be aligned with the HDD, which is the whole point of the mission. For example, take entrepreneurship. The HDD might call for your company to be known for creating ‘next generation’ products. What Measure might indicate that you’re on track? You might hold that 20 percent of each year’s revenue flows from products launched in that year. You might suggest a number of patents to be filed each year, or propose that you receive for requests from third parties to license your technology each year.

As with mission objectives, the components of each HDD element should be absolute, not relative to a market or an economy. Make them about your sales, not your rank in the market. Markets are not zero sum games: company performance is in part dependent on industry performance, and both you and your competition may do extremely well in a year that’s good for your industry. Put a stake in the ground with specific numbers, rather than calling for ‘more than last year’, and adjust those numbers with each year’s strategy cycle as you need to.

You can see how similar the dimensions of an HDD are to mission objectives. They are the very peak of the mission objectives, the targets and destinations to which all the other objectives are aimed. But just like mission objectives, there is nothing in them about how those dimensions will be pursued or met. That’s for the teams at the highest level of the organization to decide, with their decisions cascading down through the teams at every level.

As we’ve seen, the discrete elements of the HDD each contain a small selection of measurable objectives. So in a sense, setting a company’s HDD is remarkably similar to mission planning. In my next post I’ll share with you my top tips for setting and testing a clear, measurable and achievable HDD to ensure each teams’ every mission and action is aligned to the organization’s future picture.

 

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/whats-high-definition-future-picture/

Setting a clear vision for your organisation

What’s your mountain? Setting a clear, high-definition picture for your future destination

Some companies have great visions. Amazon’s vision is ‘to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.’ We Now know what that vision looks like—like Amazon.com. But before it was built? Could the leaders at Amazon tell you exactly what they were building?

Every mission that takes place in an organization must have in its line of sight the ultimate high-definition vision of the organization’s destination – it’s strategy if you will, or what we like to call the High Definition Destination (or HDD for short).

Your Mountain

The HDD is your mountain. It answers your purpose, explains your mission, and guides what you should be doing now. It defines fundamental goals that together make certain what you’re offering to what market, how you’ll be perceived, who works for you and how they’ll do it well, how you’re structured, and what your financial performance will be. It’s not so detailed that it limits people’s creativity; nor is it so fuzzy that it allows creativity to prejudice performance. Just right, so that a team leader on a mission can make a judgment call that their mission may no longer be heading for the HDD.

The Balancing Act

The HDD is a sense of purpose that compels us rationally and practically, as well as emotionally and inspirationally. It’s a vision of the future that all who choose to work with us can get behind. Such a vision helps to ‘direct, align and inspire actions on the part of large numbers of people,’ says John Kotter, and that’s exactly what we want. Achieving such a HDD is a fine balance. General, inspirational visions can set the purpose of a company or community, but they’re not enough. Here is an example of great vision that would both inspire us,and be a standard against which we can test everything we do.

‘At the Coca-Cola Company we strive to refresh the world, inspire moments of optimism and happiness, create value and make a difference.’

This vision gives us identity and purpose, and is invaluable both for the people pursuing it and for the communities it serves. It goes beyond ‘being the best at what we do’, and state that ‘what we do matters’. A telco might say ‘we have the best mobile network in the land’, or it might say ‘we connect people’.

Yet pure as this vision is in purpose, would it be enough to guide decision- making on all matters and at all levels of your company or community? We need a little more context and detail, but not too much.We need the vision to be clear, so that it is not confusing or difficult to implement. And we want it to be expressed in simple terms so that anyone in the organization can describe it.

Set a clear HDD, and people will rally round to make it real. Leave it vague and people may draw their own conclusions. As fighter pilots, if we knew exactly what our leaders wanted on the  battlefield, then they could rest easy at night knowing it would get done. If we didn’t have that clearly in mind, then they may wake up to the news that the wrong target had been hit.

Getting Started

It is not easy to paint a vision of something as complex as an organization, with all the uncertainty of the future, and all the possibilities available. What would you include, and what would you leave out?

Regardless of the process or framework you use, there are certain elements and considerations that will help define an organization and guide focused planning and action. A traditional, broader vision can complement a more detailed strategy, so you do not have to replace what is treasured. But you will find it extremely hard to execute your strategy unless you have a HDD in place. This can be achieved by developing a HDD, or testing the vision you have and filling in the gaps. Either way there’s work, very achievable work, to be done.

In my next post we’ll identify 5 key elements anyone can use to define a HDD and guide focused planning and action.

 

The post Setting a clear vision for your organisation appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/setting-high-definition-vision/

Is Your Team Distracted? Use Task Shedding to Get Back on Track

Is your team distracted? Get back on track with clear communication and task shedding

A few years back we worked with a terrific sales team. Being millennials, they used live messaging for everything, sharing new leads and information, giving each other encouragement and congratulations—a stream of positive reinforcement and a constant flow of shared information. Yet when they sat back and looked at what was happening, they realized the cost of that interaction may have outweighed the positives. Yes, the new information was coming ‘live’, but was it distracting them from their immediate task? Yes, they were responding to each other and changing their course in real time, but was all the information relevant and clear? And was it thoughtful or reactive, helpful or unnecessary?

Keep communication and minds on mission

There are times for chewing the fat, and teams love them. But not when everyone’s under pressure to perform. When there’s a lot going on, a lot of it uncertain, you can’t afford long rambles and you can’t afford short statements that are unclear. Clear, concise statements also help you and those around you to keep focus. Ramble on, and people switch off. No matter how important your message, it won’t be heard. And you may be taking up the time or phone line for more critical stuff.

Everything has to be clear, concise and certain. That’s especially the case when people are tired or under stress. The other challenge is that as much as 80 percent of human communication is nonverbal: the tone, gestures, body position, and facial expressions. That’s the value of a face-to-face meeting, or being in each other’s line of sight when you’re on an operation. So if you don’t have those visual clues, you really need to get the tone and words right, over the phone or on the page.

There are some clear rules that can help keep your communication and minds on mission.

1.  Work with hard data, not assumptions. When task saturation is hitting you, it’s amazing how an opinion or assumption can morph into a ‘fact’ on which other people’s decisions are based. ‘How long have we got?’ can have only two answers: a number, or, ‘I will find out.’ If Someone then wants your opinion, they’ll ask.
2.  Your own jargon is OK. What is convenient shorthand within the team may well be jargon outside it, but the team should still use it. Pilots use terms like ‘inbound’ to mean ‘I’m On my way, on time, with no issues’, or ‘tumbleweed’ to mean ‘I have absolutely no situational awareness, and something bad could happen any time soon’, or ‘ballistic’ to mean ‘I am out of control and something bad will happen any time soon—stay away!’ That assumes, of course,that everyone knows what it means: it is part of the team’s language, part of its standards.Technical terms weren’t made up to be vague or confuse people. They are created to describe a specific thing in context, more efficiently than before.   In the military, those terms are chosen so that when used in the same situation they don’t sound the same. We reduce the chance of mishearing someone, of making mistakes because of     an accent or a crackling line. So, ‘commit/abort’, or ‘affirmative/negative’ rather than ‘yes/no’, which are so short they might be lost in a crackling line.
3.  Cut the chatter. Fighter pilots support each other by saying only what they have to say, no more, and then get off the radio. That keeps ideas clear and lines free. In business and at home,in most situations, that may come across as abrupt. But remember we’re talking about communication within a team that is focusing on a mission. If you’re on a family road trip and it’s time to turn off the highway, just make the call!
4. Decide on simple patterns for both one-way and two-way communication. For example, in two-way communication, agree on how to check you’ve made contact, that the other person is listening, and that they have heard you. Pilots aren’t shy in asking for a repeat back’ to make sure the word has got through: not the whole sentence, but a coreword, phrase, or paraphrase.  Similarly, agree on a simple structure for one-way communication like emails, if they’re more than one line. Put the point of the email and the desired action at the top, and structure everything else below. If it’s information about an event or process, use your friends ‘who, what, and when’. Set your own rules, whatever they are, and stick to them.

Refocus and shed

It has always taken self-discipline to stay focused through our daily cacophony of personal and work plans, meetings, calls, and emails. That’s even harder now that we have a glued-to-hand smartphone with its world of alerts, distraction, and temptation. So it’s become ever more critical to be able to cut through that task list, and shed whatever you don’t really have to do, now.

Most time-management approaches follow similar themes (and Flex is no exception). We set that out below, but if you prefer your own, go with that. The real difference is with Flex you have wings, there to help keep you focused, shed tasks, and do the tasks you can’t. If you need to, work with your wingman to problem solve how to shed tasks, and how to tap into other resources.

Each day or more often as needed, refocus on what you have to do, and what you can shed. Here is the way we prioritize things:

1. Must do.  Things  that the  law, your boss,  your standards, or  an emergency require you to do. You may not like them, you may rather do other things, but there’s no avoiding these, so best do or delegate them as quickly and as clearly as possible.
2. Should do. Your core job. The missions you’re on, that take planning and diligence,and that your performance will be judged on—by you, your family, your boss, or your partners. Plan your days and weeks around these.
3. Nice to do. These would definitely be worthwhile in the perfect world, but not at the expense of your core job. Things that contribute to the plans of others, to your learning, to your relationships. Do them by all means, but in gaps that emerge in your core program. The ‘nice to do’s are a real trap

Want to take your team’s performance to the next level? Afterburner’s team building days are high energy workshops that educate and energize your staff. Speak to us about your next event and discover why Australia’s leading companies love us (02) 9939 2731

The post Is Your Team Distracted? Use Task Shedding to Get Back on Track appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/team-distracted-try-task-shedding/

Want to keep focus…? Find yourself a Wingman

Whether it’s task saturation or overconfidence, the result is the same: a lack of focus that can be fatal to missions, personal dreams, careers, and even lives. Pilots know that threat, and prepare for it as part of their plan. As we’ve explored in earlier posts, they use their checklists, focus on their central indicator and cross-check on the others. There’s another way pilots and some high performance executives remain focused on their objectives at all times….  

Without a doubt, the most important way for you to keep focus on your plan is to have a wingman. Literally, two minds, two sets of eyes and ears, looking out for each other. Call it mutual support, call it a double act, call it whatever you want that doesn’t imply a guy in a plane alongside you . . . just have one.

Don’t leave home without your wingman

Pilots never go anywhere without a wingman. Wingmen check for blind spots and signs of task saturation. It’s all part of their plan. In business, you will have seen the benefits of having two people at a meeting where you can. You hear more things; when one person is listening hard, the other can be preparing; you have more energy in the room; when two people go to a meeting, they are far more likely to plan ahead for it, to consider the threats and contingencies; you can play roles, negotiate better, follow up with more enthusiasm.

Many executives have also experienced the benefits of a true working partnership, or at least a very clear and trusted second-in-command or 2IC to take over the reins whenever needed. The U.S.teamwork software company Atlassian is a great example of the benefits of mutual support, with co-founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon- Brookes sharing the CEO role from the firm’s start up days to its 2016 listing on the New York Stock Exchange. They share the workload and the stress of building a business, take the breaks they need, and one of them is always there. Someone who can step in for you whenever needed is just as valuable, eventually, to lead in their own right.

Fighter pilots take that strength further. We don’t go anywhere—anywhere— without a wingman. We Don’t fly a mission, we don’t go out at night, and we don’t take on important roles or personal missions without having someone by our side.

Who’s your wingman?

In our mission teams, wingmen are easily identified. Beyond that, a wingman may be the life partner in your family or our formal business partner. It may equally mean someone who we share experiences with, or someone we work alongside in our work or personal communities. You know each other’s roles and objectives, you know the threats to those objectives, and you know how you can support and rely on each other.

So this mutual support is less an action item and more a mindset that people in the team share. It startswith that old friend situational awareness. Yes, there is that mission awareness, about the environment and potential external threats to the mission. But there’s  also an awareness about the person you’re supporting: their fears and motivations, critical tasks, and what will make or break them. Without That awareness, you’re an observer rather than a wingman: not a bad thing, but not what’s needed.

Where’s your wingman?

Wingmen are not always someone physically close. So many people are out there on the road these days—pushing deals, sales, development, investments, research— and it’s especially important for them to have wingmen. For example, truck drivers, couriers, and cabbies typically work solo, on days that can be as frustrating or tiring as they are long. The most natural wingmen for them could be their dispatch operators – the people who know what the drivers are doing (or should be doing) at all times, have the personal skills to check in every now and then with a banter or a more direct question, and the technology to hand to follow the drivers’ progress. The result of this mutual support is more reliable deliveries, happier drivers, and fewer accidents.

It’s one thing to be aware of something, another again to say something. The U.S. Coast Guard has studied the causes of 389 marine casualties in 1998–99. In 68 percent of cases, it wasn’t that the critical information wasn’t available or known. It was that either the people who had the information didn’t recognize its importance, and so the need to share it with others, or assumed that the others already had the information. Some call this the ‘common knowledge effect’, so common everyone assumes everyone else knows it, but most are wrong. Overcoming this issue is part of a high performance mindset: don’t be shy in speaking up if you see something that may be a problem.

Do you have a wingman?

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How Checklists Can Combat Task Saturation

Checklists are not for Dummies: Combatting task saturation on a page

 

Of all the things you’ll read about on my page, two things stand out as commonplace in the air force, and rare as hen’s teeth in our personal and business lives: the debrief and the checklist. Of the two, the checklist is like the poor cousin at the ball. Everyone we talk to gets excited about nameless, rankless debrief, with all the impact on learning and culture it can carry. Very, very few people get excited about a checklist.

So let me explain why we get excited about a checklist. Using a checklist means we’re getting ready to fly. Far from being a poor cousin, our checklists are our wise elders. Working through a pre-flight checklist calms our nerves and puts us on the same frequency as our crew, our team, and our commander. Picking up an emergency checklist gives us time to think and to respond. We know from our checklist that all the basics are in order, so that our mind can drill down to the complexities of our mission and the creativity we’ll need to solve its problems.

If I could write another book, it would be ‘Checklists are not for Dummies’. Three examples come to mind. One of my mates flew without his book of checklists just twice in his 30-year military career. Both times, nothing went wrong, there were no emergencies, no accidents. There was no cause for him to look up a checklist, and if he did he probably knew it by heart anyway. But our pilot could not do what he set out todo. Totally missed the mission’s objective. Why? Not having his checklists totally derailed his performance. He felt task saturated the whole flight—just a perception that all was not in order.

The stats don’t lie

He’s no dummy, and nor are the surgeons at the hospitals who were introduced to checklists for a 2008 study by Harvard public health professor Atul Gawande and his team. The researchers had a hypothesis that simple checklists might help reduce avoidable  deaths and complications. But nobody expected by how much. After excluding other factors, they found that deaths occurred in 0.8 percent of operations that used checklists, against 1.5 percent of operations that didn’t—a 47 percent reduction. Literally hundreds of lives were being saved. They also found that serious complications fell from 11 percent to 7 percent of operations—a 37 percent improvement. Needless to say, checklists are now mandatory for surgery in those and many other hospitals. Professor Gawande was so astounded he wrote a book, not on public health but called The Checklist Manifesto.

The Apollo 13 example

Finally, let’s go back to the movies. Apollo 13 captured the moment when aviator Jim Lovell found himself in command of a spacecraft 200,000 miles (321,800 kilometers) from earth, with barely enough battery power to light a torch. NASA was looking at its greatest disaster,and the end of its space program less than a year after the 1969 moon landing. Flight director Gene Kranz, he of ‘Failure is not an option’ fame, helped keep Lovell and his crew calm, while trying to solve the problem. Ken Mattingly, the astronaut originally slated to fly the mission, was put into a simulator to work out how to fire up Apollo 13 on a AAA battery. He worked for hours in a race against time, trying sequence after sequence, failing again and again. With everything in the simulated spacecraft turned off and next to no time left, he finally got there. The sequence was transcribed into a simple, step-by-step checklist, and sent to Lovell. It saved Lovell and his crew, the mission,and the NASA space program.

The Apollo 13 landing proved once again that a checklist beats task saturation under stress. Simplicity beats complexity. Checklists get you home. They have been standard for flying planes since 1935, when a prototype Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress crashed at Ohio’s Wright Field Due to a stunningly simple pilot error. After take-off, the plane’s nose just kept angling up—it didn’t level off at all—and eventually the plane was almost vertical, stalled, and dropped back to earth. The air force’s best test pilots had just forgotten to unlock the plane’s elevator controls—one switch in a hundred steps.

The military realized that even their best people would make mistakes when confronted with the forest of procedures and instruments needed to fly a modern warplane. Checklists have been mandatory ever since. With them, young and inexperienced people can operate rare,expensive machinery in complex situations. Without them, mistakes are certain.

Using three types of checklists

There  are three  types of checklists you  will call upon through your mission— normal, emergency, and reference. Each is just one page,but is different in format and use.

1.   Normal checklists are condensed memory-joggers of standard operating procedures, so assume that your team knows those procedures. They will also be used in the mission if that procedure is used in the mission. A pilot before take-off will talk his- or herself through the checklist, step by step, to make sure and to ease nerves. That’s the sort of checklist you’d want to use before a presentation, or a product launch. Often, the actions can be confirmed to a wingman. In a two-person Do–Confirm: one person does the action, another person verbally confirms it’s been done. Not in a narky insistent way, but because it’s the natural way the team operates to add confidence and clarity. Do–Confirm, and initial the confirm.
2.   Emergency checklists, as the name implies, are there at the ready if the team needs them, in a handy case or folder for that purpose. Ideally, the team knows what these procedures are, but it’s not necessary—what they have to be able to do is recognized when the checklist is needed, and where to find it. Usually the checklist is in a Read–Do format, for either one or two people. Read The step, do the step, then initial its completion.
3.   References are just that: a source of more detailed information you can refer to when you need to. They are comprehensive stores of standard operating procedures, and can be as long as they need to be (and no longer).

Note that these checklists are standard operating procedures: meaning they don’t have to be mentioned in the brief, it’s assumed that the team will use them. Would that assumption be true of your team? How much work would you have to do to make checklists the norm?Factor in quite a bit: to get buy-in and follow-through— all the things that a change in culture and behaviour might need.

Rules for all checklists

There are two critical rules for a checklist: keep it simple, and use it. The best way to ensure a checklist is simple and used, is for the people who use it to be the ones who write it. Say you’ve got a team who has done more than their share of product launches and launch events, but there’s been a few simple errors of late and you want them to consider a checklist. Or perhaps you’ve got teams of experienced, frontline operators working on shale oil fracking, offshore wells, coal mine draglines, geoseismic testing. If you rock up one day to any of these teams with a nice sheet of laminated paper and say, ‘Hey Guys, could you follow this checklist from now on’, would they take any notice? It would be much better if you explained that checklists were proven to save lives, time and money, and that it was up to them to create the checklists that worked for them.That’s how the best checklists are created, and why they are used. Get specialist help by all means, but don’t just deliver the end result.

Failures in offshore drilling have received a lot of warranted publicity in the last decade. Failures on land are more common, if less damaging.In the same period, one international energy company tested the blowout preventers on its active drill pipes every two weeks. Until one day one of the company’s best drill operators accidentally sheared the pipe during the test. On investigation, the company found the operator had survived 38 close calls in fewer than a hundred previous tests. The tests were routine, and so dangerous. The operators just didn’t focus.After implementing checklists, their focus has returned, and there have been no incidents or close calls since.

Rules for Checklists

•    Trigger points that clearly determine when they are used.
•    One page. These are memory-joggers, not phone books.
•     Nine steps or less, including cross-checks. Your team through their standard operating procedures will know what, if anything, makes those steps possible. There’s no need for ‘breathing steps’, as in ‘Remember to breathe’, steps that state the obvious.
•     Clear, concise language. Really push the meaning-to-ink ratio. If you don’t need a word, cut it. If it’s not clear to the operator what it means, replace it.
•     No distractions. Only what has meaning, and no more. Basic fonts, no borders, no decorations, no emojis, no arrows to large words saying ‘This is important. Please read’, no such large words.
•    Test with other operators. Not only the team that developed the checklist, but  others. They’re the ones who will use them, and who will know if they’ll work.
•     Keep with the operation. If it’s a checkout checklist, keep it at the checkout. If it’s a pipe-testing checklist, keep it with the pipe. If it’s a perforation gun,keep it with the gun.
•     Read them aloud. The checklists are designed for an operator and wingman, whatever the task. Steps, cross-checks, and confirmations are always verbal, and if possible also visual.

 

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/using-checklists-combat-task-saturation/

Combating the silent killer | Task saturation

Combating the silent killer | Task saturation: the biggest risk to flawless execution

What do people do when they feel they have too much to do with the time and resources they have? First up, the good endorphins in our body kick in, and we feel good, energized, ready to climb that mountain and skip down the other side. It’s a great feeling, but it lasts as long as this sentence. Before long, our bodies’ natural ways of dealing with stress get oversaturated. The nervous tension locks you up, and you’ll done of three things: you shut down, you flitter from task to task, or you fix on one thing and one thing only. Trouble is not far away.

The first and most harmless coping mechanism is to shut down. You look at your desk, your emails, your to-do list, and just go blank. Anything else becomes more important, no matter how trivial, as long as it’s not part of that mess. Go for a walk, visit the gym, do your monthly receipts, play a game on the smartphone. That’s fine every now and again, we all need a break. You might even be happy about it,and walk about the office looking for a pointless chat or an evening drinks buddy. But when the next day ticks over with no change, check in with yourself—is this OK, or have you shut down? Any luck, someone will have already noticed. The one good thing about shutting down is that it’s easy to spot.

Flitterers, on the other hand, are bad news. They’re risky because they act busy but do little, and kill you while they’re doing it. Everything they do is part of their job, and they’re not shutting down. They’re not waving that flag that says ‘It’s all too much for me’. But they’re not doing anything important, and not finishing anything at all. Compartmentalizers are specialist flitterers, flitterers with form. Have you ever wanted to get everything in order? Just put everything into nice, neat, calming piles and lines while just beyond your vision the world is burning? Rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Compartmentalizers will make lists, re-plan their project (again, by themselves), file papers, go from top to bottom, and become obsessively linear. Again, that’s OK as a regular routine, keeping things in order so they never get out of control or need a year’s cleanout. But if you’re doing it when your team really needs you to be doing something else, then there is a problem. And the sign is that you’re letting a team down in an uncharacteristic way: a missed deadline, a late arrival, or a communication that just doesn’t make sense.

Finally, there are the channellers. As the name suggests, channellers have tunnel vision, focussed or fixated on one thing to the exclusion of all others. Most of us are potential channellers when things go wrong—80 percent of all people—and the examples are almost too many and too painful to recall. The cable company so determined to plant their new advertising campaign on the airwaves that they didn’t think through whether their connection staff were able to meet the new demand. The day we just have to get something ‘out the door’, and close our ears and minds to any distraction, any phone call, any unplanned event that might interfere with getting the job done.

Keeping people to the plan

Whether it’s task saturation or overconfidence, the result is the same: a lack of focus that can be fatal to missions, personal dreams, careers,and even lives. Pilots know that threat, and prepare for it as part of their plan. They use their checklists, focus on their central indicator,cross-check on the others, and use their wingmen. Wingmen check for blind spots and signs of task saturation, and pilots never go anywhere without a wingman. It’s all part of their plan.

In this post we’ll look at the use of a central indicator and cross checking as a means to overcoming saturation.

Your dashboard, with primary (attitude) indicator and cross-checks

There are about 350 indicators in the cockpit of a fighter or a commercial jet. Nobody can keep track of 350 indicators. The  answer is to be able to see four or five indicators clearly at all times, and if there’s anything unexpected with them, start looking at the relevant others. Still,how would you or a business keep an eye on four, five, eight, or twelve indicators at a time? We would humbly suggest the dashboard layout of our cockpit. It’s been designed, tested, and improved over billions of flying hours by millions of pilots flying under direct combat, safety and commercial pressures.

The dashboard has all the indicators you need to see, in a hub-and-spoke layout. The center hub is the primary indicator. For pilots, that’s the attitude indicator or ‘artificial horizon’. If you can only do one thing, you keep the plane level. (One look at the attitude indicator would have saved Flight 401.) The secondary indicators form the spokes. They’re all important, so a pilot will scan the dashboard constantly, and every scan passes over the centre hub. It’s the hub-and-spoke layout of the cockpit cross-check.

Many businesses  use dashboards, but there are  three standout features to the cockpit-style dashboard that aren’t often seen. First, the primary indicator is the largest image and is at the center: you can’t miss it. Second, all of the indicators are visual: You don’t have to read anything when your eyes are rattling. You can quickly scan across the dashboard and see that the indicators are where they should be. Third and most importantly, if the indicators are not where you want them, you will

know what you should do to adjust, correct, guide, and get the indicator back where it should be. For each dial, there is a corresponding action to take to move the needle.

Your business will have its own key performance indicators, and these will make up the company’s dashboard. Because it’s the CEO’s dashboard, it will show the CEO’s priorities. Some dashboards will have the share price as the central attitude meter, others will have profit, or revenue, or margin, all depending on the company’s current strategy and priorities.

Should everyone in the company be focussing on that dashboard? No. People at different layers and within different teams will have their own missions with their own objectives. The indicator that shows whether their own objective is being met should be that team’s primary indicator. Other indicators should reveal factors that may contribute to that objective. The CEO’s profit indicator, for example, may appear as a secondary indicator to be cross-checked, because that may reveal whether unbudgeted resources are available (or not) to help meet your objective.

Many companies want their employees to have one universal dashboard. But that implies everyone in the company should have the same priorities as the CEO. Would that distract them from their daily mission, the one they’re assessed and paid on? You bet. Keep it on the side, but not centre. It’s not their priority.

In my next post we’ll look at one of the most underutilized tools in business – the checklist.

Read the previous post in this 3 part series – Managing Task Saturation | How People Lose Focus

 

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/combating-task-saturation-part-ii/

Managing Task Saturation

Too much to do, and not enough time?

One reason that few plans survive contact with reality is that people are human and don’t always stick to the plan. People lose focus, get overwhelmed, think that the situation has changed when it hasn’t really or, for whatever reason, they just make mistakes. Most often, that’s due to task saturation—too much going on, too much interference and interruption for one mortal to manage. Alternatively,accidents happen when there’s not really much going on, not enough to keep the mind active and focused. Either way, you need to protect against that loss of focus, and keep people to the plan. We’ve Worked for example with a terrific sales team who supported each other to the hilt. Being millennials,they used live messaging for everything, sharing new leads and information, giving each other encouragement and congratulations—a stream of positive reinforcement and useful data. Yet when they sit back and looked at what was happening, they realized the cost of that interaction may have outweighed the positives. Yes, the new information was coming ‘live’, but was it distracting them from their immediate task? Yes, they were responding to each other and changing their course in real time,but was that thoughtful or reactive?

How people lose focus

We  all know what  it feels like to be overwhelmed,  to lose focus on doing the important things,even to lose track of what the important things are. Our minds just can’t take it all in. Surprisingly,though, it’s more common for us to experience lack of focus when our minds are, quite literally, bored from inactivity. No matter how good a book or a film or a storyteller is, you might find your mind drifting off to other thoughts. That’s because your mind can absorb information far more quickly than the speed of normal reading or speech. So the trick is to feed the mind just enough information for it to be fully engaged, yet not overwhelmed. That way, you can avoid both the “sophomore” and the saturation risks.

The sophomore risk

Sometimes, people who ought to know better just aren’t paying enough attention to what’s going on.Overconfidence leads to cut corners, false assumptions or just bad judgments. Research into air force accidents reveals a curious statistic. Errors are more likely to be made by pilots with four to seven years’ experience—not the new or ageing pilots you might expect. Here’s why. Pilots are building up their skills and experience all the time. Unfortunately though, their confidence and lack of focus rises even more. When they begin, they’re fully engaged in the new experience, and can make quite good decisions while facing very new situations: what many call ‘rookie smarts’. But from four years in,they’re in a danger zone—until they come to their senses and again realize you have to pay attention if you’re flying a 20-tonne machine with 22-tonne of thrust at 1200 miles per hour. Maybe they’re a couple of close calls, maybe they learn from an error of a classmate—hopefully it wasn’t fatal.

That’s not so uncommon. We go through the same cycle at university. As a first year student, you’re a little clueless and therefore cautious. Having survived that, you look down from the heights of second year at the new blood coming in. You’re confident, cocky even. You’re a “sophomore” —literally a ‘wisefool’ in ancient Greek. Same thing at work—come in and we’re eyes wide open, looking for opportunities, for traps, and for assurance. As soon as we’re comfortable, we start to take things a little too much for granted. We get called into line a couple of times, because for the first time our performance doesn’t match our potential. But nothing’s fatal, we can keep going. And if we do, the wisdom of experience kicks in and we can begin to lead.

The saturation risk

The standout, biggest risk to flawless execution—to any execution—is what pilots call the silent killer:task saturation. It is totally avoidable. As it is insidious by nature you have to watch out for it, to be able to recognize it, and to respond.

Task saturation is the perception that you have too much to do, in not enough time, with not enough tools or resources. Whether that feeling is real or imagined doesn’t matter. Once it takes hold, you will not act the way you and your team need you to. You will let someone down, or worse.

In business, too many people wear overwhelming ‘busyness’ as a perverse badge of honour. The all-nighter before the killer presentation. Being three places at one time—two virtual one physical—with those in the room with you getting the least attention. The cross-continent flights to chase one more meeting, to make up for the problem that was someone else’s fault. That’s one hell of an important person right there. It feels good to be so valuable. No matter that as task saturation increases,performance decreases, that errors track saturation like ants track honey. Task saturation in business is a sugar hit; it’s nothing to be proud of.

Pilots learn that lesson the hardest way of all, seeing a comrade and mate lose their life for no good reason.

The good news is, fighter pilots have developed techniques to avoid the onset of task saturation. In my next post I’ll discuss how to spot task saturation before it’s too late, and go through my top tips for keeping you and your team to the plan

The post Managing Task Saturation appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/dealing-with-task-saturation/