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.

The post We Can’t All Fly Jets, But We Can All Put Ourselves in That Frame of Mind appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

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.

 

The post What’s in your high-definition future picture?  appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

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