As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday, I headed off to the ifs School of Finance Isle of Man lecture at the Manx Museum. I didnt’t know what to expect really and I was very pleasantly surprised.
The turnout was excellent and the quality of speakers was second to none.
The Flawless Execution key note was delivered by two ex US Airforce and RAF pilots highlighting how business’s could adopt the flawless execution model made up of 4 elements which are:
Plan
Brief
Execute
Debrief
What I particulary enjoyed was how they compared the objectives that a Thyphoon Fighter Pilot has to achieve with the business objectives that we have to meet in our day to day jobs.
The key themes that I will certainly take away and look at when project planning will be the debrief, something that virtually all organisations don’t do. They might be very good at the Plan, Brief and Execution stages but very rarely do they debrief and learn from any mistakes. Something that I really liked was the rankless debrief that these pilots undertake after every mission. Within the debrief session there is no hierarchy and everyones opinion and comments are as valuable as everyone elses, again something that I would consider needs to be addressed in many of todays organisations. How many of them could honestly say they value everyones views equally?
Which brings me on to my next point – mistakes. Mistakes can be good things and people in organisations that make mistakes are assets. If we just fired these people and moved on we would lose so much experience and we could make the same mistakes again – something that a fighter pilot in combat definitely could not make and I would hazard a guess that many business’s operating in todays highly competitive market place couldn’t afford to do either?
Another area that I found very interesting was on the subject of ‘task saturation’. During this talk we watched some video footage of pilots flying a commercial airline. During the flight they became almost obsessed with the fact that the landing gear light had failed and focussed all of their efforts and energy on trying to rectify the problem, whilst all this was going on they failed to notice the fact that the aeroplane had lost over 2000ft of altitude and it eventually crashed causing the death of over 90 people. I think the point that was being made here was that we can become saturated by a task or tasks during are daily working lives and we can lose sight of what is actually happening around us and need to react to in order to prevent a major problem.
The delivery was excellent, the two guys had done their homework on the Isle of Man, the audience and finance sector. They had obviously constructed a plan, undertaken a brief, executed this flawlessly and I have no doubt they will undertake a debrief with the ifs organisers after the event.
Afterburner – absolutely flawless
