Do you have a team ready to take your plan apart and find a way to defeat it? You better, because someone out there is doing just that. Your competition is watching, listening, trying to find out what you’re up to. They’re going to do all they can to defend their market share, counter your innovations, blunt your marketing attacks, stop your sales growth. How would you defeat yourself? Red Team your plan and then put the surviving courses of action or tactics into action.
STEP SIX: PLAN FOR CONTINGENCIES
We have a saying in the fighter-pilot world: Flexibility is the key to air power.
At Afterburner, we like to take that one step further and say that preparation is the key to flexibility. We spend up to 50 percent of our planning process on step six, asking the very difficult question, “What if?” What if the weather changes over the target area after we launch and get airborne? What if the air refueling tanker does not show up and we can’t take on fuel? What if the Wild Weasels cannot take out the SAMs before we get over the target area? Are we going to continue, or are we going to abort the mission? What if? What if? What if?
What about your what-ifs? What if the flight’s delayed? What if your PowerPoint presentation locks up? What if the facilitator for your meeting resigned over the weekend? It’s much easier if you and I brainstorm these action-item decisions right now, when the winds are calm, in an air-conditioned room, sipping a Coca-Cola instead of two hours later when we’re strapped into an F-15, going Mach 1, trying to defeat a surface-to-air missile attack. That’s not the time to brainstorm. That is the time to execute based on decisions made in the calm comforts of the planning room. There’s no time to think things through during the mission. The answers to these questions have to be made in the planning room. This is the time to fine-tune the executional decisions.
Planning for contingencies should be detailed. Start by breaking down your mission into its smallest components, then rank those components on the basis of their importance. What’s going to absolutely stop you dead in the water? What one component is the must-have component for the show to go on? Then work out all the ways something can go wrong with that component and what your solutions are. On behalf of our clients, we give seminars in Europe, the Far East, and even Australia. But things change when we go overseas. The customs laws are different, custom offices have different hours, and each country has its own policies about declarations on commercial shipments. In one of our planning meetings, we looked at the what-ifs of giving a seminar overseas. What if our computers were held up in customs? What did we absolutely have to have to give a seminar? In our case, we could do without this or do without that but we absolutely had to have an item we call the mission planning checklists. If the carton with the checklists was destroyed, or hung up in customs, or simply lost, what would we do in a foreign country, probably on a Saturday or Sunday when the show had to go on Monday morning in a hotel on a street whose name no one could pronounce? We identified the essential item, loaded it onto our corporate intranet site, gave that area restricted access, and then found a twenty-four-hour office support facility in each city on our travel itinerary. As a backup, we burned a separate copy on a CD-ROM, called it our facilitator emergency CD, and issued this to all our team members.
As it happened, we had to put the plan into action in Portugal when that one-in-a-million series of consecutive mistakes compounded into the worst-case scenario on, of all days, the Sunday before a seminar. Portugal’s customs would not release the package that was sent with our seminar materials, due to some holding restrictions unknown to us. Our facilitator had the tools and worked through the night; regardless of how tired he was the next morning, he was in his flight suit and the seminar came off without a hitch.
Without contingency planning, the show would not have gone on. But with scripted responses, the precious little time we had was spent executing a solution, not running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Break your mission apart. Look for the weaknesses. Plan for redundancies. Plan for the redundancy plans to fail. Script your responses. Keep thinking through the what-ifs. I know it sounds like overkill, but bad things happen quickly and without warning.
Once I was in an ACM (Air Combat Maneuvering) engagement, or mock-dogfight, when two jets attacking me rammed into each other. It was a midair collision. Here it was, an ordinary day, and suddenly, two jets had hit each other. That rare, one-in-a-million emergency had struck, but we had a contingency plan, and I had been briefed on this since I started flying fighters. We called it our Midair/Ejection/Rescue section. Do not under-fly the last known altitude of the collision. Do not under-fly a parachute. Mark the position of the midair with your INS/GPS (Internal Navigation System/Global Positioning System) for the rescue team. Note the winds aloft (because with strong winds the pilot could drift miles from the midair coordinates).
So what happened on that morning of January 15, at 10:03 A.M., when the midair collision happened? My body and mind went on autopilot. I executed a scripted contingency plan that I never expected to need. Step by step I went through the procedures and helped save the life of a great guy and a great fighter pilot. It was automatic.
Keep peeling back the layers until you don’t have anywhere else to go. Once you’ve got a backup for every item on the must-have list, you’re ready to move onto the next phase—execution of your mission.
SUMMARY
Let’s look at the six-step process:
Step one is to determine a mission objective. It’s not a Future Picture; it’s razor sharp—something that you and I can execute today.
Step two is to identify the threats—not only external threats, but internal threats as well.
Step three is to look at your available resources. Look at who and what on your team can help you win.
Step four is to collect lessons learned from previous missions or the experiences of others that could help you with the mission.
Step five is to develop your courses of action and Red Team the results.
Step six is to plan for contingencies.
Use these steps in your planning process and your execution levels will increase significantly.
CHAPTER 9
The Brief
Do not issue marching orders to head for the finish line
until you have told your team where the finish line is…
Now, let’s talk about how we communicate the plan to the people. We call that the preflight briefing, or briefing to win!
You know, it’s kind of interesting; we asked a lot of fighter pilots what execution is all about. “Tell me about executing your mission,” I said, and each time they gave me this puzzled look and said, “We execute the brief.” What they were saying to me was the mission is so tightly tied to the brief that in their minds they didn’t know what to talk about except to talk about the brief. That’s how important the brief is. In the world of Flawless Execution, the mission is the brief; the brief is the mission. The two are inextricably one thing in that pilot’s mind, and he or she would no more fly a mission without a brief than drive to work naked.
To a fighter pilot, the brief is such an absolutely critical step in the execution of a mission that we always brief every mission, and we do it right before we fly—no exceptions. We don’t care if it’s a short training flight or a seven-hour combat mission. The brief is where we tell everyone how we’re going to carry out the plan and what we’re going to do today. Everyone’s accountable. Every question is covered.
PREPPING FOR THE BRIEFING
So how do fighter pilots brief? Ladies and gentlemen, after eight years of training countless people, I can say this: It’s not the way you do it in business. A fighter pilot’s briefing isn’t an informal get-together where ideas are exchanged. That’s already been done. There was plenty of time for ideas in the Future Picture stage and plenty of time for ideas in the strategy and courses-of-action stage. Now come the details of the tactics. The fighter pilot’s brief is where our men and women are t
old about a mission that could cost them their lives, so you’d better believe these people are paying attention to how the briefer looks, what he says, and how he says it.
When one walks into a fighter pilot’s briefing room, first impressions are everything. There should be no doubt in the minds of the squadron members that the flight leader, the person responsible for that briefing, has been in that room two, three, maybe even four hours before the brief even started. Whiteboards are spaced around the room with the mission objective laid out in neatly lettered printing. The timelines and the decision matrix have ruler-straight lines; the tactics are arranged in colors to indicate different areas of responsibilities; even the chairs are spaced perfectly in front of the table. When the flight leader has it done right, the pilots are ready to give him or her instantaneous buy-in. They’re willing to follow this person into downtown Baghdad, in the most heavily defended area in Iraq, because when they walk into that briefing room they can see immediately that they’ve got a no-kidding, buttoned-up flight leader taking them there.
Are your briefings like that in the business world? Do your meetings start on time, when you say they will? Has the projector been set up ahead of time? Is all data loaded? Is there a spare CD? Are you using a computer? Did you check the interface to the projector? Is there a back-up plan in case the computer fails? Are there whiteboards and other visuals to help the learning experience and are they absolutely free of spelling errors? Does the totality of the room tell your team that you’re prepared and ready to go?
One of the most successful advertising agencies is located in, of all places, Oklahoma City. This is a Leaning-Forward fighter pilot-style organization. Advertising has a creative flair, so the agency’s briefing rooms, their new business rooms, are designed for theatrical impact. The walls are black; the seats are in a semicircle facing two plasma monitors that drop down from the ceiling. There are high-speed broadband connections that connect in real time to recording studios in Hollywood and film production companies in New York. The lights are recessed; the audio system is state-of-the-art digital. When the agency presents advertising, they present it with flair. But even before the presentation begins, you’d already bought in when you walked into that room.
That’s the way it is in the fighter pilot world because the briefing is everything, communication is critical, confidence in the plan is a must, and preparation is key.
Not surprisingly, preparing a great brief takes time. Let’s start at the beginning. The day of the mission, the flight leaders show up at the squadron two or three hours before the brief is to take place to put their materials up on the whiteboards or put their audiovisual together. You probably do that, too. Next, almost without exception, the flight leader sits down and actually visualizes the mission. Fighter pilots call that chair-flying. In his head, sitting in that chair, his hands placed on the throttles and the stick, he goes through the mission just as it is on the whiteboards, to see if it works. Athletes call it visualizing their moves or knowing exactly where all the players are on the field. What a great advantage this is. If you stop and chair-fly your mission, you get to visualize the mission before you set it in stone. I can’t tell you how many times I realized there was a mistake in the execution phase by just chair-flying the mission before putting the briefing on.
When the time comes for you to deliver the brief, get there early, prep the briefing room, and test the brief by chair-flying the mission. Do it yourself. Before you make an important phone call, chair-fly it. What are your scripted answers to this question or that? If it’s a conference call with four or five people, chair-fly the call and visualize which person on your team is going to do or say what. In a presentation to a client, take it no less seriously than pilots do a combat mission. Chair-fly everything. Test your plans. Find the flaws, and when your team comes in and the questions start, your answers will be so reassuring, so sound, that the buy-in only deepens as everyone sees that this mission is well thought out and entirely achievable.
THE BRIEFING
Now, let’s get into the specifics of briefing. We’ve already talked about the importance of setting the stage, that is, prepositioning everything, preparing the boards, making sure when that door opens, at the exact, precise moment, everything is prepared. You’re making a statement that you’re ready to go. Cell phones are off, eyes are forward. You’ve got everyone’s attention.
STEP ONE: SET THE TIMING
In my world, briefings start on time and end on time. If you want to set the tone of Flawless Execution, respect your team and their busy lives by starting and ending on time—every time. In my twelve years in the military I could almost bet that if our briefing was late, rushed, or sloppy, the mission execution would be the same. The way you start the mission briefing will always dictate the outcome of your execution. Sloppy brief = sloppy execution.
When your team is seated, start right off with the time hack.
“Morning, gents. Welcome to the brief. In thirty-five seconds, time will be oh-seven-hundred.”
You see, in our briefing, our flight leader makes sure that everybody is synchronized, to the exact second.
“Ten seconds.”
You may call it synchronization; we call it doing a time hack.
“Five, four, three, two, one, hack; oh-seven-hundred. Everybody good?”
Why is this so critical? In the air, we’ve got fuel limitations, weather limitations, air cover for a certain amount of time, distance issues, abort points, and exact time-over-target windows—elements built into our plans that are extremely time sensitive. We calculate our takeoff time, our airspeed, and the time between different waypoints and lay out a mission on a timeline. We expect someone to be somewhere at an exact time. If not, we have automatic contingency plans that are triggered. If we stay on our timeline and hit our window precisely, we’ll be “bombs on-target on-time,” the age-old expression in military aviation. No point bombing the factory after they’ve moved the machines.
In business, it may not come down to seconds, but timing is absolutely critical. Just like us, you have to have everybody on the same page whether you’re rolling out a new product, switching out the fall inventory, or planning a software upgrade in a department. How many times has one department gotten out of sync with another or one person on the team with the rest of the team? Maybe the research and development department was very excited about a new product and leaked some details. The sales reps hear it and they get excited and with a wink and a nod tell their customers about the next big new things—and then R&D runs into a snag. The product is not available and, poof!—all the air goes out of your cycles. Far from that drumbeat of excitement, the customers are now casting a wary eye your way; there’s a cold pail of water waiting for you behind the door.
Setting everyone’s timing is one of the most important things that we do, right off the bat, and you need to do it, too.
STEP TWO: THE MISSION OBJECTIVE
The next thing out of the flight leader’s mouth is that all-important mission objective. Think about it. Everybody is assembled in the room. The pilots have their line-up cards or notes. They’re seated, eyes forward, ready to go. After the time hack, the next few minutes are critical to setting the tone for today’s entire mission.
“Today’s mission objective is destroy the bridge, located at north thirty-twenty-fifteen, west fifteen-forty-five-ten, by thirteen-hundred Local.”
Now the flight leader has their attention. One phrase, one sentence that’s clear, measurable, achievable—that is, believable—and that supports the overall Future Picture. A bombing mission and a bridge. Today’s mission objective is to destroy the bridge located at north 31-20-15, west 15-45-10, by 1300L.
Next, lay out the secondary objectives. The pilots have got the assets in the air; they’re armed and hot. What else can we do—within the parameters of the commander’s intent—to further or accelerate the accomplishment of the overall Future Picture?
“With the destructio
n of the bridge, we’re also going to destroy the machine gun nest in the target area and help out our soldiers. Finally, we’re going to do all this with no losses to our forces.”
In business, once you and your team pack for a trip, fly cross country, check into a hotel, and prepare for your meeting, why not try to attack some secondary objectives? Why not drive past the competitor’s new plant or walk through some of those regional chains that have no outlets back east or plan a meeting with a few small accounts? For us, let’s do as much damage as we can behind enemy lines. And, more importantly, let’s make sure that we come away with zero losses or zero fallout. Primary and secondary objectives are critical.
STEP THREE: THE SCENARIO
Once you lay down your mission objective and your secondary objectives, let’s get more buy-in. Let’s brief the scenario. The scenario deepens buy-in by adding that utterly important feeling of personal empowerment. It tells us why this mission is important, why what we’re about to do matters; it gives the team a sense of the stakes involved.
“Okay, today’s scenario is this: A battlefield area interdiction is expected fifteen nautical miles north of the target with enemy troops. Enemy armored cavalry is going to be advancing through the forward line of troops, toward the position of the bridge. Contact with the enemy is expected in five hours. The bridge is key to their advance. If we can take out that bridge, our forces can bottle the enemy and will execute an end-around sweep to counter the attack.”
What’s your scenario? In 2002, AOL Time Warner was under the gun to buttress up their flagging AOL unit. They needed something dramatic, something that would keep subscribers and fight off the competitive inroads from other Internet Service Providers (ISPs). A new Future Picture was articulated, strategies were set into motion, and the programmers and developers were briefed. No doubt the hours would be long and the stress high, but they knew the scenario. MSN. While some of their problems were internal, they had one big external threat: MSN, from Microsoft. Who had more cash, more programmers, and more computer savvy than the Redmond, Washington, behemoth? Who could crush AOL? MSN was certainly the enemy, but AOL had two things going for it that MSN didn’t—a huge base of customers and a rich treasure of content. AOL gave its programmers a mission: Build the latest version of America Online software with content so unique, so useful, and so exclusive that no one need seriously consider MSN. Blow them out of the water and do it fast. Little wonder that AOL Version 8.0 was on time and released to rave reviews. The team had a clear mission objective and they knew the scenario. Giving MSN an opening was a crack no one wanted to see in the dike.
Flawless Execution Page 9