Knowing the scenario makes for a team determined to achieve their objectives. They know what the stakes are, and the buy-in yet again deepens.
STEP FOUR: WEATHER AND ENVIRONMENT
Let’s now look at the weather and the environment. You might be asking yourself, as a businessperson, “Weather and environment, Murph? How does that play into my briefing? How does that play into the way I’m going to go and carry out my mission?” Stay with me.
For fighter pilots, a constant problem is the weather. It changes daily. It affects them. It affects their ability to execute. There are things pilots simply cannot do if the weather is wrong. As an absurd example, pilots obviously can’t fly in a tornado, nor could they last in a bad hailstorm.
Yes, weather is literally a very significant factor in the fighter pilot business, so they brief it: “Local weather, right now, ten thousand scattered, twenty-five thousand scattered; should not be a problem for in and out of the base. For the weather around the target area, right now, it’s clear with ten nautical miles visibility. Sun angle at the time-on-target will be about seventy-five degrees up, so the shadowing effect on the terrain and the target itself should be minimal.”
What’s the external factor that you can’t do much about, but remains critical to your mission, indeed your survival? Well, for some businesses it may literally be the weather. Only a foolish farmer would plant seeds knowing that a devastating downpour was forecast, and a lawn service wouldn’t schedule to cut lawns on a rainy day. If you own a restaurant, are you briefing the weather that day or just keeping your head in the ground and setting up the outdoor patio anyway? Are you getting it?
But don’t take me too literally. It’s not just about the weather. It’s about those constant, recurring factors that you have to think about every day and adjust accordingly. Are you going to quote an interest rate on a loan without looking at the prime rate?
Mortgage brokers look at mortgage rates every day.
Television stations and television networks look at their overnight ratings and juggle their schedules to improve their viewership.
Mail-order companies and TV direct-response advertisers look at their response rates daily and adjust their mailing lists or their offers or their timing.
Stockbrokers check the Dow Jones Industrial Average before every phone call and adjust their pitch.
Even newspaper publishers look at the next day’s headlines hungry for the big one that will drive newsstand sales. Depending on what they see, they’ll either increase or decrease the press run.
Are you starting to see the parallel? Mortgage rates are to a mortgage banker what the daily weather is to a fighter pilot. Same for stock indexes to a broker or ratings to a TV network.
That’s the business version of weather—daily, recurring external factors that you need to know about before you execute your mission. It may be storming outside; it may be a stormy day on the Dow—but you better know and you need to include that in your brief.
Which brings us to environment. What is the environment? Forget the word as you know it. Environments are those large, usually unique, external factors that might affect our mission. For pilots, these are things like the geography and the terrain in and around the target area.
Here’s what environment sounds like in the brief:
“There is a very large cliff to the west of the bridge itself, but as far as the shadowing effect it should not have much of an effect on the target. Around the target area itself, the ground is good for terrain masking, and with the clear weather we can get down low and hide in the weeds if need be.”
Your environment might be social, political, or even attitudinal.
Do you need to consider the economic outlook in a specific region of the country?
Before you invest in a new technology, is that technology at risk due to a pending regulatory change?
Has the consumer sentiment changed and made your product environmentally unattractive to certain buyers—perhaps certain buyers in certain parts of the country?
Are you complying with the newest product labeling laws, or the current disclosure laws, or the recycling laws, both locally and nationally?
I guarantee you that the signage laws in Vail or Aspen, Colorado, are much different from the signage laws in New York City or Las Vegas, Nevada. You have to adjust your store design, for instance; they don’t allow neon signs in Aspen.
That’s environment.
CHAPTER 10
Briefing: Steps Five through Seven
To err is human, to err without briefing the plan
is suicide.
After briefing the environment, the flight leader wants the pilots to physically, visually, and mentally fly against the threat even as they sit in the briefing room. He wants them to feel tension. He wants them to start sharpening their senses. He wants their mental and situational awareness radars sweeping a little faster.
STEP FIVE: THREATS AND INTELLIGENCE
The next part of the squadron’s briefing covers threats to its success. In the planning phase the officers looked at all the threats standing in their way; now the flight leader must communicate to the team the significant stumbling blocks to the mission and the resources that will be applied to overcome them. Today’s threats are SAM sites and enemy air-to-air assets like the Mig-29. When flight leaders brief threats, they don’t just list them and tick them off like a shopping list; they dramatize them. The flight leader will show a picture of the threat, describe its performance envelop, and tell his pilots exactly how high and far their guns can shoot, what kind of warning they will have inside their cockpits when that particular threat locks on to them, and what kind of evasive maneuvers or counter tactics they can take against that threat. He’s honest. He tells them these threats can kill them in the blink of an eye.
That’s how the Air Force briefs a threat. Flight leaders tell the pilots what it is, what characteristics it has, and how they can avoid or defeat it.
The same thing goes in business. Look at today’s threats. You have disruptive technologies like Wi-Fi, which make expensive technologies like DSL moot. How are you going to react if it gains traction? Better features, discounting—or just buy the companies deploying it?
You have financial threats. What if a key supplier goes under or your leasing company doesn’t like the interest-rate landscape and closes the spigot?
You have competitive threats like a low-price electric toothbrush called SpinBrush. What are you going to do to cope? Shift the game, match the price, or cede the category and redeploy your assets in more lucrative markets?
I assure you, when squadrons brief the threats and lay out their contingencies, a fast withdrawal is always one of their survival plans. No reason to be embarrassed. Dying is a lousy price to pay for misplaced pride.
Look at your threats. You have social, political, environmental, and regulatory threats; probably dozens more I couldn’t even begin to imagine. They are there; you know them better than I. They affect you every day. They are a part of your industry and your environment, and now is the time to identify them and explain your counter tactics.
STEP SIX: MOTHERHOOD
The next portion of the briefing lays down the foundation for the entire mission. We call this “motherhood” or the “admin” or the “administrative standards.” You know motherhood. What did your mother used to say to you before you went off to school? “Did you remember your lunchbox?” “Make sure you say ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ ‘No, Ma’am.’” “Don’t forget your homework.”
Motherhood involves those things in a fighter squadron that are done on every single mission. They are standards. They are largely unchanging. Pilots will always taxi together as a formation, utilizing two ship lengths’ spacing between their jets. They will fly to and from their training airspace at 350 knots. In the briefing, standards can be altered if the environment or a new flight leader decides to do it differently. This is why time is spent on this area. If the flight leader does not
want to alter or change our standards, he or she will simply state that starts, taxis, and takeoffs today will all be performed “standard” or that “standard motherhood is in effect today for the entire mission.”
You have standards. You have operating procedures for inputting new customers into your systems. You have standards in your credit department, standards for billing, standards for shipping, and so on. These are your standard operating procedures (SOPs), and they apply on every mission unless you brief otherwise.
Customer support has motherhood.
Sales has motherhood. (Most companies require a salesperson to have a standard battle kit—a sales kit, a defined set of sales literature, order forms, brochures, and so on—always packed in his or her briefcase.)
These standards are motherhood, and we tell our people that they apply to the current mission. “As we launch this product, motherhood applies across the board,” would be a good statement. It means that standard credit policies are in effect, that the standard minimum ordering quantities are in effect, that the standard commissions are in effect, and so on.
If they are not, now is the time to say so. If commissions have a special override, here’s where you tell the sales force. If the ordering minimums have been lowered or increased, say it here. If not, motherhood is in effect.
This part of the briefing should be very short and concise and right on target because you expect your fighter pilots to know them; they’re standardized procedures.
STEP SEVEN: TACTICS AND TIMELINE
After motherhood we get into the meat of the mission. Let’s think about what we’ve covered so far. We’ve laid down our timing. We know what our primary mission objective is and also our secondary objectives. We know about weather and the environment. We know about the motherhood or the administrative standards. We also know about threats. And now it’s time to go out and turn and burn. This is where you, as a flight leader, will shine. This is where science, art, individuality, and your studies all come together. Now it’s time for tactics.
Tactics is where flight leaders go over step five in detail, the course(s) of action, and the timeline associated with them. This is where 75 percent of the briefing time is spent. This is where the real stuff is discussed. This is not where pilots talk about how they’re going to take off or how they’re going to land or how they’re going to refuel. Now is the time to talk about exactly how they’re going to carry out the mission. They’re going to talk about when they’re going to commit, how they’re going to do it, what their formations are going to look like, and what weapons they’re going to select. They’re also going to talk about their decisions—whether they’re going to continue with the attack or fall back or go neutral or abort because the forces are just too big or the odds are just not in their favor.
What’s the objective here? To make it simple. To lay out all the possible scenarios and the scripted responses and make the briefing understandable. Flight leaders don’t want fighter pilots to have to think very hard when they’re engaged in combat. So one thing they do is to brief in detail the decision matrix. As a review from the planning chapter, let me give you an example. Pilots are en route to the target, a SAM site. At five minutes out from the target, they’ll arm up the jets and precommit. At two minutes out, the flight leader will make the “commit” call and they’ll head in.
All of this is briefed using a decision matrix. Decisions are laid out on a timeline and they brief what we’re going to do in specific increments. Five minutes out. Two minutes out. Here’s what to do if things look good. Here’s what to do if we have an abort, a change in weather, anything that may change the decision to proceed. All of this is scripted before takeoff and laid into a decision matrix, which is woven into the timeline and briefed to all the pilots.
As I said earlier, timing is everything to a fighter pilot. Little wonder that a timeline is the key on the decision matrix. Every event on the decision matrix has a time hack. The first major threat is expected sixty seconds before the target area. At thirty seconds before bomb release, we’ll be in the range of triple A and some small arms fire. At thirty seconds after impact, the SAM threats will be sanitized. At ninety seconds, the last jet should be pulling off target, and the window closes. The squadron is pushing out of the area. At each of these time hacks pilots have three, maybe four decisions to make—each with scripted, actionable responses. If it looks bad at sixty seconds, they will either abort, press on, or engage the enemy in air-to-air combat.
The point is, pilots don’t know what will happen, but they do know what they’ll do when it does. Your tactics and timing should be the same. Every business works on a timeline. Give your team their timeline, make it clear, and factor in variances within the scope of a decision matrix so they’ll have agreed-upon responses scripted before they go execute.
CHAPTER 11
Briefing: Steps Eight and Nine
STEP EIGHT: CONTINGENCIES
The planning done for contingencies is a critical part of a fighter pilot’s briefing. Briefings are always wrapped up with the contingencies. Pilots ask themselves the very, very difficult question, “What if?” What if the weather changes over the target area after they launch and get airborne? What if the air refueling tanker does not show up and they can’t take on fuel? What if the flight leader blows up in midair before they get over the target area?
Now pilots don’t want to be overwhelmed with all the contingencies. They talk about the contingencies based on that mission; current intelligence, current tactics, current weather, and environmental conditions. What if a competitor gets wind of your plans and decides to flood your market with discounts for their products? Will you delay your plans or increase your discounts—or what?
What if you have a grand opening and more people than you ever thought possible show up? Do you have a backup plan to rush inventory to the store? (I can’t tell you how often a store will run a door-buster sale only to run out of stock. You can get away with that once, but if it happens twice, you’ll lose consumer trust.)
Contingencies cover the entire mission. You identify “what-ifs,” beginning at the first hour of your mission and going all the way to the very end.
I’ll give you an example of a Leaning-Forward fighter pilot-type team that briefs contingencies as well as anyone in the nation: Monday Night Football. This is a live event that is as full of potential problems as any “mission” in the world. In the comfort of your home, the broadcast is smooth and even, but how did that come about? The Monday Night Football team briefs and debriefs as well as any fighter squadron in the world. They plan for the weather, they analyze power grids (external factors!), they even have scripts for their broadcasters that smooth over the uneven quality of the teams playing so that no matter what, football fans will be interested in watching (a serious factor toward the end of the season).
Then there are the uncountable variables during a game. Players are moving across a 100-yard-long football field with over a dozen cameras trained on them. There are literally miles of cables and wireless devices linking those cameras to a broadcast truck where the director “mixes” the myriad shots into a finished product that is then fed live to the satellite. That satellite then broadcasts the signal to hundreds of television stations and cable systems, which in turn deliver the broadcast to your home.
Despite all of the variables and potential traps, rare is the day that a key play isn’t captured on at least three cameras. Rarer still is a moment of dead air time. These broadcast crews work with military precision. They have backups for backups and scripted responses for every possible failure in the entire chain between the football field and your home television set.
And they debrief after every broadcast so they do it better next week.
You brief contingencies now so your men and women aren’t brainstorming when it’s too late—during the execution phase. In the heat of battle, time is everything; you want to be quick. You want to react to situations based on decisions that h
ave already been made—scripted responses—and that’s what the contingency phase accomplishes. Let’s make those decisions now, in the comfort of our briefing room, so two hours later, when we’re in the heat of the battle, when we’re turning and burning, we have responses to almost any contingency.
STEP NINE: WRAP UP
Now, let’s wrap up the briefing. We want to make sure that nobody has a question, that there’s no confusion. Because missions have so many interconnected parts, we like to go through the entire brief and hold questions to the end. Make sure that nobody walks out of that room with a question in their mind on how they’re going to execute the mission. That’s the accountability loop that will start our after-mission debrief. No questions? Good. Now let’s leave the room on a high note. Leaders need to motivate their troops to march on Troy. You’ve been deepening their buy-in at each step of the brief. Now give them a “God Bless America.” It’s not corny. It’s true. And they want to hear it.
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