Military Leadership Secrets How Fighter Pilots Build High Performance Business Teams With Sam And Mike

Military leadership secrets how fighter pilots build high performance business teams. Welcome to this episode of Biz Bites, where we are bringing in Mike and Sam from On Target, who bring military precision and psychological safety principles to the business world, sharing how they use briefing and debriefing techniques used in combat scenarios.

To create aligned, high performing teams in any organization. These two former fighter pilots are going to dazzle you. They’re going to bring you information that you can implement right now. It is a truly engrossing episode with lots of amazing stories. Get ready for biz bites for thought leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. We don’t normally have two guests on the program, but today we do. We have Mike and Sam both joining us from the one company and both with incredible backgrounds and a relatively new business that I think is gonna dazzle a few people.

So firstly, guys, welcome to the program.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Absolute pleasure. Now, what we like to do at the start of the program is allow you to introduce yourselves a little bit and tell people a little bit about what it is you do. So I’m gonna kick things off with you, Mike. Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you.

Okay, sounds good. My name’s Mike and I am the co-founder of On Target. My background is military aviation. I spent 20 years in the Royal Air Force Flying Fighters, and I’ve now spent the last five years in the Australian Air Force teaching the next. Generation of fighter pilots, how to learn their craft.

I’ve always had a real passion for the human performance side of what we do. I attended a human factors workshop back in 2003 and I really found it fascinating. There was all this science behind the way that we behaved, the way that we make decisions, the way that we interact and communicate, and how we can get more out of it.

I really found that really quite fascinating and ever since then I’ve wanted to try and pursue that angle more and more see what I can do with it. Few years ago, Sam and I ca came across each other and realized. We both shared this passion to a certain extent and decided that, you know what, we can actually probably take what we’ve learned from flying airplanes in combat scenarios, and it’s certainly some quite dynamic and exciting peacetime scenarios as well.

And take those lessons, bring these concepts to life, and help the corporate world learn some of the things that we’ve learned. So we came together, we formed on Target, and we’re now trying to do precisely that, use our experience in the military. To bring these stories and these concepts to life and help the corporate world develop and build high performance leadership, teamwork and culture in their teams.

It is certainly an incredible background, but let’s Sam introduce himself before we get into some of this, because there is a lot to explore here.

Yeah, sure. Thanks Anthony. So my background is quite similar to Mike’s really. So I spent. 15 years in the Royal Australian Air Force Operating Fast Jets as well.

The F 18 Super Hornet which you listed as May or may not be familiar with those in Brisbane, will be from River Fire. I moved through my career there instructing and then, training as Mike does, not only the the students coming through, but then teaching the more experienced pilots and s or weapons systems officers, excuse me, to become instructors themselves, which was probably one of my most rewarding jobs.

After that, I too had throughout my career discovered this passion for, the human in the system. Especially how do humans interact with each other and how does that break down essentially when things are not going quite as planned or not entirely on the rails, which they’re frequently not in our careers.

And that interest and passion led to some university study in the field. And then finally I became a air crash investigator in the military for my final two years in the military there before I left the Air Force about two years ago. I now work in un crewed aviation. Drones, and you might think that doesn’t involve humans, but it’s still inherently a big part of.

The humans are still in the system essentially. And Mike and I co-founded on Target after a mutual friend, said, you guys both have, very similar backgrounds and are annoyingly passionate about all this human and non-technical skills stuff. So you should, guys should get together. And I think my little trigger, I go, I guess where I thought, hey, maybe there’s a market for this outside of.

The military and the safety critical context that we had applied. It was doing some consulting for one of the big three banks and they wanted me to rewrite some of their procedures, like an aircraft checklist. And I was like, no, this is, doesn’t everyone know that’s how you write a procedure? And that was when I went, okay.

Maybe other industries, aren’t quite so embedded in this Creating error tolerance systems, both in terms of procedures, but also people.

I think that’s the unique background that you guys have is that level of precision is another level. Business tends to be, oh, if we can do this.

And it’s a bit like there’s precision to the, we’ll get it done today. To hang on. If we don’t take this left turn at this exact point in time, we’re gonna end up colliding with something else. There’s, you guys come from something on a completely different level. And so take me back to how that started embedding itself from the beginning.

Perhaps Sam, just to continue that, was there a point where you early on realized that level of precision. Made a huge difference in that. You were in control of that.

Yeah. It’s interesting, you’re aligning tangentially with something. I met with someone today who works in the resources industry and he was saying that.

What impresses him about the military is the ability to basically expect people to deviate from the plan and to expect that the plan that you start with at the beginning will not be the same as that at the end, essentially. And we’re given enormous flexibility, which is somewhat it’s not at odds, but it’s an interesting, maybe juxtaposition with the accuracy that you mentioned.

In answer to your question, I’m not entirely sure to be honest if there was a moment where it clicked. But if I look back now, 16, 17 years ago, and you can see what’s felt so pointless and silly when you are making hospital corners on your beds and making sure the wrap clothes in your initial training are, folded and lined up.

A perfect inch from each other in the wardrobe feels ridiculous at the time, but you look back now and see why they do that. And much as I, I’m loath to admit it, that it, it starts to instill that real culture of precision from day one. Which maybe doesn’t answer your question, but

Yeah.

No. I it does. And Mike, it’s funny I, I saw you nodding, saying it’s this, it’s, obviously something similar for you. And it was funny, I dunno what I was watching the other day, but I happened to see something that was from the military and it was just a single person that was doing something, but he was clearly.

Marching and moving to how he’s been trained to move, and he the civilian in me just goes why didn’t you just walk? You’re on your own. Yeah, what, you know clearly there was a camera, but I don’t know whether he knew there was a camera. That was capturing this particular moment, and it’s and that’s where, perhaps someone who’s not in the military and there, there’d be plenty of those people listening to this now don’t quite understand that and that, that need is obviously drilled in from day one.

There’s a concept that I’ve just had this spark off in my brain that I think is worth highlighting to do with what we call social conformance. And it’s how. If you want to, let’s call it feel good, almost subconsciously in your brain, you have to do what other people are doing. You have to fit in with the way other people are behaving.

And there’s loads of experiments out there where people are made to do quite silly things from a fly on the wall, camera point of view. But they’re, they feel good and they feel normal, and they feel accepted because it’s what everybody else is doing. And I think in the military you are, Sam’s talking about the hospital corners and the clothes being exactly the same, and you march in step with everybody else because if you are the odd one out, it feels weird.

And if you are in a group of people that you are training with, that you’re living with, that you’re working with, and you’re all behaving in the same way, it feels normal. It feels good. You can then. Do other things, which perhaps a bit different and you can dedicate more brainpower to that. And I think that’s more, that kind of social conformance is quite common in the military and you don’t even realize it’s happening.

That’s the interesting thing about it. It’s completely subconscious, taken for granted, and it’s only when something becomes abnormal. You and you are forced to not conform ’cause it’s alien. ’cause it’s different. ’cause it’s unusual that you just think, oh this is weird. I dunno this, it doesn’t feel good, therefore I’m gonna go back to what I normally do.

’cause that feels normal. And the civilian world, by almost, by nature is, people are different and they come together in a particular situation. Civilian teams, I think are generally more cognitively diverse, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but it does mean that you have these issues getting the team together at a basic level because they’re just not used to conforming and working together because they have different norms.

Yeah, it’s, it is interesting in a work environment that most people will feel there’s a degree of, rope that people can have to do their own thing. And often, some, often a business will be doing thing one way they’ll, someone will leave, someone new will come in and they’ll do it in a different way just because, and so there’s that almost lack of conformity and that need to push the boundaries a lot as, as well, which I think is also an interesting extension of that. So how do I know it’s early days for the business, but how have you found that when you’ve been talking to businesses about that difference in that, standard for what is an acceptable conformity and what is allowable to push the boundaries?

That’s I’ll jump in, Mike. Sorry. Interestingly, one of the key areas that has got the most traction, I would say, with what we’re offering and to the point where we’ve pivoted our product a little bit towards that. And what it’s, what we call briefing. And so in the aviation world or in our backgrounds, we would go and do, if we were going up and doing a transit, like taking off from point A to get the jets to point B, something quite benign and straightforward.

We briefed for about an hour. To get everyone on the same page, to have a shared mental model about expectations and who’s gonna do what when, et cetera. And the more we started talking about that in some of our marketing material, the more it was resonating. And we’re now spending a lot of time with clients saying here are the structures that we use to, to achieve that.

Unity, or that shared mental model and how can you bring that into your workplace, both at the micro and the macro level.

And I think, the question there becomes as well, going back to what you were saying before about building this sort of conformity base to start from, because there’s an expectation when you’re in those briefings to how they’ll actually operate and the kinds of communication that you’ll have in it, and who’s got the opportunity to speak.

When and about what, which is not what would happen in most business meetings, I would dare say, except for, possibly if it’s a, CEO or someone who’s head of a department might lead a discussion, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will automatically conform to a base and that everyone will take a, an order to things.

And let me ask you, Mike, is that a shock when you go in and see that compared to your background?

I don’t think it’s a shock in my background, but that’s arguably, ’cause my background has been quite diverse over the years and you do see some really extreme examples.

Either way, most Western military cultures are. Quite open and we try and what we call level the authority gradient. So yes, you might have a formation of let’s say, four airplanes and you might have the squadron commander who’s flying one airplane and then the brand new junior pilot flying, another airplane.

But the whole idea of the culture that we try and establish is that you. Reduce that authority gradient such that in a brief or a debrief, everybody is empowered to speak and say their piece and be heard. And that’s generally quite successful. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite successful. However I’ve witnessed cultures generally from Southeast Asia where the authority gradient is much more naturally ingrained in their psyche.

And that’s just the way it is. And you can’t just undo that. That’s just a fact of life. But you’ll witness a group of say, 10. People from a certain culture and there’ll be the senior person in the room and everybody else will be doing the talking, but as soon as the senior person speaks, everybody else just shuts up and is completely subservient to what that person says, which, for what Sam and I are trying to teach and encourage and help the corporate teams to embrace, to, to grow and succeed.

I would argue that culture is not ideal, but it certainly does happen in. In life. And you’ve mentioned that CEOs may well speak and other people have to conform. I think that environment is more prevalent in the business world than we would like. It’s certainly something Sam and I are trying to encourage discussion on and trying to change.

And one of the phrases that I’ll, that I often use is, none of us are as smart as all of us. It doesn’t matter who has got. Who’s in charge, who’s been around the longest. If you’ve been around the longest, it’s very likely that your biases are gonna massively restrict your thinking. You’ll be very straight and narrow.

’cause that’s the way you’ve always done it. And it might just be that somebody comes in, the new intern, the new pilot, the new whatever, and they’re just like, oh, how about doing it this way? That’s something I’ve seen before. Or I just had this epiphany and all of a sudden you just go on this complete different tangent and the team will succeed much more as a result.

I think Toyota is an interesting example. I read somewhere in a book that when they have, when they employ somebody new, they’re specifically told go and have a look on the shop floor and come up with something we can improve. They spec, they task, they tell somebody to actually, give us something we can actually change to improve how we’re doing in business.

Which is great. ’cause that really promotes what the concept that Sam, I teach called psychological safety, which is a big part of what we’re all about.

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When they employ somebody new, they’re specifically told go and have a look on the shop floor and come up with something we can improve. They spec, they task, they tell somebody to actually, give us something we can actually change to improve how we’re doing business, which is great because that really promotes what the concept that Sam and I teach called psychological safety, which is a big part of what we’re all about. But it’s it’s many. There’s lots of backgrounds out there.

Lots of the way that teams work the better or for worse, the more you can promote everybody or make everybody feel comfortable contributing, sharing their ideas, using that cognitive diversity, the more inherent success your team has, the potential of achieving.

And it’s funny you say that because I’m reflecting on a conversation that I had with A CEO when I was working for them and I’m, I’m gonna say it, it’s over 25 years ago now, at least.

And I remember day one saying to me look, if you ever need to. Come into the office, shut the door and say, I need to have a conversation with you. And I can only reflect on doing it a couple of times. But I remember one time very specifically coming into going into his office and saying exactly that.

And it was to tell him something that I had witnessed that was happening out in it was a rather large company. So it was happening out in in a different area of the country to where we were. And I gave him. Some advice and he was me, fairly young at the time, giving a very experienced CEO, some advice.

And he actually took it and it made a massive difference to the company. And it was just because I was able to be the eyes and ears, but he gave me that ability to say that and to, it wasn’t something that I abused and I don’t believe anyone else. Did either it wasn’t meant to go and wasn’t meant to go into his office and whinge about, John out the back was being, a pain in the neck.

To me it was about being constructive for the company and being able to have you say, and I recall as well that same CEOA few years later, and he invited me into a high level meeting and he told me just. I just want you to be quite and observe and whatever else. And we had some conversations afterwards, but actually during the meeting they end and everyone ended up turning to me at one point and saying what do you think?

And but it was great to actually have the power to do that and to be able to have that. And I think that isn’t, full credit to him. He was one of my favorite CEOs that I worked with from that perspective. And are many CEOs that tend to have a very closed door policy, and it’s their way or the highway.

And so how do you go about Unteaching that?

Sharing stories like the story you’ve just told us is how I would start by trying to get other people to realize the power of that. And I’ve just used the word power picking up on it from what you said, Anthony, you felt empowered to. Contribute your ideas to want to follow your CEO to help with the success of the company because of you being empowered to offer your suggestions for improvement.

And they were listened to. Like those are all key ingredients, fantastic examples of behavior from the leadership to other people to do the same thing. So that’s precisely how I would start Storytelling is an incredibly powerful way of making people. Realize what this is all about. And that’s exactly what a lot of what Sam and I are all about.

We will use stories from combat to try and show why these things are important and why they matter, and how you can actually not necessarily apply them real life, but how they can be implied into real life in, life or death scenarios to, to improve team performance for the better. Storytelling is for me how I would start it.

Most definitely.

I love the power of story. And so Sam, I’m gonna, I’m going to invite you then. Tell me what, is there a favorite story that you’ve found that, that has actually had an impact that you’ve been telling a little bit in recent times since you’ve started this?

Yeah. As in using it in the sessions that, that’s resonating in the sessions.

Yeah.

So we have two stories that we use quite frequently that dovetail off each other, and Mike talks about the importance of trust, and I’ll let him tell his own story. But that then dovetails into something I talk about. And that’s again, talking about how do you align a team? And it introduces, once you’ve got trust there, then you need to assume that everyone can trust each other.

And that comes through, basic qualifications, their experience, resume, job title, whatever. That gives you an element of trust. So then I tell a story about being in the aircraft in the middle of the night over Iraq during the fight against isis. So I was deployed with one week’s notice to as the first lot of combat aircraft to go over to Iraq in the fight against ISIS in 2014.

So it was a lot of unknowns relatively hairy compared to, flying and training back in Australia and. Yeah so middle of the night, and we were there to support some troops in contact. So a ground fight on the ground between some Iraqi soldiers and ISIS fighters. There’s pitch black, there’s explosions going off everywhere.

You can see the trace of fire and it’s bizarrely quiet in the cockpit, which feels like an amazing kind of juxtaposition to the chaos that you’re watching on the ground. We were the only ones available, our formation of two aircraft to support the troops at that point. And we were running outta fuel, so we were imminently going to have to leave.

And typically you would have to fly to a specific area to go and refuel with one of the area airborne refuel tankers, the aircraft. In this case, the pilot of the aircraft arranged for the the tanker to come overhead, US overhead, the battle, and we then basically climbed up. To meet them and get fuel.

And what this allowed the beauty of our aircraft being a two seat aircraft was that we, what we called split the cockpits. So I turned the radio down that he was using to talk to the aerial refuelers and he turned the radio down that I was using to talk to the troops on the ground. And so inherently straight away we’re not on the same page.

We’ve got two very important jobs that have the same objective, but two very important jobs to play in that same. That same mission as it were. So while he’s doing the fairly physically and cognitively demanding task of refueling in the middle of the night on night vision goggles, and I’ve got some images in our presentations that show just how limited the cues are for that.

I’m in the backseat of the jet using our infrared pod and talking to the troops on the ground to identify where the bad guys are essentially, and coordinate employing weapons to, to support the good guys at the time that the pilot determines that we’ve got enough fuel to do it, we need to do here comes off and we turn each other, we turn the radios up and listen and make sure that each other are not talking, so that we’re not going to step on each other.

And then we have what we call the huddle. So he would say, Hey, Sam. Or in that case, he would’ve called me. Whip it. Are you are you ready to chat? Ready for a huddle? I might say, standby, working on something. Yes, I’m good to go. In this particular case it worked out quite nice and efficiently.

I said, yes, turn left, heading 2 7 0 accelerate mark 0.85 yada, yada. And gave him basically a briefing on what was coming to set the aircraft up to employee weapons. So we had our huddle. We spoke about the primary things we needed to do. So I told him about here’s where we need to go and what we’re about to do to drop weapons, to help the good guys.

And he then told me, great, this is how much fuel we just took on board. We’ve got this long, much endurance based on that fuel, and the tanker is hanging nearby for us if we need. So we’ve come back onto the same page. And then in the story, the next thing we talk about is we trust that each other has done their job sufficiently and to the best of their ability.

And then if we determine that we have time and capacity, essentially we’ll then verify and crosscheck each other. So we align and then we trust each other, but then we verify. For example, he would go and look at the check that the coordinates that are in the bomb match the coordinates on the pod.

On the infrared camera, sorry. And I would check that, how much fuel he took in, matches these calculations on how long we could stay airborn for, and so on and so forth. And so the reason we use stories like that in our training and in our sessions is because in, in the business world, I think it’s fair to say that, for example, over a project lifecycle, the time and feedback between action and reaction can be quite intangible and quite hard to see. But in our context, it’s matters of minutes and seconds between your action and your reaction. And so it becomes much more tangible. And so our general model is to start with a bit of theory, which is, a good place to baseline, but we’ll very quickly contextualize it through stories like that.

A, because it’s. Interest, and it keeps people engaged, but it actually does really contextualize the theory. And we then move into the next stage of the training which we can cover off on shortly, on how we get the get the trainees to actually experience it for themselves because these skills that we’re talking about that we focus on, we call them non-technical skills, otherwise known as soft skills synonymous with each other.

Communication, leadership, decision making, and so on.

Just like driving a car and no one learns to drive a car by a PowerPoint presentation. You have to get in and do it yourself to really experience it. We can talk about cognitive dissonance and taking yourself from unconsciously incompetent.

I was gonna say, I hope they didn’t do that with the with the fighter.

With the fighter planes. They didn’t just show you in the first and say you go and learn from, hope you That’s right. Yes.

You’ll be pleased to hear that they didn’t no. Good. But anyway, sorry I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but that’s one of the stories and how we use them.

Yeah,

no, I appreciate that. And just to pick that up, what’s the, where do you take that Mike, in terms of, piggybacking in the story?

It depends on what happens with the teams. So I’ll start off with a story about trust. So I tend to, Sam’s story tends to piggyback off mine.

And I talk about going back to a story in Afghanistan where I was launched, excuse me. I was launched in what we call alert to support troops on the ground. And normally when you’re talking to somebody on the radio, like Sam was talking about, they are qualified and experienced and trained to talk to air crew because it’s a relatively specialized skill to essentially speak the same language, understand the capabilities, and just organize the airspace and the weapons and so on.

It’s quite an intensive course and there aren’t that many people proportionally that do it, and occasionally you might get tasked to talk to some friendlies on the ground that are again shot at, and the person on the radio. Is not trained to talk to airplanes. He could be, or he or she could just be a soldier with a rifle.

They’re probably pretty scared and you are there to help them and save their lives. And that happened to me once in Afghanistan or happened to me several times. But the story in question in Afghanistan was precisely that. You are sent to a an area of airspace. You are given a frequency, you are given a call sign and you talk to this person and they need your help and you have to trust them.

To give you the basic information you need, right? Where are you? And you establish that so you don’t attack that position. Brilliant. Where are the enemy in relation to you or have you got accurate coordinates? They’re then gonna trust you as the experts in air power to deliver weapons or weapon effects onto that target, such that the friendlies can either successfully prosecute and attack or disengage safely and fight.

The chances are I’m never gonna meet that person in real life. I’m gonna talk to ’em on the radio in a really intense life or death scenario. We will do our jobs, we will trust each other to do our jobs and achieve the mission aim, and then we’ll go our separate ways and hopefully live happily ever after.

But that’s how we. We piggyback the stories. I tend to start on the foundation of trust, which is quite important. And then Sam takes it into a more applied, close knit scenario. And then how you build on that trust and use it to actually engage in, in the huddle that Sam talked about.

And trust is something in this day and age that we probably, quite frankly, give away too easily. That’s the interesting thing. We, cybersecurity people will tell you we do that all the time, right? We give away information without ever, considering where it’s going and what it’s being done.

But even in, in real life situations, we often we will hire someone, we will bring someone into, to do something in her personal life and the what they need to earn that trust. Can often be reasonably limited. And but when you’re in a bus and I think we carry that attitude into business, but in business it is it’s not quite life and death in the same scenario that you guys have painted, but it’s certainly in terms of the lifeblood of the business can be.

And I don’t think people understand that because that difference between the trust that we give away very easily. Oh, John said you’re a good bloke, so you know. It’s fine with me. It’s a bit like I, I always take references from people as with a grain of salt as much as I do testimonials, because particularly with a reference, are you really going to offer someone to be a referee for you if they’re going to say bad things about you?

Yeah. Not probably not, right?

No.

And yet you take that as being a level of trust. So how do you take that from that? That basic giveaway of trust to really properly needing that trust because the scenarios that you’ve painted are, absolutely life and death.

I think that comes back to me to it’s like layers of trust and it’s probably iterative where, I mentioned before a baseline of trust and we have a baseline of trust based on, let’s say in the business world.

Oh, this is our new hire. He’s got an MBA, so I’m gonna trust him to go and deal with the p and l or something. But then he’s new, so I don’t know him. So I’m gonna verify his work and I’m gonna check that it aligns with us and therefore my threshold of trust has now increased. If it is in line with my expectations, I would say.

And I think that can then iterate as you give someone a new, you trust ’em with a new element, you then verify and your trust is increased. Does that answer your question?

It does. It’s a difficult thing. And I suppose this gets into the area that you raised earlier. Psychological safety. It’s a term that I’ve heard a little bit in recent times, so it’s a fairly I would argue a fairly newish term in the business sense, but what does that, I’m interested in what that means to you in terms of. From a military point of view to what that actually means in a business point of view and how you actually draw those two things together.

The beauty of psychological safety is that it’s actually quite domain transparent.

So the concepts and how you develop it, how you build it, how you maintain it, are actually almost, they’re not particularly. The specifics of how you might do it maybe can be applicable to a certain context, but the general behavior and the communication techniques to establish it, I would actually, you can apply to anybody which makes it quite useful because we can try and we’ll talk about what it means to us, but it means the same thing in business and the way that you build it as a leader.

Whether you’re in the military or you’re in the business world, is exactly the same thing. The simple definition for me that I try and use to explain what psychological safety is in a psychologically safe environment, everybody feels comfortable putting their hand up and saying, I’ve got a question, I don’t know or I don’t understand.

If you. Don’t have psychological safety. People won’t feel okay putting their hand up and asking questions. They won’t say they don’t understand it, even if they don’t, and they certainly won’t ask somebody to explain something again, et cetera, et cetera. How you build it. So there’s kind of four basic levels.

The first level is what you call what rather what we call inclusion safety, which is where people feel included and they’re part of the team. And that’s simple steps like when you get a new member on the team. You ask them what their name is, you ask them about their family, and you actively listen to the answers you get back.

So if you find out where they’re living and you say, oh, what made you choose to live there? Where do your kids go to school? What do they like about that school? What sports do they do, et cetera, et cetera. And you keep the conversation going by showing that you are interested Then. You move beyond inclusion, safety to what we call learner safety, where you’re in an environment where people know that it’s okay to learn by making mistakes and knowing that those mistakes won’t be punished.

And a really simple way of developing learner safety is when you’re coming to a new project, or in fact I’ll use the military experience if I’m gonna particular sort that we’re gonna talks.

The same kind of style. And that way people that are now doing it for the first time will know that it’s okay to make mistakes and talk about them, because Mike, who’s the leader of this formation, talked about mistakes that he’s made. And you can say exactly the same thing in the business world. You’re gonna go and do a project, and the people who have done something similar in the past will say this, when I did this.

Something similar. Previously, the timeline blew out or the budget went wrong because of X, Y, Z. This is what I learned. This is what we can put in place in future. Then we talk about what we call contribute safety. And the example you gave earlier, Anthony, of where your CEO asked you for your input. He wants you to contribute for the better or the greater good of the organization.

And you said yourself, you felt empowered by that happening. To, yourself and for the benefit of the company. That’s a great example of contributor safety and the final example, the fourth stage, what we call challenger safety. And that’s where people feel fine putting their hand up and saying, I don’t agree with what you’re doing.

I think it’s gonna go wrong. Of this it’s like the sort of emergency level of things going wrong, but it takes the levels below it. Inclusion learner contributor to enable challenger. You can’t do the top layers without the bottom ones being present and the behaviors that you use. And I’ve just given some simple examples there.

You can do that. Which in whichever organization you’re in, whether it’s a military formation of fighters or whether it’s a boardroom or any kind of business organization, you can frame questions, you can have conversations in the same kind of way to build those levels of psychological safety and the team performance will accelerate beyond belief.

I think it’s a tough one. I was gonna say, I was just gonna ask you to please add to it because it, this is a tough space because we live in a world where everybody thinks they can do everything themselves anyway so having that level of respect and trust is almost fighting with that mentality these days of, Hey, I can learn how to do it.

I just watch a YouTube video.

Yeah. Yeah. And you’re right that psychologic safety is a relatively new term. It’s also a hugely misunderstood term and I think is sometimes misunderstood with and thrown in the same bucket of terms of, in terms of like diversity and whatnot, which are their own, incredibly important concepts, but it’s importantly distinct from that as well.

And it’s not about ensuring that everyone in the room speaks up and is heard, and we have to implement a bit from everyone’s idea sort of thing. But as Mike said, it’s ensuring that everyone in the room can spot an error and talk about it. For example, and if you think about, let’s not talk about fighter aviation, but you sitting as a passenger, Anthony, on a virgin flight to Melbourne or something.

You would like to think presumably, that if the very junior copilot who just got the job with Virgin is sitting next to the 30 year veteran and spots him make a mistake, that he has no hesitation of saying, Hey, you missed that check. And then that he doesn’t get slapped on the wrist for it or belittled in any way.

And that’s foundational to psych safety. Now obviously that has very tangible safety outcomes. Like you said, business is often not life and death, but it’s livelihoods is how we phrase it. And same, you want that room where the CEO doesn’t, again, doesn’t need to get input from every single person in the company ’cause it’s wildly inefficient, amongst other reasons.

But you want them sitting in that room where they’re about to go and brief, pitch the client or whatever the context is where someone goes, oh shit, boss. I realized I made an error in that number is actually wrong. Because if they feel comfortable to speak up there and then it’s better for everyone.

You, you stop the errors before they get further down the line and become bigger essentially. Now not only is it good, we’re talking a lot about capturing errors and things that go wrong, but psych safety is, it’s foundational for high performance and high performing teams because it’s the bread and butter of diversity, you can have the most.

Divergent or rather neuro diverse, culturally diverse team with this amazing kind of mixing pot of ideas. And if the leader in that room is not creating a space for anyone to raise their hand and offer conjecture opinions or highlight errors, then you’ve wasted all your resources, essentially.

Yeah. And that’s that, that must be a.

A difficult it’s an easy concept to deliver over as you are doing, but how do you actually get people to realize that and to make real change? Because it’s one thing sitting there and going, and I imagine there are people that you get in front of and they’re going, yeah, crap, that’s us. And they may not say it to you, but they’re probably thinking of and the question is how do you actually implement change at that kind of level?

It’s I’ll jump in quickly Mike and then throw to you, but Sure. There’s two. The people who go, oh, that’s me. They’re the easy ones. ’cause they’ve identified what needs to change. And again, this is a topic where we’ve found heaps of resonance in our training and people go, can we just pull that thread and go down that rabbit warren for a few minutes?

Which we didn’t necessarily expect, but I think the real challenges are the ones who go, no, it’s not us. I’m good. And I think if you’re familiar with the concepts of Johari’s window and the unknown unknowns, or it ties into that rather, but unconscious incompetence, I would say are those people who go, no, I don’t have any way to improve.

I’m psychologically safe. My team always nod and say, yes, I must be nailing it. The only way to get from there to the next rung up of conscious incompetence, IE knowing just how incompetent you are at this specific skill. Is through experience. Experience. You can tell someone all day that they need to improve, but they’ll have all manner of excuses and justifications for why they don’t until they experience it.

And experience is something that I’ll come back to. But the analogy that I’ve heard that’s effective on this is you think of telling your, 15-year-old kid that. They’re gonna go and drive the car and they’ll be like, yeah, I can do that. My old man does that and he’s an idiot or whatever.

As most 15-year-old kids think about their parents. But then if you give them the keys and put them in the seat and they’re, okay, take me to the shopping mall. Then all of a sudden through experience, they appreciate now, okay, gee, this really a lot involved in this. And that they’re not gonna get by telling them.

And I was gonna come back to something, but I’ve lost my train of thought.

No I’m just sitting there thinking, I don’t wanna be I’ve been on the road with some of those teenagers and yes, the freeways are lited with them who think that’s the problem, isn’t it?

That they often think they know everything. The teenage years are littered with that. They think they know everything in the twenties. They’re con, they’re sure they know everything. And by the time they get to 30, they realize they know nothing.

That’s right. Yeah. And sorry, that’s what I was gonna come back to was just to, plug out training model.

Again, we’ve spoken about the theory and then context through the stories. And the final piece is the experience, and that’s where we use something called interpersonal skills lab to actually put people into this very, funnily enough, a psychologically safe or a simulation that I’ll let Mike talk more about to experience it for themselves because then they actually.

Have these light bulb moments and we’ve seen numerous examples where even the director of a company in a recent one with his kind of senior leadership team went,

oh gee,

I do that a lot in the day to day business, don’t I? And the team were like, yeah, boss, you do. And he went, yeah, it was a real aha moment for him.

But I’ve been talking enough.

Mike, please pick up. Yeah,

I’ll take over. I’ll let’s pick up on the experience thing. So we, a real key difference for us that we try and get across to our, or, potential clients, I guess more than than the people who have actually experienced it. Is that we give you experience.

We don’t just do death by PowerPoint. We don’t just do the stories. Yes, the stories are a start, but if we want you to learn, we’ve talked about you don’t learn to drive a car by watching a PowerPoint presentation. You certainly don’t learn to fly an airplane by watching a PowerPoint presentation. You don’t learn how to communicate.

You don’t learn how to generate psychologically safe environments. By watching a PowerPoint presentation. You can try, but you will inherently fail because you just don’t get to practice those skills. So what we do is use, as Sam’s mentioned, the inter lab or the interpersonal skills lab is its kind of full title, which is a software simulation program.

It’s quite simple to use technically in terms of mouse clicks. And the idea is that you are in a, you’re in a spaceship, but it’s a very simple to, to fly spaceship, you just have to click buttons and move things around. But the idea is that the vast majority of our clients have never flown a spaceship before.

So they’re all on a level playing field. If we were to use any kind of environment that was contextually relevant to the teams we were working with, any kind of authority gradient would naturally come out straight away. And the people who had experience would take the leadership roles. They would do all the talking.

The newbies would take all the novice roles and be subordinate and not say anything, and it wouldn’t fix any problems. So by having a level playing field. In a spaceship, nobody knows what it’s all about. Everybody is just starting from ground zero. They watch a video to see how it works, and then they get to have a go at a mission where they have to communicate, they have to prioritize, they have to make decisions based on limited information under quite some, quite pressure scenarios to actually achieve the outcomes and the results that we’ve given them.

Now, invariably, they don’t do very well the first time, which is the point because it allows us to draw out lessons. Based on their actual experience, and they will give us the lessons themselves. We just, draw the discussions along. Then they get to have another go. They will debrief that first mission, or we will, we’ll run them through a debrief.

Then they get to brief a mission, which again, we help guide them through as well. And they go and do something similar a second time and they take those lessons forward and they use it, their actual experience to have another go and they improve and they get. Better at communicating. They get better at teamwork.

They develop more psychologically safe environments amongst the team and their overall performance accelerates and their levels of success in the actual Intel lab will increase and develop and improve. And the idea is that because it’s all these generic non-technical skills, communication, leadership, teamwork, situation awareness, decision making, et cetera, et cetera, those skills are.

Generic to any environment. So they can take specific lessons from Inter Lab and they can put them into their own business environment and use lessons from what we’ve taught them, but in their own context to enable their own success in business. So it’s the actual experience that we give them where they can take something the way that actually sticks, that they can use to improve.

And it’s really quite, it’s the evidence is there. It works, it’s successful, it’s, and it’s good fun at the same time.

I love what you’ve both given me there in the end, and it a, I’m looking at the time and I’m wishing we could talk for hours still, because there’s so much to explore here.

Not the least of which is your incredibly fascinating backgrounds, which I would dare say are very different to the majority of people that are listening in here at the moment. What I normally do to wrap things up is ask people about ask the guests about their aha moments that clients.

Tend to have when they’re working with you, and you’ve both kind of alluded to those in the last little bit. So I perhaps wanted to extend that a little bit further and ask each of you to give me the the one tip that tends to make a difference that that you know for. Different people that you’ve seen them come in, I guess it is their a heart moment, but what is the one thing that each of you see that sort of clicks with people and starts to sh make a shift in a mind, in their mindset?

Sam, can I kick off with you?

Yeah, sure. I’ll jump in front of that bus first. So I think for me. I alluded to, yeah, the aha moment before. But the thing that seems to, resonate most widely is this concept of debriefing. And people often think that they, and there’s varying degrees to this, a spectrum, but they debrief or do after action reports or, wash ups after an event, whatever you want to call it, at a point where your team comes together and talks about.

What can we learn? How can we improve and develop this learning culture is so often done with the best intentions, but poor execution, is what I’d say. And a big part of what we focus on is how to bring structure, but a debrief, sorry, how to bring structure to your debrief to get the most out of it, but it’s also the perfect kind of.

Pinnacle of the end of the training session because an effective debrief relies on the foundations of everything we’ve taught up to that point and everything we’ve spoken about today. You need trust, you need psychological safety, and so on and so forth. Effective communication to get in a room and have people honestly talk about.

Boss, you stuffed up X, Y, ZI did this, or, next time I think we can improve X by doing Y. And we talk about a lot of the techniques to do that. And that, I think is one of the biggest tangible takeaways that we leave people with and what we get a lot of really positive feedback about.

Fantastic. I love that. And I think, again, we could talk for ages about that whole debriefing process, which I and the briefing process. On both ends of it that I think are so critical that are often overlooked. But we might have to save that for another time. So let me ask you, Mike, you’ve had a bit of, you’ve had a couple of minutes to think.

So what’s the other moment or tip that you might give people listening into today?

I’ll give a, perhaps a specific one. Sam’s highlighted really quite nicely how important structure is in debriefing, especially, which you don’t see very often. Briefing planning people are, they’ve got an idea about debriefing, not so much, and that’s certainly where most of the learning comes in.

So I think structure and consistently applies, structure is absolutely critical. We ran a session in Melbourne using Inter Lab about three weeks ago now, and one of the participants there, the thing that he really. Kept on picking up himself, which is the whole point. It’s not, we’re not there to tell them what the lessons are.

They get the lessons themselves. This chap Steph was really almost blown away by how important it was to what we call close the communication loop. So inherently as humans, what we’ll do is we’ll transmit an instruction to somebody and we’ll assume that instruction’s being heard and it’s gonna get acted on in the way that we intended.

Often that’s not the case, and especially when you are doing something like Inter Lab, which is novel, dynamic, different, you don’t understand everything about it, you have to. Close the communication loop so that the person you are dealing with has under, has confirmed that they’ve understood the message that you’re trying to get across.

And quite consistently, the software will have traps and pitfalls that if you don’t close the communication loop, you will fall into those traps. And Steph fell into them several times, which is fine ’cause it’s designed to bring these lessons out so that you can learn from them. And he really took away.

The importance of when you’re in an environment that’s different, that’s novel, that’s unusual, where you definitely haven’t all got the right idea what’s going on. You need to close the communication loop, otherwise, things can start to go wrong pretty quickly.

So many valuable lessons. Much more that we could talk about.

But I wanna thank you both for being a part of the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders Program. And I definitely want to have you guys back in the future because there’s so many amazing stories to tell and so much more for people to learn. But for now, thank you both for being a part of it.

Thanks.

Thanks, Natalie. Yeah, our pleasure. Cheers.

And of course we’ll include all the details of how to get in touch with Mike and Sam in the show notes. So don’t miss that. And to everyone listening in don’t forget to subscribe and we look forward to your company on the next edition of Biz Bites for thought leaders.

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