Don’t "get behind the plane”, business scaling advice from an ex-fighter pilot

I have had several people ask me lately when I would write more articles about how lessons I learned from my time in the military can be applied to today's business world. I started writing these articles during the lockdown period when I saw people struggling with the VACU scenario (Volatility, Ambiguity, Complexity, and Uncertainty) of the pandemic world. With the way things are going today with geopolitical, economic, and social stresses, people are looking for advice on how to cope.

?I work with entrepreneurs and corporate venture teams to optimize their operations, and sometimes I see these leaders feeling overwhelmed with too many decisions and distractions, which can lead to making mistakes, being paralyzed, or getting burned out. This feeling reminded me of my time trying to land an F-14 on the back of an aircraft carrier, especially at night! We had a saying to capture the feeling, "Don't get behind the plane." It is a sickening feeling when your brain is starting to fall behind the plane that is still hurling through the air towards the ship and the water.

When landing on a ship, there are three critical variables that pilots constantly manage: airspeed, glide slope, and line-up. If any of these three variables are out of tolerance, the plane will miss the wires, be too low/high, or be too far left or right. If a pilot ignores the other two variables for too long while fixing one, the result may be having not one problem but multiple problems that are starting to compound. As the pilot starts chasing multiple problems at once, they run the risk of "getting behind the plane."

When I look at management teams trying to scale businesses in an era of VACU, I can sense that they are facing the same dilemma that I faced years ago in the cockpit of a plane. I see leaders facing multiple "pipelines" that they need to ensure are delivered well to grow as expected.

I am sure there are more, but the 4 main ones are:

1.???? Investment/Cash flow pipeline: will I run out of money, when do I need to start to raise again, what is the trigger to act and how much do we need to hit our strategy

2.???? People Pipeline: How do I ensure a steady state of talent, how do I keep the talent that I have, how do I drive efficiency, so I am not dealing with people issues all-day

3.???? Sales Pipeline: How do I ensure a steady flow of new business and renewal business, how do I reduce my CAC, when do I expand the team vs. using technology

4.???? Delivery Pipeline: Now that we have won the business, how do we ensure that we can deliver it, how do we take advantage of new tech (like AI)

It is easy to see that management teams can get bogged down with one of these pipelines, think fundraising! When they return to the others, just like the pilot, they often find issues with the other pipelines that may start compounding. To avoid this, teams should continually scan all areas, manage by exception, and assign owners and check in often.

Maybe a few lessons learned from the cockpit will help.

1.???? Scan all areas continuously, we were taught to keep scanning the other variables as we were fixing one of them. I can remember thinking, ‘I have been looking at the line-up too long, what is happening with the airspeed and glideslope.’? For business people, this means putting useful dashboards and targets in place to see everything in one place.

2.???? Manage by exception, the trick is to switch to the most important area very quickly. To do this you need a simple what to tell when something is out of tolerance. Teams need to start to learn to manage something when it is going out of tolerance, not trying to track everything, especially when it is working.

3.???? Assign owners and check in often, dashboards are nice but it is better to have a trusted co-worker who can deliver the day-to-day AND highlight when there is a real risk. No crying wolf every time something is ‘going wrong’. Invest time in teaching the manager how to escalate when needed.

By doing so, they can combat the "getting behind the plane" feeling and keep their businesses on track.

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