Perfect Imperfection

The Blue Angels is the United States Navy's flight demonstration squadron.

Its Widget is 'to?showcase the pride and professionalism of the United States Navy and Marine Corps by inspiring a culture of excellence and service to country through flight demonstrations and community outreach.'

The team sits through a post-flight critical debriefing which they consider is as important as the actual flight. They talk about what worked, what didn't, and 'no punches are pulled'.

'We are as wide open as can possibly be to criticisms. We want to become our own worst critics.'

The debriefing process takes twice as long as the flight took. 'Rank doesn't come into play.'?

'We have a term that we use: 'Glad to be here''. ?It's a way of reminding themselves of the privilege of flying with the Blue Angels while our fellow pilots are doing night carrier landings in the Mediterranean Sea'.

'We have two 'critiquers' on the ground that look at the manoeuvres and tell us their impressions, basically.'?

'We make these mistakes and we 'fess up to them and we do it every time we fly. It's an extremely important aspect of what we do. What we do after we've said it is 'I've made this mistake. I'll fix it. You always say you're going to fix it ?It leaves the rest of us with the feeling that you've recognised your mistake and you're going to take corrective action not to let it happen again. So it doesn't drop our confidence level in another person in the formation.'?

'You gotta be able to learn each and every time you go flying because there's never been the perfect flight demonstration yet.'

Imagine if principals opened every school assembly by scanning the impressionable young student and staff faces looking up at them, allowed a pause to represent the number of teachers x 1500 x five school days [= number of decisions affecting young lives the principal was responsible for in the previous week] (that's 750,000 decisions for a school of 100 teaching staff cleared their throat and said:

'Here are two mistakes I made last week.

Here's what I learned.

Here's what I'm doing better as a result.'

Imagine if the boss did the same.

Imagine!

What a way to perfect imperfection.

[To see the lawyer equivalent, sit in on any appellate court hearing or read its judgment.]