Training for a crisis - the Red Devils

I do enjoy a good military story that has a business message.  And spotted this one from the people at K2, who I first met through work they were doing with Dame Kelly Holmes, bringing the psychology and performance lessons of her double-Gold medal winning 2004 Athens Olympics heroics to life. 

Their latest blog, about the cool way of one of the Red Devil's Freefall display parachutists handled a major malfunction has some interesting lessons. 

https://planetk2.com/blog/2015/06/are-you-as-ready-as-a-red-devil/

I particularly picked up the comments in this story about having "absolute clarity about your role and the role of others" and "when the sh*t hits the fan, trust in each other and allow your training and preparation to kick into action."  How many corporate teams do actually engage in this sort of behaviour when there's a major issue, compared to how many do the reverse and individuals work less as a team and trust less, ensuring their backsides are covered?  I'm sure we've all seen this.  My belief is this trusting behaviour comes more from training together, and training in the most difficult scenarios, rather than necessarily having the "right" people or the "right" procedures.  Sometimes work is a good proxy for training, but it can often not delve far enough into searching issues until the real crisis occurs.

After leaving the military I was genuinely surprised how relatively little time corporates spent on training of any sort.  In the military (and perhaps more so in a front line unit like The Parachute Regiment) you get very used to dealing with uncertainty, and while awaiting those uncertain events, you spent most of the time training: training in drills and training to make sure those things that are in your control are absolutely flawlessly executed with minimal fuss in all circumstances.  Thus leaving lots of thinking time for the crises when they do arise. 

Like pretty much all ex-Paras, I do have my own near-accident story to tell.  In 1994 I was jumping into Holland for the 50th Anniversary of the Arnhem campaign and my chute wrapped round the chute of the person jumping out of the opposite door (incidentally, exactly the problem the new A400M was recently reported to have during its trials!).  Similar to the story by K2, I never thought much about it at the time, apart from absolutely following the drills that had been rehearsed and rehearsed during a month learning the art of military parachuting at Brize Norton.  And having a person above me (who I'd never met before - he wasn't in my unit), whose parachute I was absolutely relying on, doing the right drills.  And he was relying on me in the same way - deploying my reserve would have stalled his chute and sent him to a hasty end.  Rival (non-airborne) units often do wonder why Paras "are so stupid" that it takes them a month to learn to take one step forward out of an aeroplane, and their parachute is automatically deployed as well!  The reason is here - it is an endless series of rehearsals for crisis events that most of the time don't happen.  But when they do, boy are we glad we had that training, which kicks in without a moment's hesitation.  And that we know those around us have had the same training so we know exactly what they will do in the situation. 

Utrinque Paratus!

Chris