What Flying with an RAF Fighter Pilot Taught Me About Management

As a teenager I must have watched Top Gun far too many times. I loved that movie (which seems to be on repeat every other day at the moment) and I’m sure I entertained many fantasies of being a Top Gun pilot in my youth. So you can imagine my excitement when I did some work with the Royal Air Force in the UK. They wanted my help in designing their strategic performance management system.

I vividly remember being in a meeting with the head of the air force and his team and they wanted to talk about strategy, KPIs and management dashboards, and the only thing I wanted to talk about was how they could get me into a fighter jet one day!

Over the coming months I must have asked the question so many times that eventually they agreed. I was invited to RAF Valley in Wales for my fast jet flight.

Planning the mission.

On the day of the flight the pilot sat me down and said we need to plan our mission. We sat in front of the computer and mapped the flight path out which had us fly out to the sea from the airbase, do some interesting manoeuvres and then follow the mountain range and river up the Welsh countryside with the pretend mission goal of bombing one of the bridges in the Valleys.

All this data was then printed on a one-page document that was put in a clear plastic pocket on the flight dashboard. This is essentially the map of the mission and it’s constantly in eyesight so that the pilot and co-pilot never forget it.

This, at least, was familiar to me, because everything I do in the performance management and data analysis world also has to have a clear mission that everyone on the team can refer to and understand at every point in the process.

Finally I get strapped in and we took off. I’m sure everyone at the base had bets on how long I would last and certainly the first 15 minutes were very tough on my body. The manoeuvres out at sea were phenomenal – my head loved them but my stomach, which was a good 10 seconds behind, didn’t.

Luckily the pilot took pity on me and took us above the clouds, which he assured me, would make me feel much better.

We then talked about the dashboard, the dials on it and how to read them. He explained that it had five essential indicators on it that would allow you to know where you are in relation to where you should be as well as the flight map. Pilots have to know exactly where they are at all times, even if they are flying into a cloud or some bad weather. And they trust those five instruments completely.

Above the clouds I did feel better and the pilot gave me control of the plane for a while. When he did, he informed mission control that I was in charge (even though I’m sure he had full control really). Mission control also played an important role by monitoring the airspace around us, assessing weather data and any unidentified aircraft in the area, as well as satellite data and other data from other sources.

Creating a dashboard for your mission.

I was reminded that day of the importance of strategy and having a dashboard that can help you quickly assess whether you are on or off course without even looking out the window!

A management dashboard allows you to do that.

A management dashboard is simply the concise visual display of the most mission critical information needed to help executives and decision makers deliver on strategic and operational objectives.

Like the dials in the cockpit of the fighter jet, dashboards help everyone stay on track. They are best considered from an operational and strategic perspective.

Operational dashboards monitor day-to-day processes and outputs to make sure expectations and performance are met consistently. They provide information that allows us to fix issues before they become problems and incrementally improve performance.

Strategic dashboards, on the other hand, look to the future and seek to identify obstacles and challenges that may occur on the way to the strategic destination, a bit like the job of mission control.

Both are important.

When I advise clients on their performance management, dashboards and data analysis I always make sure we start with a very clear flight map and then develop dashboards that allow them to complete their mission successfully.

Just as the pilots could go dangerously off course without their dashboard, so too any company can veer off course without the tools to constantly check and readjust during the mission.

----------------

Thank you for reading my post. I regularly write about performance management
as well as the mega-trend that is Big Data for LinkedIn and Forbes. If you would like to read my regular posts then please click 'Follow' and feel free to also connect via Twitter, Facebook and The Advanced Performance Institute. When I am not writing then I help companies put in place performance management approaches that work. My latest book is Key Performance Indicators For Dummies.

To celebrate the launch of this book, Rocket Software is sponsoring a book launch and you are invited. Why don’t you join us on April 23rd in London, I would love to meet you and you get a chance to network over a glass of champagne and also receive a complementary signed copy of my book. For more information and to register, go here: https://info.rocketsoftware.com/Bernard-Marr-Book-Event-registration.html

Finally, here are some other recent posts I have written on the topic:

• How the FBI Manages Performance
• How To Set Performance Targets That Work
• The Seven Secrets of Top Performers
• The Top 5 Performance Management Tools: Good News And Cautionary Tales
• The 25 KPIs Every Manager Needs to Know
• Wrong KPIs? Why Questions Are The Answer!
• Meet 7 Brand New Big Data Billionaires

Photo: Shutterstock.com