This week on the Defence Connect Podcast former RAAF fast-jet pilot and business performance coach Christian Boucousis offers his perspective how skills, attitudes and processes from the cockpit can amplify business growth and effectiveness – especially in defence organisations.
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Boucousis – who is managing director of Afterburner Australia and New Zealand – says there’s an opportunity for all defence businesses to enhance performance, win more work, build a better culture and deliver projects on time and on target through adopting proven and scalable processes that get results.
Join Boucousis and the Defence Connect Podcast team to uncover the winning actions and techniques to get the most out of your people, teams and organisations – and how to be a better leader.
Enjoy the show,
The Defence Connect team
Listen to previous episodes of the Defence Connect podcast:
Episode 488: SPOTLIGHT: How quantum will revolutionise PNT and RF sensing, with DSTG’s Andrew Seedhouse and QuantX’s Andre Luiten
Episode 487: DEFENCE PROPERTY PODCAST: Investing in property from post to post
Episode 486: SPOTLIGHT: Quantum – revolutionising Defence, health and energy – with Dr Cathy Foley, Australia’s chief scientist
Episode 485: CONTESTED GROUND: Unpacking resource and food security, with Senator Matt Canavan
Episode 484: SPOTLIGHT: Commercialising academic and industry research, with Defence Trailblazer’s Dr Sanjay Mazumdar
Episode 483: SPOTLIGHT: Pitching to Defence, with Professor Emily Hilder and Dan Bennett
Episode 482: PODCAST: Contested battlespace, with former prime minister Scott Morrison
Episode 481: CONTESTED GROUND: Into the space frontier with former prime minister Scott Morrison
Episode 480: SPOTLIGHT: The Innovation, Science and Technology Strategy, with Professor Tanya Monro
Episode 479: CONTESTED GROUND: Divisions spike ahead of the US election
Speaker 1: |
Welcome to the Defence Connects podcast with your host, Phil Tarrant.
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Phil Tarrant: |
G'day everyone, it's Phil Tarrant here. I am the Director of Defence Connect. Thanks for tuning in to our podcast. I'm joined by one of my regular co-hosts, Victoria Lewis. Victoria, how you going?
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Victoria Lewis: |
Hello, thanks for having me Phillip.
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Phil Tarrant: |
It's good to have you back. The podcast we recorded recently with Jim Molan went really well.
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Victoria Lewis: |
It did. I think we learnt a lot there from Jim, and especially his thoughts on how government plays a big role in helping defence.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Yes, he has an opinion which we always like to have. His observations were interesting and if you haven't listened to it, make sure you tune into it to give you a bit of a feel for some of the geopolitical challenges faced by the world today, and how that might influence the way in which our war fighters and our government chooses to challenge our security, and ensure our security moving forwards. So, tune in.
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But today, we're probably going to lift it up a bit of a note and not delve into some of the more strategic stuff in the world. We're going to talk business and that's what I like to discuss and, obviously, Defence Connect has been geared to help people in defence industry be better at what they do, and on that basis I've got Christian Boucousis. I got that wrong didn't I?
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Christian: |
No, you got it right.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Yeah?
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Victoria Lewis: |
Nailed it.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Its good?
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Christian: |
Yeah. Perfect.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Thanks for joining us mate.
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Christian: |
Thanks Phil.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Your background ... so today, I guess you are involved working with businesses both large and small to help them do what they do better from a strategic point of a view.
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Christian: |
Yeah, that's my passion project. I head up a company in Australia, which I acquired a few years ago called Afterburner Australia and it is a branch, I suppose, of a global company called Afterburner.
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Afterburner is all about strategic execution and it's principles and methodology, which is called Flex. It comes from the fighter pilot community and really it's about an objectives focused business where we create simple strategy that gets implemented with the ultimate aim of achieving the same strategic execution rate of a fighter pilot, being ninety-eight percent.
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Phil Tarrant: |
You can speak quite authoritatively about this because you've done your time with the Air Force.
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Christian: |
That's right, I did. I spent 11 years. I was a fighter pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force, where I flew F-18s and I also spent some time flying with the Royal Air Force, where I flew Tornados. Unfortunately though, my career came to an end because I was diagnosed with a medical condition that meant, in short form, my back and neck were broken and that's when I made a decision that if I couldn't fly fighter jets that maybe it's time to look outside the Air Force and make a transition into business. I did do 11 years of service, which is a good innings and that started my adventure in the business world, which has been around 12 years now.
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Phil Tarrant: |
What would be one or two key things that any business owner ... and lets talk about defence industry, any business owner can take from a cockpit of an F-18 into running an effective business.
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Christian: |
Clarity and simplicity. There's no doubt, defence contracting, as well as what defence is trying to achieve in the battlefield sense, is very, very complex, and I think that happens is that completely can become overwhelming and what we lose is clarity as a result. I think we need to almost approach it with a mantra, which is what is the effect defence is trying to achieve and what are the objectives to support that? If we're sitting down and we're talking between defence and industry, it's almost the opening question. What are we sitting here for, and what are we trying to achieve.
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Phil Tarrant: |
There's so many way we can take this podcast. What I want to try and achieve today is to get some of that knowledge that ... I know you work with businesses intimately and you also do a lot of speaking stuff where you try and take some of that knowledge of your experience flying fast jets and empowering businesses to do what they do better, and you just mentioned two of the key things to realise that.
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I think for our audience defence industry, and primarily it's the whole gamut from SMEs through to Primes through to government themselves, a lot of friction and pressure points between those sectors in order to deliver capability to defence.
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In your experience and the way that you have built your career, post Air Force, have you found it easy to be able to get real lessons from that time in service and turn that, or synthesise it, into very, very simple business lessons? Has that been an easy process or has that been something that's taken time?
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Christian: |
It's been quite an easy process but it's been revelatory for me. Having had both sides of the coin, almost an equal amount of time in defence and flying fighters and in business, the principle reason why I acquired Afterburner was when I looked at the theory and how we translated the simplicity of planning missions, communicating them effectively, executing them without becoming task saturated in the fog of complexity overtaking us. But most importantly, it's that debriefing process. It's a case of saying, "Well look, we all set out to achieve something here. The world has changed. There's innovation, there's new ways of going about the same problem and therefore often our capability and objectives and requirements start to translate a little bit out of what we're contracted to achieve."
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I think what we need to promote a little bit more both in defence and defence industry are those conversations about, "Well, this is what we set out to achieve, this is what's actually happening, what can we do together to resolve it, and let's go and do that tomorrow." I think creating that open and honest discourse is very important.
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It's challenging in Australia because a lot of defence contractors are part of a highly matrixed organisation, either from Europe or from the US. We have a small local defence industry, so I think it's important that the management, the leadership of Australian defence industry clearly articulates inside that matrixed organisation what we need to have locally to achieve it, because it doesn't matter what capability you bring into market as a defence contractor, if you're unable to maintain the relationships, which are all local, then you can have the shiniest, most effective piece of equipment in the country, but if no-one likes you or trusts you, it's going to sit on the shelf.
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Phil Tarrant: |
You work across markets right across Australia -
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Christian: |
All sectors.
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Phil Tarrant: |
- from all sectors
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Christian: |
Absolutely.
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Phil Tarrant: |
I think defence is somewhere where you're passionate about because of your background defence, but you don't do a lot of work with defence businesses.
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Christian: |
No, not at all actually. A very small part of our portfolio is working to defence and what we do is very strategically focused. It's about positioning their purpose, how to best meet the needs for Australian defence and whether you're a defence related business, the finance sector, mining, fast moving consumer goods, the reality is when you're working with the complexity of a lot of people the lessons are all the same.
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Phil Tarrant: |
How would you rate defence industry versus other sectors in terms of their business sophistication to break down bureaucratic barriers, champion entrepreneurship, get stuff done. Your book that you've just recently released is called On Time and On Target, right?
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Christian: |
That's right.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Obviously -
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Christian: |
Which is all about getting stuff done.
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Phil Tarrant: |
- about getting stuff done. Would you say ... and this is a good headline, but would you say, is defence industry as sophisticated in terms of their businesses as what a fast moving consumer would, or IT tech ... where are they sitting within that parameters?
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Christian: |
I think defence industry is very capable. I think what they deal with and the problems their solving are very challenging, and what's interesting is if you look at most of our tech that we use day-to-day, a lot of that was developed in the defence industry, and a lot of that is we've used in fighter jets or, particularly ... the internet was invented by the US Navy.
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I think defence industry's quite fortunate in that most people that work in the industry have that sense of purpose. They really do feel like, "I'm creating solutions here and products that are going to contribute to keeping the world a safer place." I genuinely believe that's the mindset that most people in this industry -
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Phil Tarrant: |
Yeah, I agree with that.
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Christian: |
- approach. Whereas in the consumer side of business, I don't know whether that purpose is necessarily there, so I think in terms of starting point, we've got great purpose. We've also got great people in defence industry and the clients that we do work with in defence are definitely the most enjoyable to work with, because they are quite dynamic.
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I think what happens though is because of the platforms and the history and the reliance on process, overcomplicated process, not simple process, the organization's become a little bit bogged down and it's almost that the entrepreneurial element is subdued a little bit, and again I do think it comes back to many of the companies here representing a global, multinational behemoth, so it comes back to what I said before.
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We're really navigating multiple relationships in defence industry in Australia, not just defence but we're managing the relationship with our parent company as well, and that's what we have to invest in just as much as the relationship with local defence.
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Phil Tarrant: |
In terms of complexity, and we as a business, we were across markets right across Australia, defence is by far the most complex industry that we work with and there's so many different moving parts, so many different stakeholders, and the reason for it is complex as well. Why do we have a defence industry? Is to equip our defence forces, which support our security, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a very complex industry and as I navigate through defence industry, I notice along the way a lot of frustrations from businesses, particularly SMEs, around how hard it is to get stuff done. Certain SMEs might operate in different sectors as well where it's a lot easier to do business, whereas if you look at defence industry, often it's hard to do business.
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What would be your recommendations for these businesses to just make the ease of doing business in defence simpler. Is there any tips or tools or tactics they can do to engineer their businesses, or position their businesses to really capitalise?
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Christian: |
You highlight two very different approaches to engagement of industry. So coming through a bespoke product or a small, medium enterprise is a vastly different experience to coming into industry through a multinational.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Absolutely.
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Christian: |
I think what's important is both sides of that coin. I think large contractors can benefit from partnering with local SMEs, and SMEs are always hungry for that next deal because generally the key person who's delivering the product also owns the business and probably has a family to support. So you do get a lot of hunger in that market but SMEs just don't have the capital that's required to invest in some of these major projects and major capabilities.
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I believe not only do we have again just managing those relationships, particularly for large contractors, many of whom have a requirement to partner twenty to thirty percent locally anyway as part of their contracting terms. It's to make sure that the SME and the principal contractor are having the conversations about where they support.
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My first business in Afghanistan was contracting back to the UN and other NGOs to major multi billion dollar contractors, and where there was value in using an organisation like ours was the ability to cut through red tape, the ability to move quickly and deliver capability at the coalface, whilst the principal contractor was dealing with the contracts and the legals and, effectively, administering the bureaucracy that comes with spending billions of dollars.
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I think it's the combination of both and Australia is a country where SMEs are prevalent in almost every industry and all capabilities, you have to be able to build the relationship between the two. I think where large contractors fall down a little bit is that maybe the door's not as open as it could be to some of these SMEs that have strong relationships in defence, that have a great capability, but it's almost in the too hard basket in terms of moving the oil tanker that is the larger contractor.
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Victoria Lewis: |
Absolutely. I was going to say actually, having worked for a Prime and been an SME myself, one of the hardest things I found was being able to find someone in a Prime to speak to.
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So, if I'm an SME, I'm driving now, I'm listening to this podcast, listening to you thinking, "Yes, I'm going to change things." How can we open up the communication? What can I do to open up the communication with the Primes across the defence industry.
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Christian: |
I think particularly in defence industry, it's very much attending the events that go with the industry. There's trade shows, there's air shows, there's naval open days, there's any number of events where you're able to make a connection, and I think it's as simple as saying, "This is what I do, who do I talk to?" in your organisation to get this done. I think defence potentially has more to do than a lot of other industries, it's not very social media enabled, it's not one of these dynamic innovative communities.
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Phil Tarrant: |
This innovation's a podcast. Podcasts have been around for nearly twenty years and -
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Christian: |
There you go.
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Phil Tarrant: |
- it's the first one for defence.
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Christian: |
I think what's important is to realise business in defence is very tactile. It's very much sitting in a ... and everyone in defence is actually very open. People love to help, they love to have a conversation. The stakes are high in defence so we learn to get on well and to operate well as teams, so I think as an SME, don't think of it as you've got a product to deliver to a defence industry. Don't think of it like you would think your normal corporate beast. Get in the car, go to a trade show, you don't even need a stand. Just buy a ticket and just knock on the doors, introduce yourself and organise a coffee. Everyone loves a coffee in defence industry. Organise a coffee and then get yourself a half an hour to get someone to explain to you how to navigate the system.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Just good old-fashioned business. Get in front of people, introduce yourself, have a chat -
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Christian: |
That's a great thing about defence industry. It's the old-fashioned way of doing things.
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Phil Tarrant: |
It's really open. I find it really refreshing. Everyone is really accommodating in defence and everyone's got time, and people like to collaborate and talk. It feels like there is that groundswell of people that want to do this but then it just hits a roadblock and people go, "Okay, what next? Where's the contracts, where's the purchase orders, where's this, that and other?" It's an interesting dynamic.
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Before you came on air, we had a chat about some of the one-on-one work that you do with CEOs, so organisations, large or small, looking to improve their performance of their operations through doing things better.
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If you were sitting down with a CEO of a large defence Prime or even an SME, and you wanted to understand their business and try and get the information out of them so you guys can interpret that and synthesise that, and then apply advice back to them for them to improve their business, what would be those two or three key questions that you would ask those guys?
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Christian: |
We like simplicity Phil. Fighter pilots. We like the number of take-offs that equal the number of landings. I don't even have three questions. I only have one.
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Phil Tarrant: |
What's that?
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Christian: |
What are you trying to achieve in the next three months?
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Phil Tarrant: |
Okay. So anyone listening to this right now should think of that straightaway and go, "What am I trying to achieve in the next three months?"
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Christian: |
If you're looking to work with a defence contractor or you're looking to get the most out of your contractor, ask the question. "What are you trying to achieve in the next three months? What are you trying to achieve in a year?" Procurement timeframes in the way that defence contracting works, it's a long lead time business, but unfortunately what that means is we tend to lose sight of what's happening in the short term, so between becoming aware of a project to the tendering process, to the selection process, to the contracting process, there's a lot of conversations that need to be had and I personally believe, and it's not just defence but I think defence is guilty of it because of that long timeframe, is we lose sight of the day-to-day operation of our business.
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One of the top seven reasons why any company strategy fails is we get distracted and seduced by the new shiny things, and we lose focus a little bit on what we should be doing. That's why I ask, "What are you doing in the next 90 days? What do you set out to achieve? Give me the top three things? If someone waved their magic wand, what are the top three things you wish you could achieve in the next 90 days?"
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Phil Tarrant: |
If you ask that question, you must get the same responses from most people right? Growth or ...
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Christian: |
Mostly blank stares.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Yeah?
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Christian: |
I think the issue in business is that clarity isn't there at that level. I've got 50 things I need to do. No, the organisation has 50 things but what are you needing to achieve as the leader of the entire organisation.
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But what we like about that conversation is it promotes a different thought paradigm for leaders and it's a case of, "Well, if I've got to achieve three things, what does everyone around me need to do then for me to achieve those?" Flex is fundamentally about that.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Can you talk me through Flex? This is your process for enhancement.
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Christian: |
It's called the Flex Methodology. It was actually developed out of a process many, many years go called the OODA Loop and the OODA Loop is all about observing what's happening around us, orientating ourselves relative to what we're observing, making a decision based on those observations then acting, and then observing again. What's happened as a result of that action? And it's a loop and it's continual.
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It was actually taken up with a lot of interest in the legislative environment in the US and a lot of major US law firms still today use the OODA Loop in terms of their case management, because every time they make a case, it changes, and every time they make a position in a Court room it can change day-to-day. So that OODA Loop allows them to not only analyse quickly, but also we call it, "Planning using the facts rather than assumptions." Until we're actually implementing our plan, we can't tell whether or not it's working and we don't know what's really happening, so the OODA Loop was developed a long time ago, around the time Top Gun started as a school, not the movie, and that has morphed into a few areas.
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I don't think many people know, in the software industry there's processes called Scrum and Agile. Those are developed by a guy called [00:18:23 John?] Sutherland, who was a fighter pilot in the US Navy, and Flex is another offshoot of that, and how we explain it is it's about simple planning to create those three top objectives, communicating them effectively, because one thing we're not particularly good at is explaining a strategic concept that we would develop at Board level to someone who's on an aircraft turning a wrench, and getting the buy-in all the way down is very powerful and very important if you want to achieve these strategic objectives. We give people some tools to do that effectively.
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Then the number one thing that affects our ability to achieve, now that we've actually got an objective to achieve that objective, is our task saturation where we feel completely overwhelmed by events and there's just not enough time and too little resources to get a job done.
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For a fighter pilot that happens all the time, as you would imagine, running around at 1200 kilometres per hour, so you need to be able to go from a state of stress and anxiety and being task saturated and swamped with your workload to calm again. We have a process that we use to do that.
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Phil Tarrant: |
So an actual process that you were trained -
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Christian: |
Correct.
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Phil Tarrant: |
- to be able to do it.
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Christian: |
Everything in Flex and in the book is about how to do things, whereas I think the problem in business is there's too much what? There's too much direction, too much telling people what to do.
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We work with organisations and SMEs that might have a 20 million dollar turnover and the CEO will say to me, he goes, "I keep telling my people what to do and they won't do it," and our response is, "Well, that's the problem. You need to set an objective for them and they'll achieve it and let them figure out how, and you just mentor them through." Because it's not North Korea. We have to be able to create an environment where our people do more for us.
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The final step in our process is that debrief, which most organisations find incredibly empowering. Fighter pilots after every mission debrief and we hash out what went right on our mission, what went wrong and we take away a couple of lessons from that, just one or two.
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In business only ten percent of organisations have any type of review or feedback process to see how they went and to take somethings away to get better tomorrow. Hundred percent are fighter pilots, ten percent are business, and that's where that ninety-eight percent metric comes from because you can imagine doing the same thing, and most businesses do the same thing everyday. You're supposed to, your business is supposed to be very focused and targeted, you shouldn't be too diverse so people can find you and understand what you do. But still, despite the fact we do the same thing every day we don't do it very well. So we need to learn how to constantly improve week on week through debriefing and within, we say 90 days, all your performance metrics will lift by around twenty-five percent. Just purely based on that small piece of feedback, 45 minutes every day or two, and your performance will be increased by twenty-five percent.
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Phil Tarrant: |
You've spoken a lot about how this is learned behaviour and anyone can probably learn this behaviour.
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Christian: |
Absolutely.
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Phil Tarrant: |
And you've mentioned ...
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Christian: |
It's a system.
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Phil Tarrant: |
It's a system.
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Christian: |
You look at a fighter pilot. There's no stars, there's not superstar fighter pilots out there. We're all very, very average ...
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I repeated my last year of high school and still did badly the second time round. Most of us, there's no football captains, no captains of the school, prefects, we're all very average guys and girls, but something happens when we get put into the system and these very average people get transformed into phenomenal executors of strategy, where day in day out they're executing at ninety-eight percent, and it's purely as a result of following these four steps, again and again and again, and 7 million dollars being invested in every fighter pilot to learn this process so it become ingrained. What I discovered in business was this process is so ingrained, I will run through it four, five times a day subconsciously, and it just means that relative to everyone in the room, I always feel like I'm the one with the clarity, I'm the one that can understand where the process is getting derailed. Sometimes you can see three months into the future based on debriefing our performance to date and, low and behold, something will go wrong. Or if we're able to influence the people around us effectively, we'll avoid there being some sort of disaster or major break of contract, 90 days down track.
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Phil Tarrant: |
You make it sound so simple. It's about the right number of take-offs -
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Christian: |
It is.
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Phil Tarrant: |
- the right number of landings.
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Christian: |
Human beings, we have a propensity to over complicate everything and this is a simple solution.
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Phil Tarrant: |
You've mentioned a number of fighter pilots who have gone and developed some pretty interesting thought leadership type stuff, successful in business. Would you say, by and large, that life after Air Force for fighter pilots is ... do a lot of them make the transition into business and are most of them successful? Do you hear of guys who don't really cut it in business?
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Christian: |
I think it's not a natural step to take. I think one of the areas where fighter pilots may struggle is we're so used to a high level of performance and we're very familiar with people telling us they're going to do something and it will happen one hundred percent, and then transitioning into business it takes a little bit ... and I've found through the first few years, it does take a little bit of time to realise that sometimes people tell you they'll do something. Maybe they're thinking, "I will try and do that," or "I hope I can do that for you," so you need to realise that potentially it's not going to happen the way that you're used to. For me it were three years of transition and I think that's an important part of it.
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Flex is a combination of fighter pilot methodology and using business. I don't think you can just walk into an organisation and go, "Think and act like a fighter pilot." I think it's quite alienating. You have to say, "Here's a small part of our world that works and here's how it transitions into your business."
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It's interesting and if you get through that three year process, just like anything I suppose, it probably takes three years to get used to any transition in any career, then I think there's a precedent for fighter pilots being very successful in business.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Certainly. I think the phones are going to light up from defence industry now, all fighter pilots wanting to make the shift over.
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When you were actually flying fast jets, were you thinking about life after Air Force? Were you preparing yourself for ...? Obviously, it sounds like the decision to leave the Air Force was a decision that you didn't get to make so you had to move quite quickly. But yourself and your peer group, when you sit around the mess do you talk about what are you going to do after ...?
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Christian: |
Definitely.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Yeah.
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Christian: |
Of course, and it's human nature and I think what's interesting, as of late, a lot of guys have left and pursued different careers and come back, because it is an incredibly fulfilling job. You get to work with people you have the utmost respect for, you know that everything works like clockwork, your equipment's A-level, you get paid reasonably well for what you're doing and it's a satisfying job, when you fly operations and we contribute to hopefully make the world a better place. There's a lot about it that's very fulfilling. So I think the natural progression for many of us ... it's a tough job. Being in any position in the military is a tough job and fighter pilots are unique in that we're the only operator that has a strategic viewpoint. We think strategically, and we're all officers and we're all in battle on the tools at the same time.
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I think that also builds a unique insight into business. We can naturally walk into a business and see the connexion between where the strategic leadership and the operational leadership and implementation side are, and how to bring it together with a bit more clarity.
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But I think the well-trodden path of fighter pilots is, obviously, to go into an airline. The great thing about Afterburner, I get to capitalise on that because as a part-time job I've got ten fighter pilots working for me doing programmes and implementing Flex in various companies around Australia, so I'm quite happy with the status quo and the guys and girls that work in the business are phenomenal, and I'm very fortunate that my core business is property development but I do get to experience my old world at the same time so -
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Phil Tarrant: |
Best of both worlds.
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Christian: |
- I'm probably the luckiest guy in the country, if I'm honest.
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Phil Tarrant: |
It's good, and when you were within Air Force did you think about ... so you've got a kit, plane, whatever else you're using. Did you think about where it come from? Were you familiar and aware of the organisations to contractors who were doing particular bits of work to keep the plane serviceable or ...?
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Christian: |
Definitely. From a macro level at the time you know it was MacDonald Douglas F-18 and you knew everything about the aircraft. That's part of it. You knew the competition. You knew what other aircraft types were similar to yours and you do have a great appreciation of what industry creates. There's a complete disconnect on how to access it as a war fighter and achieving a capability, and there's a great degree of frustration between, "What gadget do I need to get the job done?" and that filtering through capability development -
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Phil Tarrant: |
To get it.
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Christian: |
- to industry, to lead times, to arriving on the airframe in time, to make an impact on the battlefield. That's, compared to when I was in that, has improved a lot, so I think there's a grey in roads to improve that but a key part of Flex is, doesn't matter how good you are today, you can always be better, and I think that applies in not only defence industry but in defence as well.
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You only get better by sharing and debriefing with each other, being open and honest and collectively, we all improve.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Good. We're running out of time Victoria.
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Victoria Lewis: |
I'm actually contemplating what I'm going to achieve in the next 90 days actually. I'm just sitting here just going, "What am I going to achieve in the next 90 days?" So I've got some food for thought this afternoon.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Do you think that everyone listening to this should write it down, is that the best way to do it? "What am I going to achieve in the next 90 days?" Should you write it down?
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Christian: |
We have a suggestion to organisations we work with. It's if you're feeling overwhelmed just on any day, write down on a piece of paper what you want to achieve today. Just write it down.
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Phil Tarrant: |
So simple.
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Christian: |
Just get that focus and clarity and do it. One of the issues with having checklists with the vast amounts of information is we tend to not use them for very long because there's too much on them and we can't.
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So as fighter pilots we have a philosophy. "If you're trying to do more than three things at one, you're going to achieve nothing." Stick to the rule of threes.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Well, that's how I'd summarise this podcast. In the next 90 days what are you going to do?
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Victoria Lewis: |
Absolutely.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Everyone should do it. That's good. So you're book is On Time On Target, which you've co-authored with your colleague, James Murphy. How do you get this thing? All good bookstores?
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Christian: |
Bookstores. It's on Kindle ... you name it. All the ...
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Phil Tarrant: |
It's all over the place.
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Christian: |
I'm not across the detail to be honest. The publisher looks after all of that, people find it, they read it, we get inquiries straight through our Afterburner Australia website. We tend to give everyone in our programmes a copy of the book so, you Google On Time On Target, you'll find the book.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Nice one. Christian, we really appreciate your time mate. Enjoyed the chat and ...
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Christian: |
Thanks Phil, it was a pleasure.
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Phil Tarrant: |
You've given me some food for thought and challenged my ...
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Christian: |
Mission accomplished.
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Phil Tarrant: |
It's what it is. It's good. Excellent. Thanks Victoria. Thanks for coming along again. Remember to check us out, defenceconnect.com.au. We're on all the social stuff, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. If you'd like to me @phliliptarrant. Are you a Twitter person, no?
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Christian: |
Twitter, no I don't do Twitter. Too much of a distraction.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Too much of a distraction.
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Christian: |
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram you name it but Twitter for a person that suffers mild ADHD like myself it's -
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Phil Tarrant: |
Not a good thing.
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Christian: |
No. Get those three things done every day.
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Phil Tarrant: |
Nice one. Thanks for tuning in we'll see you again next week. Bye bye.
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