Afterburner - Fighter Pilots

Virtual Programs

• COVID Survive then Thrive 90 Day Programs
  The way businesses will operate in a post COVID world will be very different from today. It’s going to be tough. For businesses that adapt, innovate and operate in a lean and agile manner quickly, there will be unique opportunities to thrive and grow in a new world order.
  
  The Afterburner 90 Day program equips you as leaders to take hold of the COVID narrative within your organization and your customers and clients. Whilst COVID is the largest disruption business has seen in a generation, there is a way to unlock the deep reserves within your people and your organization, to streamline your business and capatilise on the opportunities COVID presents.
  Developed and implemented over 25 years by 3,500 organisations including some of the largest on most successful organisations including Microsoft, Apple, Google and Michael Jordan’s $3 billion Nike empire.
  
  Our highly successful and impactful programs have been adapted for online delivery to meet the needs of a remote workforce.
  
  How it works.
  • Program launch day – how to make good decisions at speed at adapt quickly.
  • How to build simple strategy to execute at speed in an ever-changing world.
  • Build an execution dashboard to run your agile teams.
  • Weekly team coaching sessions (have you ever seen a world champion without a coach?
  • Strip down and rebuild your meeting culture into a remote working agile “execution gap” sessions rapidly addressing issues that arise day to day.
  • Implement the gamechanging debriefing process to accelerate decision making and innovation.
    
    
• Kick Off – Online Full Day Program
  The Full Day program is delivered to as many people in you organisation as possible.
  
  Our Full Day Program is a 5.5 hour experiential learning experience, facilitated online from our Sydney studio. The experience is inspired by the elite and uncompromising world of fighter pilots, where the success rate on the execution of objectives is consistently 98 percent.
  
  Our team of pilots will start the program by introducing what is about the world of high performance military aviation that is so relevant to business, especially in today’s highly disrupted COVID marketplace. This will include an overview of the Flex Methodology – a framework for action and a way of thinking that can be applied to any business function or process. If focuses on a logical cycle of planning, briefing, executing the plan and debriefing.
  
  A portion of this content will be customised – content that we will develop with you prior to the program delivery date – to demonstrate how the simple culture and techniques used by fighter pilots can be applied specifically to your strategy, your issues and your opportunities. We can also tailor the content to focus on a particular aspect of Flex and balance the entertaining elements of the program with the more substantive.
  
  After the Flex introduction, your team will then break into online groups of 12-15 pax to participate in a fun and intense planning exercise. Applying the elements of Flex, they’ll take on the roles of squadron commanders, intelligence officers or HQ staff to build a rapid plan for a mission that will be conducted by simulated flying squadrons.
  
  At the conclusion of this exercise we will explore the psychology of performance and demonstrate through a real-world aviation incident how our natural human inclination is to become distracted which, in turn, degrades our performance. With the advent of smartphones, social media and the vast quanta of information bombarding our people, task saturation and distraction is becoming a major issue within organisations today.
  
  We’ll finish the session by debriefing the mission the teams planned earlier. This is a great opportunity for your team to practice “Nameless and Rankless’ debriefing – an extremely powerful tool that has been independently assessed as improving an average team’s performance by up to 300%.
  
  We will then transition into a “Debrief Workshop” where your pilots will facilitate a debrief with your team. The aim of this debrief is to break out into smaller groups to practice the 3R debriefing technique utilising your objectives and performance as an organisation. The team will practice interacting in a “Nameless/Rankless” manner, seeking the root cause of performance gaps in your business. We will require your team to bring their personal and team objectives for the preceding quarter or year, whatever your key KPI’s are organisationally and individually.
  
  
• The 90 Day Program
  The 90 Day program is limited to only 10 organisations per annum.
  
  The Program is an on-the-job development program designed to develop effective habit patterns and the personal growth of your people through realistic work experiences. We will facilitate the experience by engaging your delegates in a developmental process. The minimum commitment from the organisation is as follows:
• Afterburner Keynote or Half Day for all key stakeholders (direct reports to leadership group).
• Half day debriefing session (3 x 40 minute blocks).
• Full day planning session.
• 4 x 60 min XGap meetings in the first month, either via webinar or on-site.
• 2 x 60 min XGap meetings per month for month two and three.
• End of quarter XGAP, debrief 60mins, plan three hours.
• Unlimited on-call coaching with Boo
  
  Facilitated by Boo you’ll receive the framework, feedback, coaching and support throughout the 90-day period. Please refer to the attached program guide. With the support of high-performance experts, the developmental process will require each delegate to: 
  
  
• Define three to four executable strategic objectives for a 12-month period and once defined, identify three key team and individual objectives to achieve in 90 days; 
• Implement an objective tracking framework and score-card (utilizing your existing processes and systems or alternatively a G-Suite system); 3. Operate as an agile team by delivering a meaningful result within 90 days;
• 4. Demonstrate and reinforce good habits including: 
• Clearer objectives aligned to strategic intent, driving individual accountability at all levels. 
• Improving meeting culture by utilising our planning and debriefing processes (which is what we call execution gap meetings (X-Gap)) where the focus is on execution vs “update” culture. 
• Greater transparency and trust through the practice of debriefing .
• Demonstrate and develop the enduring leadership and team skills required to drive FLEX to enable execution mastery. By the end of the program, the delegates will have embedded a disciplined planning and debriefing process and established an execution rhythm to enable them to execute the organisation’s broader strategic objectives.
  
  
  
  
  
• The Success Habit
  How to go from accepting the status quo to embracing excellence and success
  Fighter pilots consistently win, their lives depend on it. In the high stakes game of air combat, fighter pilots have confronted their human performance limitations and built a simple system to mitigate them. This system has formed the backbone of the fighter pilot community for over sixty years, building the world’s most integrated and effective workforce.
  
  In the Air Force is called Culture, ethos and a way of working. Afterburner calls it “Flawless Execution”. In Boo’s best selling book, co-authored with Afterburner founder James D Murphy “On Time, On Target” the subject of self-reflection and accountability is explored in great detail. Once you conquer yourself, you can conquer the world.
  
  You don’t know it because you’ve never seen it. Afterburner lets you peek behind the curtain to help you to understand how to be successful all the time, just like fighter pilots.
  
  
• Keep things simple
  How to overcome analysis paralysis, make good decisions and get things done
  Travelling at speeds of over 1,500 km/h and operating in a three-dimension work space, fighter pilots make decisions on a split second basis. There isn’t time to think. Therefore, the value of simple planning, communication and personal execution of each task becomes clear. Whether you are a leader or part of a team, learn the secret to making better decisions that influence those around you and lead to successful outcomes. It’s called ‘situational awareness’, total clarity on your surroundings and what you need to do next, before the competition. We’ll talk about the rule of three, never try to implement more than three initiatives at once, creating strategic alignment and cascading objectives, aligning every member of the teams individual goals with the overarching organisational strategy. Most importantly, the ability to reflect on performance an goals and make day to day adjustments to maintain momentum and motivation as you track towards your goal.
  
  
• The Clarity Effect
  Overcoming information overload and task saturation in the digital era
  Today’s workplace is full of distractions and information, there are too many opinions, too much data, all of which updates on a minute by minute basis. Yet despite that, some people are able to cut through the noise, inspire those around them and achieve great things. What do these people have in common? The ability to achieve clarity in everything they do and the people around them. For most people it’s a skill they’re born with. For a fighter pilot’s it’s a skill developed through training. Afterburner has distilled the process to achieve clarity on a daily basis and in turn enhance your leadership skills and ability to influence your team and more importantly your customers or stakeholders.
  
  
• High Performing Teams
  Getting people to work together in harmony whilst being highly effective is challenging.
  So, you want to be a high performing team, do you really know how to become one? The key is “nameless and rankless”, the ability to have conversations irrespective of rank or role inside your organisation. Fighter pilots conduct debriefs every day after each mission. They assess their results, the reasons for those results and what they are going to do tomorrow to improve them. This is the secret to winning everyday as a team.
  
  
• The Flex Method
  Afterburner don’t tell you what to do, they show you how to do it, it’s called “More How”
  Afterburner will Introduce you to Flawless execution, the ability to achieve your strategic goals just like fighter pilots, 98% of the time. The FLEX Method, “Flawless Execution” is a simple four-step process that creates clarity, motivation, continuous improvement, agility and accountability for you and your team. You’ll learn how to Plan, Brief, Execute and Debrief like the best of them. The program has been delivered to over 2.8M people and 3,500 organisations, from Michael Jordan, Disney, Dell Computers to three Superbowl winning NFL teams!
  
  FLEX is a simple, scalable, interactive process that can help you supercharge your collaboration efforts. By aligning everyone in your organisation with your vision, you will drive individual accountability and address the complex environment that is business today.
  
  Afterburner enables you and your team to unlock the creative and innovative heart of your organisation, not only by creating the greatest ideas but to get them executed.