The similarities between flying a multi-million pound jet fighter on a low level sortie over hostile terrain and delivering business success are not immediately obvious to many. Yet for Mission Excellence, a corporate development company of former RAF Fighter pilots and Red Arrows, the processes and behaviours required to survive and succeed at the highest level in either environment are indistinguishable.
Justin Hughes, Managing Director and former Red Arrows pilot explains:
“Every fighter pilot mission requires an extended team of people, who may never even meet, to act in perfect cohesion. To operate at the highest level under the most intense pressure – where failure is not an option – it costs lives!
The parallels with business are obvious; whilst the nature of the risks may differ, the achievement of long-term strategic goals is dependent on a large number of “missions” being executed successfully and consistently.
We identify those transferable processes and behaviours which allow fighter pilots to routinely turn vision and strategy into reality, to close the gap between expectations and performance.”
One of the core concepts underpinning this is the Fighter Pilot’s Mission Cycle or Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief.
This simple but powerful concept facilitates the planning and execution of complex tasks under pressure through the adoption of processes and behaviours commonly used by frontline fighter pilots. It helps define the leadership, teamwork and communication skills required for operational excellence. Above all it creates a culture of continual improvement.
Justin Hughes comments:
“
For every strategy that works you hear of many more that fail. Undoubtedly a large proportion of these failures are caused by poor execution of the plan. To quote one of our clients: ‘Customers only see the quality of the strategy in the execution of the plan.’
Our objective is to help our clients develop winning plans and empower their people to execute at the highest standards – to consistently deliver the vision.”
Since launching in 2002, Mission Excellence have used their unique insight into high performance teams to create an innovative series of development programmes – from large scale seminars to training Masterclasses - that have proved hugely successful with many large organisation such as AstraZeneca, Balfour Beatty, HSBC, IBM and Prudential. Client feedback includes:
“Despite our environment being totally different from a fighter pilots, we were able to make so many analogies that we can apply to our industry to make us more effective individuals and teams…One of the managers who attended commented that he had learned more during the 1 hour Mission Excellence exercise than he has ever learned in any training course he has attended.” AstraZeneca
"The exercise was absolutely brilliant. I have never learnt so much about group dynamics and individuals…”
Merrill Lynch
