“What Leaders Can Learn From Fighter Pilots” with Christian Boucousis | Ep. 051
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About this Episode:
In this episode of The Transformative Leader Podcast, I’m bringing you a conversation with speaker, business coach, and fighter pilot, Christian “Boo“ Boucousis. Through his company, Afterburner Australia, "Boo" offers keynotes, coaching, and team building programs to train businesses and leaders in fighter pilot concepts, such as situational awareness, debriefing, and the FLEX model. Christian is also a little more specialized in a particular field, like Dr. Mark McLaughlin from last episode, but make no mistake, the lessons he provides are valuable to anyone who wants to achieve high performance and success in life or at work.
The program "Boo" delivers was developed over 60 years ago by fighter pilots and is the method still used today to ensure fighter pilots achieve a success rate of over 98%, whereas in business that success rate is closer to 13%. As “Boo“ puts it: No nonsense, no shortcuts, just a simple methodology that cuts through the noise and inefficiencies that exist in our day to day lives, principally as a result of a lack of understanding around our human performance limitations. This is how Afterburner Australia helps businesses create agile teams, highly effective leaders, and achieve operational excellence.
You may be wondering what fighter pilot training has to do with business success, but consider that fighter pilots operate in some of the most rapidly changing, complex and hostile environments on the planet, and consistently achieve a 98% success rate on their strategic objective. And how do they do that? Through an inherent understanding of human performance limitations and developing the habit patterns and skills required to conquer them. That sounds pretty similar to Transformative Leadership to me! It goes without saying that this was a great conversation with a very interesting guest, so be sure to check it out.
Some topics discussed in this episode include:
How an overwhelming sense of purpose led Christian through the fascinating journey of joining the Air Force and all that that entailed.
The basics of FLEX and other fighter pilot methods for cultivating situational awareness, focus, and clarity.
How “task saturation“ leads to disengaged employees and lack of productivity, and how the practice of debriefing allows businesses to strategize more effectively by linking their history to their futures.
Why businesses and leaders must recognize and address their inherent limitations (such as optimism bias, analysis paralysis, etc.) to create agile cultures that can thrive in any situation.
How top-down leadership causes the entire organization to stagnate, and why the best leaders engage and share decision making with their executions teams on the ground.
Christian “Boo“ Boucousis is the CEO of Afterburner Australia. He served as a F/A-18 fighter pilot for 11 years with the Royal Australian Air Force, using what he learned to build and run businesses in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Australasia. Afterburner Australia is part of a global training organization that has delivered programs to over 2.5 million people and 3,500 organizations, helping them become more successful in a rapidly changing business landscape.
Guest Links:
To learn more about Christian and his work, you can visit his website, where you can check out his great blog (I particularly like this post). You can also pick up his book on Amazon. You can connect with Christian on LinkedIn.
How you can Support the Podcast:
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