Decision Spotlight

Making decisions under fire

By Jim "Murph" Murphy

In a Fighter Pilot's world, Situational Awareness is knowing exactly where you are, based on where you have been, and where you would like to be – all in a three-dimensional, rapidly changing environment. The ability to fully comprehend your environment is the difference between life and death. In business, while the threat of physical death is unlikely, a lack of situational awareness can still be dire.

Split-second decisions

Being a fighter pilot requires thinking and acting in split seconds. In the business world, leaders are under similar stresses: not just from external threats, but from massive amounts of information and rapid changes in technology and markets. When your company's survival depends on it, how do you make sound decisions against these tough odds?

Decision–making under stress means working in an uncertain environment. It's characterized by:

Shifting or competing goals.
Time constraints.
High stakes.
Multiple players.
Ill–structured problems.

"Situational Awareness" essential to decisions

Experienced decision-makers have little difficulty in choosing between options. The real challenge is completely understanding the complexities of the situation before determining their options. We call this "Situational Awareness," and it's the key to making good decisions under pressure.

Situational awareness involves three phases:

Perception: Noticing and gathering relevant data.
Comprehension: Generating a mental picture of the situation.
Projection: Knowing what is coming next and how to respond.

Most of us suffer from too much information and not enough situational awareness. We have more data than ever before, but most of us are less informed than ever before. There is so much information to be sorted and interpreted that it presents an ongoing problem, whether the job is in a cockpit or behind a desk.

Perception the most important aspect

Remember Eastern flight 401? More than 30 years later this doomed flight still teaches a powerful lesson. In this crash, a pilot, his co–pilot, and a flight engineer were so preoccupied with a malfunctioning flight instrument that they completely lost situational awareness.

According to their flight recorder, they spent their last moments second guessing their altitude – thinking they were at 2,000 feet when they were actually at 100 feet, at night on approach to the airport. The crew's perception was so dangerously skewed that they were completely blind to the most critical information: the reality of their current situation.

It's an instructive case that illustrates how perception is the most important element in situational awareness. In aviation, 76 percent of situational awareness errors occur in the perception phase. But error rates decline as you move through the process – to 20 percent in comprehension and to 4 percent in projection.

What does this mean for business? Simply that if you can notice and assemble relevant data, your odds of making a good decision are vastly improved. If you've established an accurate current picture, working out what to do next is relatively straightforward.

Build your own situational awareness

Here are some practical tips for building your business situational awareness:

Use a scorecard that tells you where you are, from a financial and non–financial perspective. Make sure you measure the right things, at the right level of detail.
Debrief – Hold a nameless, rankless Debrief when you finish a project. You'll know WHY you succeeded or failed and have an accurate assessment of reality in your next plan.
Use Red Teams. Designate a team to aggressively critique your plan so you'll know whether or not it's based in reality.
Have a Wingman outside your circle of influence who can tell you what reality is when you're too close to the issues.
Don't believe your own press – leave that to your clients.

About the Author:

Jim "Murph" Murphy, Founder & Chairman of Afterburner, Inc., has logged over 3,200 hours of flight time in high-performance jet aircraft. As a combat flight leader, he has flown missions to Central America, Asia, Central Europe, and the Middle East. Through his leadership, Afterburner has become one of Inc. Magazine's "500 Fastest Growing Companies in America."

To date, the Afterburner team of 50 fighter pilots has led more than one million executives, sales professionals, and business people through their unique, high-energy programs. Murph's book Business Is Combat is now in its third printing. His latest, Flawless Execution (HarperCollins), was released in 2005.

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