The Leader Lab

7Extract

The following is a short excerpt from a debrief between two fighter pilots (Lemoine 2019). Technical jargon aside, see if you notice what makes this conversation special:

Lemoine:	A couple of things I need to clean up – I could have been a little bit more clear on, kind of, the setups and what I was looking for and how we were gonna run that …. Did you have any questions from the brief? Anything that came up in the air that, you know, you're like hey, I could have maybe briefed that a little bit better?
Wags:	Nah, negative.
Lemoine:	So departure … the only thing I had was on the rejoin for the initial takeoff. If you would have just cut to the inside that probably would have saved us a little bit of gas. But otherwise, I thought the rejoin was expeditious.

The debrief continues in this way for 24 minutes and 30 seconds. They review every moment of the short flight point by point from brief to takeoff to landing. Their tone throughout is calm and matter-of-fact. What makes this debrief special? Nothing, actually. Commenting on the debrief, Lemoine says:

“This is just how a debrief works. Wags did a great job, but we debrief. No one has a perfect flight. No one does everything perfect because if they did, we would never have to train. So, we train. We make mistakes. We learn. We debrief, and we do better.”

In the world of aviation, debriefs are a mandatory ...