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Benefits of Debriefing
The Forces of global change can render professional skill sets obsolete almost overnight. Organizations that fail to continuously revise assumptions about their operating environment (i.e. market) risk obsolescence or irrelevance. It is vital to develop the capacity to learn from your environment. But how is this done? Information overload is the management crisis of the 21st century. We have so many measures, dashboards and performance indicators that acquiring information can become an end rather than a means. The answer is debriefing. In fact, debriefing isn’t just something that is helpful, in today’s environment it’s an imperative.
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About the Authors
James D. ‘Murph’ Murphy, the Founder & CEO of Afterburner, Inc., has a unique and powerful mix of leadership skills in both the military and business worlds. Murph joined the U.S. Air Force where he learned to fly the F-15. He logged over 1,200 hours as an instructor pilot in the F-15 and accumulated over 3,200 hours of flight time in other high-performance aircraft. As the 116th Fighter Wing’s Chief of Training for the Georgia Air National Guard, Murph’s job was to keep 42 combat-trained fighter pilots ready to deploy worldwide within 72 hours. As a flight leader, he flew missions to Central America, Asia, Central Europe and the Middle East.
Will Duke is Afterburner’s Director of Learning and Development. His duties include coordination of the development of intellectual property, training programs, and educational materials. He also serves as a consultant to process and continuous improvement management programs. With Co-Author James ‘Murph’ Murphy, he wrote the 2010 release The Flawless Execution Field Manual.
Human error reduction not only applies to the performance of operational activities but to analytical tasks as well. Errors made during performance of these tasks frequently go unnoticed at the time of occurrence, only to become consequentially evident when action is taken based on the errant analysis. These latent errors can have an equally devastating financial, environmental, asset and human impact as operational performance errors; simply occurring with greater time separation between the error and the event. Therefore, human error reduction must be applied to these activities too.
Excellent business strategies fail to deliver superior results when not executed well. Subsequently, consistent, high-quality human performance becomes a critical component to successfully achieving the organization’s goals.
Performing operational tasks is no different than administrative work or project activities – elevate all tasks to a level of equal importance and they all become unimportant. As previously defined in StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Best Practice 2 – Peer Checking, activities that should be peer checked are those irreversible actions presenting a severe adverse consequence if an error is made. If all activities are peer checked, including those that are either reversible and/or have little consequence if a performance error occurs, then all activities are elevated to an equal level of importance; unnecessarily diminishing productivity and inviting complacency in the performance of truly important tasks.
Even the most well-intentioned and dedicated humans are fallible. Therefore, the challenge becomes one of minimizing human error.
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