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Do I want Facts or Feelings When Trying to Win · Commander's Intent

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oak.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Today you're stuck with just me and my two dogs as guests.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're not very smart and not very talkative, so don't expect anything insightful.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wearing my Thursday t-shirt from the 25th Fighter Squadron, Iron Maiden, because I think it's appropriate for what I wanted to talk about today.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: The Iron Maine face on my t-shirt is kind of indicative of how I felt in the experience that I want to share a little bit today.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we ask ourselves, should we focus on facts or should we focus on feelings?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do I want to hurt somebody's feelings and tell them the truth, or do I want to sugarcoat things and let them down easy instead of being really direct with it?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Having really professionally grown up in a fighter squad, my go-to was probably a little bit more harsh than some of my kids ever wanted.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I've had to learn how to adjust that as required.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't take away from the power of being direct and focusing on the facts.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: When we I've talked about this before, when we talk about a debrief, we focus on the truth data, the truth bombs, because we have opinions.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody has an opinion, and we feel really inclined to share our opinions and to argue our point and be defensive.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: But that really doesn't get us to improve performance.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't get us to excellence.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: If we're defending the mistakes we already made, we're not moving forward in the direction and at the speed that we want to move forward.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to tell you about when I was going through the instructor upgrade.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Instructor upgrade and a fighter aircraft, really any military aircraft, is very, very difficult because of what's expected of you.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: You're supposed to be an expert in the system.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: You're supposed to be an expert pilot, but then you're also supposed to be able to fly and teach at the same time to be able to share what you know with your students.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I was going through the instructor upgrade.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'd been in the Air Force for about 11 years.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And here I was in Korea flying with the 25th Fighter Squadron.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I flew with Cosmo Shear.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: He was our weapons officer and he was my instructor for the day.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a great guy.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: He was a great pilot.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And sadly, we lost him a couple of years ago as he was preparing to go to Afghanistan.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: He's flying a night mission.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: He was probably tired.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: He'd probably been flying like a lot of weapons officers do.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: He was flying a ton and he got disoriented at night on takeoff and he turned upside down and he pulled into the ground and was killed from the accident.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: A terrible thing.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I have about a day and a half from this particular ride of experience and expertise that he gave me that I will always cherish and I always appreciate because he focused on the facts and he also focused on that end state, what kind of an instructor he wanted Derek Oaks to be, Woody, at the time, what he wanted me to be.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so we got to prepare for a fight.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to do a air-to-ground basic surface attack ride where you go to the range and you have a very set target and it has a scoring system in it.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you each drop between six and 12 bombs.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then you also pull the trigger three times.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you strafe, and then sometimes you shoot rockets.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so we went out there.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: We were going to the Cooney Range, which is just off the coast of, you know, south of Kimpo, south of Seoul, and west of Osan Air Base, where I was stationed.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we went out there, and my job as an instructor trainee was not only to fly a good jet, not only to drop good bombs, but to explain what I was doing when I was doing it and to be able to diagram what I was doing while I was doing it.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, he's across the circle before me.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're flying around in a circle over the target and one of us bombs while the other one's 180 degrees out and the other one bombs.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm supposed to be instructing him and giving him inputs as he goes down the chute, as he aims himself at the target to drop his bombs.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now, dropping gravity bombs, it's a precise action, and yet it's a system that's based on assumptions.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And because you have to, because things are going too fast.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: You have a computed site for some bombing events, and for others, we would train to a non-computed site where you're having to do the math the entire time of where do I need to put my aircraft?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: What airspeed do I need to be at?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: What dive angle do I need to be at in order for the bomb to leave the aircraft and ballistically hit where I want it to on the target.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't dropping GPS guided weapons, we weren't guiding laser guided weapons, we weren't guiding, we weren't shooting weapons that had fins that would fly themselves to the target.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: These are just what we call dumb bombs, general purpose bombs.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you hit the weapon release button, and as soon as you release the weapon, that's where it's going.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to leave the aircraft and it's going to use gravity and the inertia that you put on it and the laws of physics, and that's where it's going to hit.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a lot of assumptions that go into that.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said, I had to put myself and my aircraft in a very particular specific position, going a very specific speed on a very specific dive angle in order for the math to work out.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And we would do a lot of those computations on the ground, but then you never flew a perfect aircraft.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you're getting towards the position where you're going to roll in and point at the target, and you're taking into account every single minor mistake that you make, every hundred feet that you're off altitude, every five nautical miles per hour that you're off airspeed, and if your dive angle is a little bit different, and your brain is going through the math of, okay, now where's it going to hit?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm steep, I'm shallow, I'm fast, I'm slow, I'm off target a little bit, I'm banking, I'm not banking, all those things factor into where is that bomb going to hit.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if I have a computed site, I still need to get it there, but the computed site's giving me, it's doing a lot of the update math for me.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: If I don't have a computed site, if I'm using just an iron site like my dad in Vietnam, then that's all you get.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you're having to do all that math.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was an exhausting ride.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: The ride was about two hours long.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm talking through and I didn't feel like I flew a good ride.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like I made a lot of mistakes because I'm so focused and in my head about how to do this properly and how to teach Stanley student how to do it properly.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then we land.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so the preparation for it was about 12 hours, probably between the day prior and the day of, as I'm preparing and rehearsing.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then we flew for two hours and then we land.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember we started debriefing at about three o'clock in the afternoon.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he wanted me to draw where my aircraft was and where his aircraft was on every single weapons pass based on that truth data, based on the recordings that we had, and also based on my memory and based on what the bomb scores were.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he wanted me to diagram out exactly what every single bomb was doing and where the aircraft was to make the bomb do what it did.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went through all of my weapons pass and I diagrammed them.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then I went through all of his weapons pass and I diagrammed them out.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And some I did well, and some I didn't do well.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Some I misinterpreted the data.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so we debriefed from three in the afternoon until 11 that night.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he had to be in the next day.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so we knocked off the debrief and we came back in the next day, and then we debriefed for another two hours, only for him to say, I need you to be better.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to do this again.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you're going to do that right again.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: That crushed me.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was so painful to hear that, that I'd gone through all that work for him to tell me, you're not good enough.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're not there.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I hated to hear that, but he was right.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: I needed to be better.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And if you fast forward into my career later on, where I was an instructor, when I'm taking young kids out and I'm trying to teach them the nuance of dropping bombs, I really needed to be good at it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I held myself to a high standard.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I was so glad that he held me to a high standard.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I wouldn't take anything for granted.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't treat anything frivolously.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: I really wanted to be an excellent expert at not only dropping bombs, but teaching other people how to drop bombs.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a long, painful two and a half day lesson of Derek, you're not good enough, you need to do it again.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: We face those a lot in our own lives.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is, do I get defensive or do I take the truth data?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: When somebody drops a truth bomb on me, do I run for shelter and say, no, it was your fault, it was aircraft's fault, it was the team's fault, they weren't listening to me, or do I just take it and say, maybe what they're saying has merit.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe what they're trying to tell me is something that I need to listen to.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I just need to shut up and say, Derek, what can you be doing better?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: What are they saying that has value for me and comparing it with that truth data?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then comparing it with my own preconceived notions so that the next time I go out and fly, the next time I do whatever it is, I am better.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say you're the CEO, and as the CEO, it's your baby, it's your company, you've been with it since its inception, and you are the smartest person in the room when it comes to the product and the project and the vision and everything else.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you get to a point where you don't take feedback very well.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And now you have the lowest of the low in your organization, somebody who's brand new as an intern, and they don't understand something and they give you feedback.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: How damaging is it to you and to that intern and to everybody on the team if you don't take your medicine, if you don't say, hmm, maybe what they're saying has value instead of dismissing it outright.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I need to sit back and go, how can I be better?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And is the input I'm getting gonna make me better?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's the beauty of the debrief.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: If we use the debrief right, is it's not about personal attacks.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about saying something to put another person on the defensive.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about being better than the person that we're working with.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's about what are our objectives?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: What are we trying to do and how are we gonna get there?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: And are the actions that we are currently performing, are they gonna get us there?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because if they're not, we need to change and we need to swallow our pride and we need to accept that input.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just like when I was that young instructor pilot to be.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I said this at the beginning, but I was a pretty seasoned pilot.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: I had quite a few hours in multiple different aircraft.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: As an officer, I was higher ranking than your average line pilot in the squatter.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I held a certain level of respect and received a certain level of deference from people in the squatter.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: But that would have made it even more damaging if I hadn't listened, if I hadn't been willing to take that feedback and say, hmm, what is Cosmos saying to me right now?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: What do I need to change and how do I change it?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And being hungry for that change and hungry for that input.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: If I hadn't been willing to do that, that could have caused severe damage to the organization.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: How many of you guys have seen that where the leader doesn't take input that doesn't take feedback and it causes severe damage to the organization?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot do that if you want to have that 10x company.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to see those extreme ROIs, you can't do that.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be hungry for that feedback, hungry for that input, regardless of where it comes from, and regardless of the seat you're sitting in.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So ask yourself, am I accepting debrief?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Am I accepting feedback regardless of my job title, regardless of where it comes from?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do I really want that perfect mission?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Am I really striving to be better at my job?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Am I really, is my vision really more important than my own pride?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Ask yourself those questions.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Look at your own work, look at what you're doing, and then make a change if you need to make a change.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: My guess is that all of us need to make a change, at least a small change, so that we get better at receiving feedback, better at taking the debrief and working to get better towards that common vision.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for being here with us.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions, reach out to me, zap me a note, DM, send me a note on my website, and I'll share, subscribe, comment on the podcast, and continue listening so we can all become better decision makers for better results.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in a grand prize drawing to win a$25,000 private, exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oaks himself.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: So head on over to Commanders Intent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.