I started my career in IT operations moving to London and working on initially Coca Cola’s infrastructure, and then moving into investment banking and working on trade floor infrastructure. This was after being based in South Africa and doing quite a lot of work for DeBeers on e.g. the most productive diamond mine in the world at the time. I absolutely loved working on mission critical systems. Love the rush. Loved at 4am being one of a small team doing a complex deployment on a sometimes multi-billion dollar business, where failure was not an option.
So failure not being an option is something that has fascinated me. I’m an instrument rated pilot. I fly a Cessna 206 in what in aviation is referred to as single pilot IFR – meaning that I’m flying on an instrument flight plan in bad weather i.e. in the clouds, and there’s only one of me in the cockpit. It’s some of the most demanding flying one can do in terms of cognitive workload. And of course failure is absolutely not an option.
In instrument flying we use approach plates to conduct an instrument approach. The approach phase is one of the busiest times in the cockpit along with doing an instrument departure procedure. The approach plate is a one page easy to read summary of several critical pieces of information, like what my frequencies are, what my critical altitudes are, what path I’m flying and what to do if, when I get to the runway, the clouds are so low that I can’t see it and I have to execute a missed approach.
There’s a technique we use called “briefing the approach” which is really designed for a two pilot environment, but us single pilot IFR guys use the same technique. You’ll do a read-through of the instrument approach plate before you actually start flying the approach, and you’ll do it at a time when you’re not as busy as you’re about to be. Starting at the top you’ll read through items like frequencies, navigational fixes, minimum altitudes, missed procedure and so on.
I can’t share the approach plates I use because they’re published by Jeppesen and are copyrighted, but here is the FAA plate for the approach on Orcas Island where I live, that I fly quite a lot.
The briefing from the top of the plate will go something like this:
- OK so the approach we’re doing is the RNAV runway 16 at Orcas Island
- Our approach course is 193 degrees
- Airport elevation and touchdown zone elevation are 35 feet
- AWOS frequency [for the weather] is 135.425 and we’ve already given it a listen and have the weather
- Whidbey approach frequency is 118.2 and we’re already talking to them and we’ll be switching to Victoria on 132.7 soon and I have that dialed in
- Once we’re on the approach they’ll switch us to the advisory frequency which is 128.25 and I have that ready.
- Our final approach fix is CALBI which we’ll cross at 1900 or above.
- We’re doing an LP approach and our minimums are 340ft and I’ve got that dialed in.
- Our missed procedure is…..
[Side note: If you’re instrument rated, don’t nit pick my briefing here. It’s designed to be parsable by non-pilots and is for illustrative purposes only.]
And so it goes. It’s a relatively quick process and it’s more concise then I’ve described here because there’s some jargon used.
As a single pilot flying IFR (instrument flight rules) you literally say the briefing out loud to yourself before flying the approach. This technique is one of the many that aviation has come up with to mitigate the weakest link in aviation, which is the human being at the controls. In general aviation (non scheduled flights like I fly) around 78% of accidents are caused by the human. And so aviation spends a lot of time coming up with techniques like this to mitigate the risk of the human making a mistake.
Surgery has a similar technique called the timeout. The timeout is essentially the surgical team “briefing” the procedure. This includes basic items like the patient identity and the surgical site. It’s to prevent fundamental errors like wrong site, wrong person or wrong procedure errors.
I’ve incorporated this concept into my business (Defiant Inc which makes Wordfence) and my personal life. If I’m about to hitch a 10,000 pound trailer to my truck, take it into a ferry and go do a bunch of stuff on the mainland, I’ll brief it with my wife to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Yeah – I know- that makes me sound like a bureaucratic pain in the ass, but we’ll just spend a couple minutes talking through what we’re about to do and whether we have everything we need.
If we’re about to do something complex or mission critical at work I’ll brief it with the team. They don’t realize what I’m doing most of the time, but I’ll describe it as “briefing” the thing and we’ll just talk through what may seem to many on the call as some obvious details. Sometimes something will fall out that we need to address, or we’ll go deep on an issue.
When you’re doing something that is mission critical where failure is not an option, consider briefing the thing. Just talk through what you’re about to do and the pertinent details. It’s really just a mental shift where you’re fully dedicating your mental capacity to thinking about what you’re about to do and the details, rather than assuming you’ve got it all figured out. And then when you get busy or are under pressure, you’ll have all the data and procedures stored in your short term mental cache ready to go.
Footnote: “Failure is not an option” doesn’t originate from NASA. It actually comes from the film Apollo 13. But from what I’ve seen, aviation has enthusiastically adopted the phrase.