Seeing.

'You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader, You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance.'

General Eric Shinseki - Ex-US Army Chief of Staff

The Air Commodore saw the Flight Lieutenant waiting at the Orderly Room counter.

'How are you finding the job so far, Bernard?' He remembered my name. He was the Air Officer Commanding Training Command with hundreds on his immediate staff and thousands more at the units under his Command scattered around Australia and overseas. He remembered me after being introduced a month earlier when I began my first real Air Force posting.

'Busy?' he asked. I gave the only answer that I could to my boss's, boss's boss. 'Well, you need to find a couple of days to spare,' he said. 'How would you like to come with me on a Staff Visit to RAAF Base Wagga?'

The next day I accompanied the Air Commodore and his senior staff to all his meetings with the various commanding officers of units at RAAF Wagga. 'I think it's important that all junior officers get to see what we do first hand,' he told me in his car on the way there. 'You need to get out of Headquarters as much as you can to see what our people do.'

I watched how a One Star commander listened, spoke, deliberated, questioned, joked, sat, responded, decided, commanded. No other boss ever gave me an opportunity like that, let alone a boss's, boss's boss. The second most senior commander in the Air Force.

No other boss saw me.

On the drive back to Melbourne he asked me 'What did you think?'

A good boss sees.

She sees you and stops to help you [to become who you are].

She sees because she is looking.

She is looking because she is confident that she doesn't know and that you may.

She hands you her map and says 'Take us there'.

Evidence.

The CO of the Squadron was waiting for his two F111s when they taxied in to their hangar bays. Two days later he was waiting for me.

'The future of military aviation - indeed aviation in general in Australia is at a crossroads,' he began. 'The Minister wants us to deal with this incident in a way that ensures continuing confidence in our responsible use of airspace to conduct our training.'

My legal boss had put it more bluntly when he'd tasked me as the Prosecuting Officer. 'If you don't get convictions, don't bother coming back.'

The two pilots had each flown a low level 'spacer pass' by the control tower at the bombing range 30 seconds apart. Their speed was just below the sound barrier, causing a sonic 'disturbance' that blasted the tower into $100,000 worth of damage. The range controller was showered in glass but otherwise unhurt and with a great story to tell.

I arrived at the Base on the Friday. The trial was to begin on Monday. Everyone at the Squadron was as respectful as my rank required in assisting me to gather evidence. But no-one wanted to help me to convict two of their own pilots.

'There was an airman who filmed it,' the CO had told me. I found him and asked if I could have a copy of the video. 'I gave it to the Squadron Safety Officer,' he told me. The Squadron Safety Officer shrugged. 'I deleted it,' he said. It wasn't the smoking gun, but it would have helped.

Three years later and I'm visiting the Directorate of Flying Safety in Canberra to give some legal advice. I'm chatting with the two Squadron Leaders about the F111 trial and ask their opinion about some of the questionable technical evidence given by the pilots.

'Would you like to see the video?' one of them asks. My jaw falls open.

My role as Prosecuting Officer in a Defence Force Disciplinary Act trial was to use an adversarial process to present admissible evidence that proved beyond reasonable doubt that two pilots had broken the law and should be punished to deter both them and others from doing the same. In SPEAR terms I was helping to Patrol the Space.

The role of the Directorate of Flying Safety is to use an inquisitorial approach to gather information about aircraft incidents to learn from them and pass on those lessons to all pilots to keep them safe. It was helping to Create the Space.

Same information - different Widgets.

Scared.

'Make the time to be scared of more interesting things.'

- Merlin Mann

Watching TV at 8.37pm on a Wednesday when my phone announced an email and I nearly vomited.

At my desk at 2.50pm when I'm summonsed by the boss and I pocket my shaking hands.

Exiting the ceiling loft at 11.15 on a Saturday morning watching work scenes in my head instead of the ladder and stepping into space and falling five metres onto a plastic bin and then concrete. 

I lay on my side for ten minutes wiggling my toes and visualising my spine and ribs and pulling plastic shards from my clothes and feeling reincarnated.

Work had nearly killed me.

I thought of the Merlin Mann quote. 

The earth had slammed me into its bosom demanding I make time to think about my fear dividend. 

Slumped in a car outside a chemist with a searing headache after a second day of prosecuting two military pilots. Stressed. Out of my depth. Thriving. 

Sitting at a boardroom table next to the Chief Operating Officer facing off ten government and commercial lawyers opposite and the contract that would make or break our start-up company in stalemate. Stomach churning. Overwhelmed. Thrilling.

Emails about inaccurate staff leave accounting making me nauseous? Ridiculous.

Calls about not filling out an HR form correctly constricting my breathing? Embarrassing. 

Peter Block says 'The price of freedom is anxiety.' Any decision worthwhile will make us scared. The key is to Step Back and confirm that our Widget is worth it.

I.

 'There is a lot of learning between 'It fell' and 'I dropped it'.

- Anonymous

'You got a sec?,' the strike pilot asked me. His cheeks still had the outline of his oxygen mask. 

I followed him to another room and he pushed a video casette into the VCR. 

'This is vision from the package that I just led.'

The black and white infra red images filmed from an F111C aircraft earlier that night three nautical miles away at 600 knots began playing. He was about to narrate when he paused, smiled, leaned back in his chair and gently closed the door from where three pilots from one of our allies were looking in. 

'See the cross-hairs?' he resumed. 'You'll see me move them over the corner of this intersection.' He jabbed at the screen where the white cross was settling on the outline of the top of a building. 'This was our target. The telephone exchange in the centre of the city. Top left hand corner. Remember it?'

I nodded. I had reviewed and approved all the strike package targets for the Commander earlier in the day.

'See those numbers here?' He pointed at one of several sets of readouts along the edge of the image. 'They are simulating my laser guided bomb coming in. Three, two, one. Perfect. Bang on. Target destroyed. Well, simulated. Now watch.'

The cross hairs remained in place for a few seconds. Then glided to the ghostly outline of the building on the bottom right of the intersection. Then back up. Pause. Then diagonally down. The image flickered to black. 

'Wrong building,' he said, punching the tape out of the recorder. 'I bombed the wrong corner of the intersection. I need you to tell me the consequences. I need you to brief me and the rest of the Squadron on the legal implications of my error. Can you do that?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Good,' he said. 'Thank you.'

There was a knock at the door then it opened to five bearded, filthy and grinning Special Forces soldiers. 

'Come in fellas,' the Air Commodore said, then to me 'Sorry - these blokes just want to see the video of us tracking them along a creek bed last night from five miles away. They're curious. Didn't hear a thing. Want to sit in?'

Game.

Airmen would ring the Warrant Officer Disciplinary to ask his opinion on what punishment that were going to be given if they were found guilty.

'That will be up to the CO,' Henry would say in his booming parade ground voice modulated for telephone. 'But I suggest you bring your toothbrush.'

He would always schedule trials for Fridays. Punishments took effect immediately so the convicted airman had lost a weekend to restriction of privileges or extra guard duty by the time I reviewed the transcript on Monday. It was Henry's insurance against me finding an error of law and the conviction being quashed.

Henry's tactics to stop the Law from interfering with Discipline didn't affect our relationship. As the Senior Airman on Base, he was fiercely protective of the welfare of the hundreds of airmen who feared him. He had no doubt about his Widget. Some asked him how he felt about having a Legal Officer around. 'I was the one who got the position established and got the Flight Lieutenant posted here,' he would answer, only slightly embellishing the truth. Henry was too good at his job to feel threatened by a junior officer lawyer.

We met and bantered every morning in his immaculate office with his polished pace stick resting on its cradle along the front edge of his desk. As his retirement date approached our meetings became later and he knocked off earlier. 'Working back, Henry?' I'd say at 11am. 'Just waiting for the Sergeants Mess Bar to open, Sir.'

He introduced me to his replacement. 'The Legal Officer comes to my office every morning at eight,' Henry told him. 'And I give Sir his list of jobs for the day.' The new guy looked baffled.

The Monday after Henry retired the new WOD rang me at 8.05 wondering why I wasn't in his office to get my list of jobs. I complied so he wouldn't feel foolish. He rang looking for me each day for a week after that. I never turned up. He stopped calling me.

I think of Henry and the new guy each time I've seen the leadership game being played in workplaces. Good people keep turning up to do work for bad bosses.

The boss assumes that his workers keep turning up and doing good work because of his leadership, management, wisdom, charisma or intellect. Because of the course he did on 'Working With Gen Y', the books he's read, his imposing office, his annual performance reviews of them, and his generous 'My Door's Always Open' policy. Because of his well-run staff meetings, the Thank You speech he made at the Staff Christmas Party, the witty asides at the Birthday Morning Teas, his reserved car space. Or because he's firm but fair. Or because they aspire to be like him one day.

Possibly.

More likely it's in spite of him.

They have mortgages and superannuation that need them to turn up and pride that demands they do good work.

Unlike me with Henry's replacement, they have to turn up and play the game.

Primary.

 'To defend Australia and her interests, Sir?' the Air Force First Year Defence Force Academy cadet said in answer to my question.

'Yes, but no, ' I said nodding towards the Navy Midshipman with her hand up. 

'To protect Australia's sea lanes, Sir?' she said.

'The main aim. What's the main aim of the Australian Defence Force,' I repeated. 

Only two hands remained in the air. I picked them off.

'No - not to assist in natural disasters. We do that, sure, but that's not why we exist. And no, not to assist in Peacekeeping. Again, we do it, but it's not the primary role of the military.'

I scanned the young faces staring back at me, barely clean of their mums' lipstick on their cheeks as they were farewelled into the arms of the Navy, Army and Air Force as Midshipmen and Officer Cadets.

'Those answers got you through the recruiting process, but none of them defines the job that you've signed up to for the next nine years. So let me tell you:

'To apply the maximum amount of violence permitted by law upon the enemy.' 

Some faces froze. Others began to grin.

'That's the aim of the Australian Defence Force,' I said, looking at each of their young faces in turn. 'To apply the maximum amount of violence permitted by law upon the enemy.' The job of an Officer is to ensure that those under your command use their weapons violently and lawfully. Which is why it's been said that, as Officers, you are a 'Manager of Violence'. Other people here will teach you about the management and the violence. I'm here to teach you about Military Law.'

It's obvious why the military fudges its advertised Widget. Organisations camouflage their Widget for many reasons. Most are to do with marketing and recruiting. 

This is where most of the difficulty applying Widget Thinking begins. If we don't advertise, recruit, contract, orientate, train, promote, manage, terminate - make decisions - using the Widget as our reference point, then we're navigating with a swinging compass without a True North.  

The latest scandal to hit the Australian Defence Force has had the talkback lines buzzing. 'We don't want our daughter joining the Army after we heard about this behaviour,' one father called in to say. 'We don't think it's safe for her.' 

Neurons.

'I'm sorry that I didn't seek your advice today,' the Air Commander said over drinks in the Mess, 'But I didn't have a neuron spare.' 

I'd watched from two seats along as he'd coordinated fighter aircraft launches into the skies over Northern Australia and beyond to defend it against waves of attack by the Kamarian Air Force. He was making a decision about every two minutes for eight hours.

What I wanted do say was 'You need to practise having a neuron spare, Sir. Better for you to practise and learn when the air battles are staged.' But I didn't. I was only a Flight Lieutenant Lawyer and he was a Group Captain Fighter Pilot and I wanted to make it to Squadron Leader. 

 'We didn't have the resources to stop and attend to the enemy wounded,' the Army Lieutenant Colonel Infantry Officer had explained to the International Committee of the Red Cross representative who reported this breach of the Law of War to me in Exercise HQ. 'They need to train as they would fight,' I wrote in my post-Exercise Report. 'They must learn what resources that they need to fight lawfully.' I scraped promotion to Squadron Leader.

 'We don't have time to comply with the various policies in this organisation,' the senior executive said to me as his peers in the audience nodded with folded arms. 'We're too busy doing our jobs.' More nodding and the beginnings of applause. 'You need to practise having a neuron spare,' I quoted myself. 'Those policies are laws and doing your job means doing it lawfully.' I glanced across at the CEO who was texting on his phone. 

Good decision making is a skill. Like any skill it needs to be practised until it becomes routine. We need to build the neural pathways by applying the Five Steps until doing so is unconscious. It's called being Professional.

The Air Commander wondered out loud how he could resolve his Rules of Engagement with the radar blips playing out on the huge screen covering the wall in front of us. It was the last wave of the week. 'Air-to-air missiles are not classed as 'aircraft' under International Law, Sir,' I said, loudly beginning my unsolicited advice.

He bought me a drink in the Mess that night.  'Let's kill a few of those neurons you made me exercise today,' he said.

Pause.

My friend Dan is a very experienced Air Traffic Controller. He teaches other Air Traffic Controllers how to safely separate airliners with hundreds of lives on board moving with closing speeds of up to half a kilometre a second tens of thousands of metres above the ground. (Dan has done this for years in the RAAF and Reserve as well - where closing speeds can be closer to a kilometre a second.) Constant decision-making in seconds with high consequences for failure is the nature of Dan's workplace.

Yet Dan nodded when I first told him about the first step towards a good decision being for the decision maker to step back. 

He explained how he teaches his trainees to do the same.

'They need to have a rote understanding of what to do in any situation,' Dan said. 'The novice Air Trafficker knows that if X happens they do Y. It's automatic and requires very little thought process.' 

'We want them to develop beyond that reactive drill. We want them to feel confident to explore and consider other options to situation X.  They can only evolve to this ability if they have the discipline of automatic response Y. If they instinctively know that Y is available to them, then they gain themselves time to be more creative in finding alternatives to Y. It might only be an extra few seconds, but that's often sufficient time for them to think of a better decision for an aircraft. It may save an airline thousands of dollars in fuel by flying a more direct route. If a controller can't find a better decision than Y, then they just default to Y.'

Dan's explanation is an excellent example of how rules and procedures in workplaces actually encourage creativity. They eliminate variables and force us to focus on what is available to us. They allow us to assume the ordinary so that we can explore the extraordinary - knowing that we have our boss's permission.  

At the very least, boundaries that define our scope of decision making force us to decide whether we want to find or create our own decision-making space with another employer or on our own. (Instead, some people choose to pound their fists against their organisation's boundaries demanding that they shift. Dan's Air Traffickers don't have that option.)

If Dan can routinely step back in his decisions that are measured in seconds with catastrophic consequences from error, then it should be easy for workplaces where results are usually measured in months and mistakes don't risk hundreds of lives.  

Dan has a simple way of seeing whether his trainees are applying the Step Back approach to decision making. 

'I walk behind them as they're sitting at their screens. If I see someone leaning forward, I gently pull their shoulders back into the chair.' 

My friend Liz told me about similar advice that she gives the Alternative Dispute Resolution practitioners that she trains and mentors. 'It's important that they don't get drawn too much into the details of the dispute between the two parties at the table,' she said.

'So I say to them: 'Make sure that you can always feel the back of your seat.' 

Tension.

In the Conclusion to the book  The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the authors state: 

‘Perhaps, above all, we observe in this record - more clearly than in any other documents we have seen - the contrary pulls of detail on the one hand and belief (or conviction or ideology) on the other.’  

These battles between evidence and bias, and the micro and the macro, are critical ones to recognise and win for any decision maker. 

The authors note that histories of decisions - whether insignificant or that such as faced by Kennedy; the destruction of the world- rarely see or even know the subtle flow of details and therefore underestimate their pushing and pulling on the mind of a decision maker.

This effect of detail on the ‘conscious and unconscious minds of decision makers, who see facts and form presumptions within frameworks of understanding shaped both by their personal interests and by their accumulated experience’ is further exaggerated when there are multiple contributors towards a decision.  Each has their biases and personal frameworks and agendas and projects their advice on a decision accordingly.  

Kennedy was under constant pressure from the military to use overwhelming force to solve the crisis, which was a seductively simple response, yet with potentially catastrophic consequences.  Fortunately for the world, the President had learned a bitter lesson about accepting the generals’ advice after the Bay of Pigs debacle early in his Presidency.  He even resists the taunt of  General Curtis Le May that Kennedy’s cautious response to the Soviet aggression is ‘almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.’  The President has the self-confidence and mental strength to not be influenced by Le May’s highly emotional ‘argument’ against the quarantine.

There are many lessons for decision makers and their advisers in the way in which President Kennedy behaved during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The need to reconcile the incessant tension between realities and beliefs is one of them.

Emotion.

In the Conclusion of ‘The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, the authors assess the decision-making of the Soviet and American leadership that is revealed almost word-for-word in the nearly seven hundred pages of taped crisis meetings in the book.

Khrushchev made his decisions alone and without seeking advice or analysis.  He ‘acted more from instinct than from calculation’, was an ‘impulsive risk taker’ and was described by aides as ‘reckless’.  Khrushchev had little experience or knowledge of foreign affairs and his understanding of the world was framed in simplistic Marxism-Leninism.  He made assumptions about Kennedy based purely on the President’s youth and family wealth, and saw his ‘flexibility’ as a weakness.  Khrushchev also suffered from an inflated sense of his influence on world affairs as a result of his mis-reading of the motivations for America’s responses to his previous decisions.  

In short, Khrushchev’s decision-making was driven by emotion more than reason.  If this made it difficult for the Americans to read and anticipate his actions, it must have been equally so for his generals and ministers.

In comparison, President Kennedy ‘did not make any impulsive decisions during the crisis’.  He ‘opened up much of his reasoning….and likely consequences of his choices before he made them.  He explained his thinking to a range of analyses and critiques from formal and informal advisers and even representatives of the British government.’  He also allows his advisers to ‘reason through the problems’.  

At the height of the crisis, the authors argue that Kennedy ‘seems more alive to the possibilities and consequences of each new development than anyone else’, remaining calm and lucid, and clear about his objectives. 

While Kennedy kept himself open to the advice of others, and had obviously nurtured a working relationship that meant his advisers felt confident enough to disagree with him, he was firm when he needed to be.  He overrode the generals’ planned air strike in retaliation for the shooting down of an American U2 aircraft, even though that was the response that he had initially agreed upon.

The ability to remain uninfluenced by bias is one of the most important qualities of a good decision maker.  It makes her thinking visible, her actions predictable and teachable and gives confidence to her team who may have to execute their own decisions that flow from hers. 

Kennedy used many tools to keep him focussed on the facts.  He verbalised his logic, exposing his thinking even to those outside his circle to avoid ‘groupthink’.  He had private venting conversations with his brother, the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy.  Most importantly, Kennedy did not surround himself with ‘Yes Men’.  

President Kennedy’s willingness to be transparent in his decision making and open in his uncertainties showed courage and were evidence of great leadership.

Donuts

I always ask for written feedback after a presentation. 

'Give the presentation a mark out of 10. 

If you didn't think that it was worth a 10, please tell me what I needed to have done differently for you to have given it a 10.' 

Feedback from 25 Squadron members after my Military Law presentation to them at RAAF Base Pearce yesterday. 

Questions.

‘The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis' is a verbatim account of all meetings that President Kennedy had with his advisers in mid-October 1962 in response to the Soviet Union installing nuclear missiles in Cuba - thus threatening the world with nuclear war.

Kennedy’s first meeting is a lesson in good decision-making.

He called together 12 advisers.

His advisers spoke 285 times.

The President spoke 66 times - mostly no longer than a sentence.

The first 11 times he spoke he asked questions and listened to the answers.  

The first non-question from him was ‘Thank you’.

He then asked 21 more questions - a total of 32 questions - before making a statement.

His first statement to the meeting was a summary of the information that had been given to him.

He then asked six more questions and listened to each answer.

His 40th statement was ‘Well now, let’s decide what we ought to be doing’.

His asked nine more questions.

He made four asides.

His 54th statement was to ask that the meeting reconvene later in the evening. 

He made three more statements.

He followed these with six questions.

Then two statements, a question, two statements, four more questions, one statement.

He ended with a question.

President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world, facing a decision that could result in nuclear armageddon, asked four times as many questions as he made statements.

The only decision that he made was that they should have another meeting.

Teacher

Flight Sergeant Tanya Fraser, CSM, represents the hundreds of cadets, sailors, soldiers, airmen and officers whose professionalism, kindness and patience have taught me and others about the privilege of leadership during my 30+ years of involvement in military organisations.

The great advantage of military service is that unless you're an airman recruit about to get off the bus on the first day of Rookies, you're almost always in charge of someone. A Corporal points an open palm at a bewildered and pimply recruit and barks 'You! Yes, YOU! Get these people into three orderly ranks. NOW!' Instant leadership practice with compliant followers and immediate 'feedback' yelled in response to every mistake.

(It's not really Leadership of course, any more than a police officer's charisma leads you to breathe into her breathalyser. But it's Leadership with its L Plates on.)

In the military, your teachers call you 'Sir'. The really good ones patiently and generously allow you to 'lead' them, when really they are shaping and educating you. Luckily for me I have been taught by some of the best.