The Philosophy

Taking years to train people to perform highly complex skills to a high standard but having them unable to employ the skills in conditions they haven’t seen before because they have been drilled on replication rather than application is not an effective way to do business. My professional world is a swirl of changing global and environmental contexts, and yet nowhere in our instructor training do we teach people how to teach understanding – it’s just something that experienced instructors pick up through experience, and that wasn’t good enough for me anymore.

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Doing better required helping our instructors to be better, not just changing the way we teach them but also what we teach them to teach. We needed a fundamental rewire of what the military actually views as important in flying instruction. The stated preferences are all about decision making, captaincy, airmanship - the revealed preferences focus almost exclusively on technical skills and the ability to teach and assess those. Mainly because it is easier to put an assessment rubric against them, not because they are most valuable.

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Around this time I came across the concept of Triple-Loop Learning which built on the work of Argyris and Schön while writing my PGCE – the idea of not just improving the outcome (single-loop) or improving the system (double-loop) but improving how the system thinks about itself (triple-loop). Taking the decision owners back to their own assumptions and preconceptions, not to challenge or confront them but to go one step further and push those leaders to consider why they hadn’t challenged their own assumptions in so long?

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It's a lot, and at first glance it’s miles outside my lane as a helicopter instructor, but I disagree. I’m a specialist generalist in the art and science of people development and thinking about thinking. I am a specialist in helping practitioners think differently about their craft - you can call it pattern matching, or innovation, or being contrarian. I call it difficult and useful. There’s always another layer. For anything that we do that really matters, the real magic happens one layer below what is obvious – it’s about getting underneath the pattern, the behaviour or the assumption. It’s about moving beyond improving towards evolving – developing better performance is great, but the real reason that I do what I do with the intensity that I do it is to help people understand themselves and their problems better. To help people and organisations ask better questions and refuse to take the clean, easy question or explanation but instead to dig once more for the real problem because that’s the one that brings lasting, meaningful, foundational change.

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Fixing these problems and seizing these opportunities is difficult because almost all of the problems that manifest at an individual or local level often have systemic causes. You can fix the symptoms at the same time but convincing those in power to sit with the discomfort of confronting the fact that not only the system but their assumptions about the system are different from what they thought needs a very high threshold for discomfort. Culture change takes a significant investment of time, energy and patience, working at different levels across an organisation – an especially hard sell when nothing is really broken and everything is “fine” – but in the long run it’s not harder than fixing the same problem over and over for 15 years. Trust me.

Real, raw, fierce honesty often carries the day here – once people see that you care and that you are willing to take risks with your personal reputation for the benefit of them and their organisation then there is a willingness to trust you with their professional capital. In organisations today speed is everything but this kind of deep work takes time - you can have it quick, you can have it cheap, or you can have it done well, but at best you have two of the three.

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It's not really about personal, professional or organisational development after a certain point, it’s about relationships. It always is, really. Looking for root causes, commonalities and golden threads can make complex ideas seem almost reductive at times but if you can build a relationship where the response to a poorly-judged intervention or suggestion can be immediate, unfiltered and honest: “that’s a bit strong”; “I think you’ve joined dots that aren’t there”; “those are your thoughts, not mine” – then you’re getting close. It’s a relationship that is honest enough to allow the directness of the immediate reaction but strong enough that they can then sit with it, think about it, and the second response is more nuanced. The safety in the ideal relationship allows the first reaction, and that releases some of the pressure/tension that the poor question created – if the pressure isn't released then there may well not be space for the more reflective response, and things stall. Its psychological safety taken one step further – not just safe enough to share, but safe enough to push back. The work that I’m asking the client to do with their system, to challenge the assumptions underneath the questions that are or aren’t asked, is surfaced in the moment. The relationship is a practice ground for what we are talking about. The ability to hold serious ideas and challenges with lightness, to laugh at ourselves and our dilemmas – this doesn’t diminish the work, it enables it. Mischief, inventiveness, playfulness – these are the elements that lift the work from being something that you do to being something that you can’t wait to do.

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I’ve spent years moving beyond teaching people how to fly and fight in the air, into how to understand what they do when they are flying, and finally into understanding who they are when they are teaching others to do those things. It’s both art and science. The science provides the foundation, the rigour, the underpinning. But beyond a certain point you have to feel when the right time to make the intervention is; you have to sense how much is too much in a certain moment – when to push for more, when to back off and allow things to settle. It’s different for everyone, and there’s a real joy to doing that, to taking the skills and knowledge and experience and making it yours in the moment of delivery. Like a dance, or improv of some kind – definitely tinged with fear when you’re pushing hard because you’re meant to be the expert and what will people think if you make a misstep but I’ve taught more from my mistakes and screw-ups than I ever have from perfectly-executed instruction. Because being willing to take the educated, calculated risk; to explain why it did or didn’t work and why it was worth the risk in the first place and then to do it a bit better next time, all live and in real time and embracing the rawness of the errors while maintaining the safety and security that deep learning needs – that’s real freedom and real responsibility.

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Freedom to be energetic, irreverent, to reach for the right tool at the right time regardless of where you learned it. Freedom to follow where the work needs to take you without fear of the invisible policeman. Freedom to trust yourself, your client and your decision-making, fully and without qualification. The responsibility is heavier, for everyone involved – when you take the decision to strike out on your own path you bear the responsibility for your own route-finding, and for keeping everyone safe. That change in thinking is triple-loop learning in action – not only being totally responsible for your own actions and decisions, but responsible for adapting the way you think about how you make those decisions in the moment. That’s a responsibility that I actively seek out.