I Love Failing
It was after 9/11. We had been in Afghanistan for a while and conducted hundreds of missions. But we hadn't had a mission this big yet. We were going after a Tier One target (also known as an "at the top of the list" terrorist).
A Navy Seal Team was planted on a mountaintop not too far away from the location where the terrorist was. The Seal Team was on a "special reconnaissance" (SR) mission. An SR mission is where they are not expected or ordered to engage the enemy. Instead, their specific mission is to stay hidden in camouflage, not move (literally, not move a muscle to avoid being detected), and report back to headquarters as more intelligence is gathered. The intel they were collecting and providing was a mixture of video, photo, audio, and their best-educated guesses as a team of the actual situation on the ground.
The last words that came in from the Seal Team were: "He's here; it's him; our guess is he won't be here for long."
From their intel, we – the crews of the black special operations helicopters and the elite special operations team – planned, rehearsed, and briefed what the assault on the target was going to be like. We didn't have a lot of time, so we did this in a quick fashion.
The night came. Man-o-man, it was dark. There was no moon, no ambient light; this village was in the middle of nowhere. It was sooooooo dark. As good as they were, the night vision goggles simply didn't give enough visibility and acuity to provide the aircrews even the slightest bit of comfort.
Here we go. Buckle up.
One of my closest friends is my co-pilot. I'm the pilot that is leading the entire flight in. Since I'm leading the flight, he's on the controls. I'm coordinating more with the aircraft behind me, the ground force commander – Paul, the door gunners, and headquarters. It's a lot of radio chatter and a lot of heavy thinking.
I'm also directing the co-pilot on where to go and how to fly. I continually gave him coaching and minor course corrections: "Hey, you are doing great; you are five miles out from the target." Thirty seconds later, it would be, "You are a bit right of our course line…come right five degrees." We would get behind a tad, and I would say, "We are about forty seconds behind… let's speed up five knots."
He was doing good. He was doing exactly what I was telling him to do. And he needed to. We needed to hit this target plus or minus thirty seconds from when we said we were going to arrive. That way, everyone was aligned and synched up: Gunships, the elite commandos riding on the helicopters, the headquarters team, etc. This was going to be a "weapons-free" assault, meaning; everyone on the target was going to be an enemy, and we should expect heavy resistance…so be ready to jump into the fight will full fervor.
"We are thirty seconds out," I said to the team and my co-pilot.
My Commander, who was on the aircraft with me, said, "Doug, I think we are going to fly past the target?" He wasn't alarmed or didn't sound that way to me. He said it more in a way that communicated, "Hmmm, this is probably not really happening, but it looks like it is?"
Well, it was happening. We were getting ready to fly past the target. We were "screaming" with too much speed past the target. And it wasn't my co-pilot's fault for two reasons: (1) He didn't have as good of a view as I did because the building we were assaulting was out my door and not his; and (2) He was doing exactly what I was telling him to do with the flight controls as I coached and course corrected his inputs.
So, in short, this was my mistake. And I had to fix it. Fast.
I tell the co-pilot, "I have the controls!" I grab the flight controls, throw on the brakes by dumping power, pull back on the stick (or cyclic); and, to everyone's surprise, I don't fly past the landing zone. Instead, I land on the landing zone. More accurately, I crash into the landing zone.
As bad as it was, it wasn't fatal – and the aircraft was still flyable. BUT, once I flew the damaged aircraft from the target, I wasn't going to be able to come back and pick up Paul and his team of commandos. The helicopter was too fouled up for that.
There were guns firing everywhere, a damaged aircraft on the target, and I tell Paul, "Hey man, I'm not going to be able to come back and pick you up right away…I will have to figure something out to get you guys off the target. Do you still want to continue with your assault?"
As cool as a cucumber, Paul says, "We're good to go, Doug. See you later."
Sidenote: That incident where my Commander says we are flying past the target, me grabbing the flight controls from my co-pilot, landing and crashing on the target, guns a blazing, my conversation with Paul...all of this took place in like eighteen seconds. It, suffice to say, was a whirlwind.
Over the next few hours, the whirlwind continued; it was harrowing, scary, innovative, collaborative, and messy.
Nobody died. Nobody got hurt. It was a crazy mission.
Guys were coming up to me – both the ground force commandos and my fellow special operations aviators – and telling me how amazing it was that we were able to work through extreme chaos. They thought it was amazing that we had synchronized the tapestry of various military hardware and personnel together, where we safely exited a situation that could have been one of those "horror" stories that we knew too well from previous fatal battles.
Candidly, it felt good to be safe. It felt good to be patted on the back for preventing a bigger disaster.
But this mission wasn't done. Not yet.
Soon thereafter, we grabbed all the aircrews that were on that mission – both officers and enlisted. And not just those on the mission but the rest of the aviation team who weren't directly involved in the mission.
There I was, standing in front of the entire group, in front of a whiteboard and a flatscreen LCD. We started the "debriefing", or what we called an "After Action Review", with the video from my cockpit that showed every detail of the mission. And when I say "every detail" was shown, I mean every single nook and cranny. Every human error, every leadership failure, every squiggly under-the-rock that would – quite frankly – make most people (including me) cringe. It makes you queasy to watch it, talk about it, debrief it, and put under the microscope your failure for all to see. It brings you nausea to watch in and know we were a breath away from lives being lost. All because of my mistakes.
It was super difficult to walk through that.
It was humbling.
And it was beautiful.
A huge group of professionals gathered and jumped into a 100% audit of how we did. We could've done the opposite – and high-fived each other that we made it out of that situation with only a few million dollars of damage to an aircraft. We could have celebrated that we didn't have a single scratch on a human being.
But we didn't. Lest we forget, and go into the next mission; and make some (or all) of the same mistakes next time… and something more personal gets damaged than landing gear or sheet metal.
We went to the wrestling mat and fully debriefed each other with full candor – and full respect – on how to do it better the next time.
Is it easy to do? No. It's hard.
It is worth it. Oh my, YES.
In Brene Brown's book Dare to Lead, she says, "…there is absolutely no innovation without failure."
Said another way, we can't create, imagine, innovate, improve, and grow without mistakes and failure being part of the mix.
How many soldiers are alive because a group of soldiers sat in a tent and admitted what they did wrong; and then walked out of there promising – and delivering – on doing it differently and better in the future?
I can't answer that empirically with a number. But my gut, and probably yours too, says, "At least some people aren't dead because of the learning through failure."
Some of you are already crushing this concept. When you plan an event: A military mission, a corporate event, a Sales Kick-off, or a keynote presentation, you immediately do two things first: (1) You calendarize the event, and then, just as important, (2) You calendarize the debriefing or After-Action Review immediately following the event.
For the rest of you, this sounds foreign. That's okay. Don't over-engineer it. But don't avoid it. Instead, start with two simple steps.
Schedule the debriefing any and every time you schedule an "event." If your quarterly earnings call is on March 31st from 9:00-11:00 am ET, then schedule an internal debrief from noon to 1:00 pm over a working lunch.
Have a plan for what the debrief is going to look like. There are some really simple models, some really complicated models, and everything in between. Start with something super simple. It could be, "Hey gang, what went well and what didn't go well in today's earnings call?" And then listen, take notes; and then, most importantly, inject the learnings into the planning stages for the next quarterly earnings call.
Learning through failure takes guts. It takes intentionality. It's uncomfortable. The word "failure" feels nasty. But I've come to love the debriefing process. I've come to love the lessons. I've come to love the actuality of getting better from them. I, candidly, have come to love failure.