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Chapter 1: What insights does a fighter pilot offer about achieving goals?
What is it about fighter pilots? No matter what you see or where you go, you're always thinking, how can this be done a little bit better? 95% of our decisions are based on our own perceptions, which means that they're not based in reality. And the great thing about an execution gap is it's an emotion-free space for you to get curious as to why it exists.
People believe their opinions and ideas outweigh reality. Leaders often just give a vomit of stuff that needs to get done to their team. You can only solve one problem at a time. The thing that gets in the way is fear, not ego.
Christian, dude, it's incredible to have you on the show. I'm very excited about our conversation today.
Thanks, Ryan.
Chapter 2: How does fear impact decision-making in leadership?
It's an absolute honor to be here. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk today and see if we can share some insights for your audience.
Yeah, so when we were talking in the green room, you used this word that I think It is the obstacle of our day, at least in this moment. And it is uncertainty. I think that most of the stress, anxiety, you'd also use the word panic in the green room. I think one of the cores, if not the core root cause of so much of this heightened tension we deal with is uncertainty.
So maybe break down with your clients with your life with your experience, like, where is this uncertainty coming from that I think everybody who's listening to this show, in some regard, feels every single day of their life and is and is dealing with in hopefully positive ways.
But I think unfortunately, there's a lot of negative a lot of negative ways that we're dealing with this uncertainty as well.
Yeah, look, I think uncertainty has been there for hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, if you're a caveman and you went out hunting, there was no certainty that A, you'd find something, and B, it's not going to bite you back.
So I think uncertainty has been a factor of humanity, which is why some people thrive and grow and build empires and businesses within that uncertainty, and others kind of get crushed by it. I would say the only... got a radical change in the last 10 years as we just talk about it more. And we talk about uncertainty as if it can be tamed. I have a book coming out in September.
It's called A Flawless Leadership. And the premise of flawless leadership is to understand that Perfection, which has its origins in Latin and in scholarly texts, is an environment where basically you can control everything. For something to be perfect, it has to be completely controlled and delivered both internally and externally. The way that I define a flawless leader is a leader who
who understands that perfection's unattainable. And even the origin of the word flawless comes from Vikings. It's a warrior word. And it means that my stone is not broken. And it's more about what you can control.
So when we look at uncertainty as human nature is geared towards survival, we tend to project externally all of our problems, like it's the world, rather than internally, which is, okay, the world is going to be uncertain. It's a given.
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Chapter 3: What is the ORCA debrief framework and how can it improve execution?
You have to have a conversation. You have to scope it out. You have to talk about your feelings. What feels good? How do you want the room to flow? And what I love about the fighter pilot way of thinking and working is
is everything we do, and you have to understand that a fighter pilot, we're basically a reprogrammed human being because everything that we're programmed to do as a human to survive is the opposite of the skill sets and the mental models you need to be a fighter pilot.
So what we understand is everything in the world of a fighter pilot, you start with a target and work backwards, and then you iterate your actions to get there, whereas a human being does the opposite. A human being says, here's who I am and what I do, and this is where I want to go, which means that you're really not going to transform yourself or evolve yourself into the person you need to be.
And at risk right now, is anyone in the intellectual space, anyone who is in the leadership space. Because if you keep approaching leadership as you do today, which is managing what exists, three years from now, you're not going to have a job because AI needs direction. So in an ironic way, we've gone through this phase where technology has dehumanized us to some degree.
We were talking about it before we got on the podcast about how technology is making us neurotic. because we really only do things based on what the technology tells us to do. Whatever the messages we receive, whatever the email that's just been sent, whatever our job tracking software tells us. So we've actually gone backwards into being these really reactive leadership models.
And AI needs the opposite. It needs us to be deeply human because that's what it can't do. It needs us to go back into the critical thinking structures of the brain. It requires us to get creative. It requires us to understand the emotional impact that we need the intelligence to deliver. So I'm kind of hopeful that
My job is to help people with this, is to help you reconnect way more at the human layer, to be more free to go back into those models of building relationships, talking about emotion, being engineered towards making an impact on the world and the people around you. rather than being effectively the doing side of what your technology is telling you to do today?
Lots to dig in there. So one, I did not know the genesis of the word flawless. And I love the fact that it means, what is it? My stone is unbroken. Is that what you said? What was it? Yeah, my rock.
My rock. Is not broken.
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Chapter 4: How can leaders overcome uncertainty in their organizations?
And that, to me, resonated so much more in my life than 10,000 hours. Because there's things that I feel... top, top 5%, top 3%, top 1% efficient in certain tasks. And I certainly haven't put 10,000 hours in them, but I have absolutely probably put 10,000 narration. So that really spoke to me. And, and I will say after doing 450 plus episodes of this show, the idea of curiosity is
is pulled through almost every one of these high achieving guests like yourself who've been on the show. It's like a, it's almost like a core tenant of achievement is is curiosity. And I think iterative thinking and curiosity kind of go together. So let's say I'm sitting here, I'm listening to this show. And Maybe curiosity and this idea of iterating, it just hasn't been programmed into me.
Maybe I came up through corporate world where it was just task, stamp, swipe, task, stamp, swipe. I was actually penalized for thinking iteratively, for being curious about things. Stay in your lane, do your job, do what you're told. This is what I pay you to do, right? There's so many people who are now
I feel like in the way the world is today and all the entrepreneur porn that's out there and the access to entrepreneurial opportunities that AI is creating, their brain is starting to open up.
Hey, maybe I can be an entrepreneur, but they've been almost like programmed for most of their life to stay in their box, to stay in their lane, to incremental improvements, you know, one step at a time kind of stuff.
How do you recommend to your clients and the companies that you're working with that they can maybe break free of some of that linear thinking and get into a more iterative, curiosity-driven culture? How do you start to build that if it doesn't exist inside your organization or yourself today?
Yeah, well, iteration is really the talent that an inventor has. The talent... You know, I think entrepreneur is a bad word now because there's more people that are entrepreneurs that aren't than are. I prefer to think of founders, people that found something that wasn't ever there before.
Yeah, or builders. I really like the word builders.
Yeah. And they found a problem that needed to be solved. You know, I think one of the, again, the challenge with an entrepreneur is when you approach entrepreneurialism with a linear mindset, you say, I have a product, everyone needs this, but you haven't actually asked anyone. And then you wonder why it doesn't work.
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Chapter 5: What role does curiosity play in iterative thinking?
It means you don't bring your biases. You don't bring your opinions. You're creating a picture of the future that's completely objective. We know where it is. We know how to measure it. And we believe in our soul that it's achievable. So that's the first step that most people aren't very good at. Everything in the future is generic and subjective.
And we create these objectives in another system I'll talk about later. The R is the result or reality. And if you look at the neuroscience on how human beings make decisions, right? 95% of our decisions are based on our own perceptions, which means that they're not based in reality.
So when you do anything in life, the only moment in time that really supports your decision-making in the future is being very honest about your reality. If you want to get healthier and that's your intention, but the reality is you reach for a bag of chips with every meal, you're chomping a Snickers bar after dinner every night. then your reality is out of kilter with your intention, right?
So between objective and reality lives a gap. And we define that as the execution gap. And the great thing about an execution gap is it's an emotion-free space for you to get curious as to why it exists. And that's what the C stands for, curiosity or the cause of this gap. And what's really important about this process in the way the human brain works, if you go to a museum and
And you see those plasma balls, the big glass balls, and they have like electricity going everywhere inside of them. And if you put your hands and all your fingers on the glass ball, you'll see the electricity dancing around everywhere.
It's kind of weak and sippid and it's just... If you put one finger on the glass ball, you get this incredibly intense piece of electricity flowing into your finger. There's no... It's not dancing around everywhere. It's locked in. The brain is a plasma ball. It's just electricity.
And when you reflect on something, if you reflect on 10 things, you can't access the deep recesses of the memory and you're working with assumption, not reality. So what happens is the objective is the finger on the ball. The reality is the electricity and the curiosity is, well, why is there a gap in between?
So you get this really powerful focused ability to access the full structures of the brain. So it's deep, meaningful, intentional reflection. And it's in the context of what good looks like in the future rather than why am I a bad person and why am I a loser and why is it not working? When we get curious, we're just looking for one thing, one root cause that's within my control.
And once I understand what it is and I can control it, the A is the action. What do I do tomorrow morning? Or what do I do right now to close the execution gap? So in this one really neat conversation, you're connecting to the future. You're assessing it versus today. you're looking over your shoulder at yesterday, which is the only real thing that's happened.
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Chapter 6: How can businesses effectively set and manage expectations?
The last mission, you're flying as a force ship in contested airspace with 2,000-pound bombs under your wing, and you've got to drop them on the target within five seconds. So throughout that process of iteration, and this is what we've worked with 19 NFL teams at Afterburner. And the reason we did that is the first NFL team we worked with won the Super Bowl.
And what you find is too often within these systems, people believe their opinions and ideas are outweigh reality. Another great example is the book Moneyball and the movie, which was a very fact-based, reality-driven methodology that delivered success.
And even though we have all of this evidence, and even though we know that we make better decisions when we're grounded in reality, the human bias always tends towards, I know best, this is easier than it's going to be. And if we just do something new, it's going to be better. It's a little bit like if I just buy a new washing machine, I'm going to fix the broken one's going to be fixed.
But the reality is where you can probably just fix the existing one and you don't need a new one. So we've moved into this world where hypervelocity, not only hypervelocity of just the speed of the world, but the velocity in which an expectation is believed to be met.
So we effectively, you book an Uber, you book a Waymo, you order your Uber Eats, your expectation is that within five minutes I get an Uber, within 20 minutes I get my meal. And anything outside of that elicits an emotional response. You get very upset. This
speed of expectation delivery is subconsciously now programmed into every leader inside organizations big or small founders entrepreneurs businesses with four people businesses with 400 000 people and we work with all of them and a big part of of working with with leaders is to say hey look you're setting expectations that take months to achieve
And you're anxious because you're not achieving them on the first day. We need to start getting really good at expectation management and daily setting of expectation. And when we talk about daily setting of expectation, very rarely does anyone wake up in the morning and write down the three things they need to achieve today.
People wake up, they have their coffee, their brain's all over the place because we're coming out of our REM sleep and our expansive default mode network. And we've got to switch into the task positive network of the brain, which is the getting stuff done. And usually what that means is you open your emails and you start going through your emails. So you're pushed around by the technology.
So a big part of execution and getting things done Let's use an NBA player, right? An NBA player at some stage as a child, they decide they want to be in the NBA, right? That's called an intention. And just because you want it doesn't mean you're going to get it, right? So we start with intention and then we have to think about setting a destination.
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between ego and effective leadership?
And I was in a room with a coach of one of the most successful college teams and we're having a conversation and the conversation was like, what happened to you guys? Six years ago, you used to come and see me like three, four times a year. You'd get us all the coaches together and you'd come and we'd just go off site for two days.
I haven't even heard from you guys for six months and you wonder why we're all going with a different brand. So the first place to start your strategy is outside your eyeballs, on the other side of your eyes. Then you reframe, what can we do to make that? I built an entire multi-million dollar business with this. I had a business that had no products, no services at all. It didn't even exist.
It was a brand new company. Me and my best friend started it. We had an industry and the industry started as providing services security in post-war-torn countries, and then it morphed into humanitarian services because we iterated in the field. And what we would do is we would... This wasn't conscious, by the way. This is how strong biases are.
That bias towards curiosity and the bias towards doing things a little bit better meant that we were doing that orca thing with everyone in town, and this was specifically in Kabul in Afghanistan. So we flew into Afghanistan with nothing. Sweat equity...
meager retirement savings from being a fighter pilot for 11 years and we just had coffees and beers with everyone every single day we were always out with the people doing the work and we would ask hey g'day i'm boo what's your name i'm mike what are you doing here mike i'm building i'm with this company we're building a road from kabul to kandahar ah awesome that's that's going to really change things up here that's going to be a massive contributor to the economy
You must really enjoy the work. Yeah, I do. It's really challenging. How's it going? Oh, it's going really well. We're doing this, we're doing that. We're dealing with a lot of the challenges. And we had done our homework and we had this conversation a few times and we'd learned that it's Afghanistan. Nothing's easy, right?
And the biggest cost that we could understand in that part of the world was labor. So we're sitting there and we're like, oh, okay. You know, we understand that it's difficult to secure the environment, you know, that there's terrorists and IEDs and all this sort of stuff. And we're like, yeah, yeah. So it's costing us an absolute fortune.
So the result is it's costing us a lot of money, all right, and actually the project's starting to fall behind. So we're curious about why does it cost a lot of money? Where do you recruit your people from? And we go through this whole iteration. We said, what if we could get people that were just as capable on half the salary? Would that be of use?
And they're like, yeah, that would really unlock a lot of potential for us here. That would be because we can have more people and we can do more work. And we said, okay, we'll get back to you by Friday and we'll come up with a plan. together. So we went away and we knew that India, Nepal, Philippines, there's very capable people there.
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Chapter 8: How can iterative processes lead to organizational success?
And the fear is... that if I do something wrong and people are aware of it, I am not a worthy person. I am a loser. And what we're actually attacking is identity. And when we talk about identity, what we're talking about are the behaviors that accumulate in us define who we are.
And as James Clear talks about in his book, Atomic Habits, is you're not going to change your habits until you change the identity, which is the forward-leaning mindset part. The biggest challenge when it comes to iteration is the personal attachment to failure because you've got something wrong. And these are all, again, they're just biases. The survival mode is, well,
you know, I need to be seen to be good at everything or else no one will follow me and help me kill mammoths and saber tooth tigers. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of, you kind of also mentioned as well, the 120% goal and I got 105. Like I was just working with another, you know, the biggest video conferencing company on the planet.
And every year the finance team sets targets that they never achieve. And then, There's this perception that they do better each year. So it must be because we keep setting these unattainable targets. But the science is the opposite. The science is when you set an achievable target and you outperform it, then you get all this dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins in the bowl.
We've forgotten that you don't have to win massive all the time. You can win small. And when you set achievable goals and then also set a stretch goal. So if I work at 60%, I achieve my goal. I achieve my objective. But if I want to unlock the extra 40, I go further. And you ride the energy and the positivity of the small win to get you to the stretch win.
Because no one likes to constantly lose. But that's what most businesses feel like because 99% of programs run late and over budget. So we're always in crisis mode. We're always full of cortisol. As men, we're carrying bellies at the age of 40 and 50 because we're just holding on to all our stress down there because we've never set ourselves up to win.
So a big part of understanding ego is understanding how you see yourself. So again, if you look at those 400 missions, every one of them is incrementally more difficult than the one before. But through iteration, we've learned that fighter pilots can handle this rate of growth. And that rate of growth is what we call pushing out the comfort zone.
We don't operate outside the comfort zone because when you're outside the comfort zone, you experience what they call the amygdala hijack, which is effectively the body thinks like an animal. It doesn't think like an intelligent human. So when you're outside your comfort zone, your learning regresses rather than grows.
So sometimes in a business, you'll see organizations like, right, let's embrace the guys. Let's get outside our comfort zone. It's like, okay, let's do that and go backwards. That's a really great idea. What you want to do, and let's go to the Little League, is how long is a Little League season?
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