Admit it and take your medicine
The idea
The fastest way to get better at anything is a room where mistakes are named out loud, starting with the person in charge, and nobody’s ego is allowed to get in the way.
Where it comes from
The Lion’s Gate by Steven Pressfield, his 2014 oral history of the Six Day War, told by the people who fought it. The voice in this passage is Giora Romm, then a twenty-two-year-old Mirage pilot in 119 Squadron, who went on to become the Israeli Air Force’s first jet ace and, much later, a major general.
The story
Before the war, an older pilot asked Romm what he thought was the most important thing Ezer Weizman had done for the air force. Weizman had commanded it from 1958 to 1966 and was its boldest and most flamboyant leader. Romm thought the answer was easy: the Mirages, the French-built fighters every young pilot wanted to fly.
The veteran told him he was wrong. Weizman’s real contribution was the culture of the ruthlessly candid debriefing.
Here is how it worked. At the end of every training day the whole squadron sat down in the briefing room. The commander, Ran Ronen, stood at the front and went through every mistake made that day. Not only the young lieutenants’ mistakes. His own as well, first and without flinching. Then he made everyone else speak with the same honesty. If you had got something wrong, you said so in front of your peers and you took your medicine. In Romm’s words: “Ego meant nothing. Improvement was everything.”
Romm tells a second story about the same commander. In air-to-air training, a kill was awarded on gun camera film, and the rule was that you had to hold your gunsight on the other aircraft for a full second. But a habit had grown up called the demonstration shot, where a pilot fired the camera from a position that was not quite a kill, just to prove in the debrief that he had been on the other man’s tail and not the other way round. It was a way to look good in the room.
One day Ronen killed the practice. From then on the camera could only be activated with the opposing aircraft dead centre in the sights, held there for sixteen consecutive frames. A sure kill or nothing. The pilots groaned, and he told them he had no compassion for them. Romm says the next day, when the squadron went up to dogfight, the standard of flying rose by something like forty percent. Every pilot raised his game because there was no longer any way to fake it.
Notice what the veteran did not say. He did not say the secret was better aircraft or braver pilots. What the squadron had was a room where the truth about yesterday’s flying was spoken plainly, by everyone, every day. That is an advantage you can build without buying anything.
A question to sit with
When did you last say “that one was my mistake” in front of your whole team, before anyone else had to?