8:00 – 10:30 p.m.

The Denver Summit concluded with a powerful message delivered by two fighter pilots.

Tracy LaTourrette and John Hilterman are part of the popular Afterburners, a group of some 50 fighter pilots who have trained 1.5 million business executives on the Flawless Execution Model(tm).

The main speaker was LaTourrette, a highly decorated officer who has logged 3,000 hours of time in the F-16, AWACS and other aircraft. She's flown missions all over the world, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Turkey and has flown numerous missions in protection of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. LaTourrette is currently flying with the Colorado National Guard.

"I'm an Air Force fighter pilot," she exclaimed energetically as she took the stage. "My call sign is 'Jackie O.' "

LaTourrette explained that each member of the Afterburners has been an actual Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps fighter pilot. "Most of us own our own businesses. We focus on delivering outstanding customer service. We deal with changing technology. And we teach and apply the things we've learned flying fighter aircraft."

A video clip showed that - unlike the hot-dogging Maverick and his cohorts in the box office hit "Top Gun" - real fighter pilots have a singular focus when in the cockpit. "That pilot in the video was twisted around in his seat, trying to keep sight of one thing and one thing only," she declared: "the bad guy, the threat."

It's the same in the business world, she urged. "If you lose sight, you lose the fight. If you ever lose sight of your threats to mission success, you will always lose the fight. It's true flying fighters, and it's true for you in the corporate real estate environment as well."

LaTourrette then outlined the Flawless Execution Model(tm) and its six key steps to successful mission planning.

1. Determine the mission objective. "This is actually the toughest part of the process," she said. "It must be clear, measurable, and achievable. And it must support the future picture. You can't just say, 'Grow the business.' That's not good enough."

2. Identify the threats. "Often organizations have a tough time visualizing the threat," LaTourrette said. "You have to know who you're up against. You have to consider external threats and also internal threats within your organizations."

3. Identify the available resources. "Who's on your team?" she asked. "What physical assets and financial assets are available? In the squadron, we get everybody involved from the very beginning so we start off with buy-in and understanding of the reasons that went into the final decision."

You'll win some battles on your own, she acknowledged. "But ultimately, when it comes down to it, if we want to win the entire war we must operate as a cohesive team."

4. Evaluate lessons learned. This step is crucial if you want to improve execution, LaTourrette emphasized. "We must have specific steps to improve communication. What are we going to do help that 'lesson learned' come to fruition? These must be clearly written and specific so everybody can benefit from them. If you were to fly this same mission tomorrow, what would you do differently? What worked? What didn't? Take a little time to consider the lessons learned of the teams that have gone before you."

5. Determine courses of action/tactics. "This is basically the how-you-get-it-done part," she explained. "What we'll typically do is take our planning team and divide into smaller groups. We like to tell one of those groups to assume that they have unlimited resources. That group we'd normally call the Blue Sky team, and they bring a unique perspective to the team. We bring the groups back and analyze their ideas.

"Next we invite the Red team. It's the Red team's job to poke holes in that plan your team just created. Then the Red team leaves, and we go back and modify our plan. At the end of step 5, we have a pretty solid plan. But how often does it go exactly as planned? Not very often in my world."

6. Plan for contingencies. Fighter pilots certainly have to plan for contingencies, LaTourrette confirmed. "What if there's weather over my target? What if 15 enemy aircraft show up and we were expecting only two?"

It's important to make our decisions now, she said, so when we're out there with the competition we already know what we're going to do.

Even with the best of planning, though, challenges remain - in the air and in the office. Two particularly big threats are task saturation and channelized attention.

"As task saturation increases, errors increase," LaTourrette warned. "As errors increase, performance decreases. We can call task saturation the 'silent killer.' It's insidious. It sneaks up on us. We usually don't even know it's happening to us. Recognizing it is 90 percent of the battle.

"Before we know it, we've said 'yes' to so many things and we have so many irons in the fire that we don't recognize it's hurting our team's performance."

Fighter pilots know how dangerous task saturation is. "I had two friends who were great fighter pilots," she said. "They were doing a great job and a lot of things exceptionally well. But in each case they managed to lose sight of just one thing. And unfortunately in both cases it was the ground."

Most people, though, when they feel the stress of task saturation, focus on just one thing. "That's channelized attention," she said. "It's like looking through a giant soda straw. All you can see is that one task. Everything else in your world just seems to vanish."

Taking the stage next was LaTourrette's teammate, John "Hit Man" Hilterman, a Navy F/A-18 pilot with 500-plus successful aircraft carrier landings. He displayed a video clip and described a commercial air accident some 35 years ago in which the crew fell victim to channelized attention.

In December 1972, Eastern Airlines flight 401 was en route from New York to Miami. As the L-1011 neared the airport, flying at about 2,000 feet, the crew put the plane on autopilot (an acceptable move, if not standard procedure) in order to troubleshoot a problem. The pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer were concerned because an indicator light seemed to suggest that the nose landing gear was not in the "down" position for landing. (Actually, it was.)

The crew toggled the switch back and forth, trying to figure out what was wrong, and immersed themselves completely in the task. Tragically, what they didn't notice at all was that the plane was diving toward the ground. One of the crew had accidentally bumped the autopilot off.

"The last words on the flight voice recorder were 'We're still at 2,000, right?' Hilterman said. "By the time the pilot looks up, he sees that he's at 100 feet. They're channelized on a fictitious plane on autopilot at 2,000 feet, instead of the plane they're actually riding in, which is a plane at 100 feet. They became channelized on a burned-out light bulb. That was the only problem with that plane." Ninety-four passengers and five crewmembers lost their lives.

Similarly, he said, "if you become channelized, you can take your business right into the ground."

LaTourrette returned to the stage to conclude the session. "I've seen this video hundreds of times," she said. "But it gets my attention every time I see it. There has not been another accident like this since then. They took the lessons learned from the accident and made a lot of changes in the way air-traffic controllers are trained and the way pilots are trained."

Air travel today is a lot safer than it was years ago, she said. "But there's one thing we will never be able to remove from this scenario. Human beings will always be susceptible to channelized attention and task saturation."

For more information on the Afterburner seminars program, visit www.afterburnerseminars.com.