Top Gun

So what's Top Gun got to do with organisations, top teams, and change?  As it turns out, plenty.   

For a case study in against-the-odds transformation, here's the origin story of the Navy Fighter Weapons School - a.k.a. Top Gun - according to Captain Dan Pederson, the founding Commanding Officer.

Overview

• By the late 1960s, technology was disrupting decades-old military aviation doctrine.  Advances in air-to-air missile technology convinced the US Navy to stop training pilots in air-to-air combat ("dogfighting"), in favour of radar and automatic target acquisition.

• Rolling Thunder – the notorious Vietnam War bombing campaign, was a key test of the new approach - and a resounding failure.  US air crews had lost traditional close-quarter ACM (Air Combat Manoeuvre) skills, and were shot down by the dozen to North Vietnamese pilots flying Russian MIGs.

• TopGun was founded to re-instate dogfighting skills – to spectacular success.  It's story echoes on today. 

3 things you may not know:

1. TopGun itself was more or less set up to fail.  Vested interests opposed any challenge to the missile doctrine.  There was no blueprint for a new training programme, which many senior leaders disagreed was needed at all.

2. As the founding lead instructor, Pederson was given minimal budget and resources.  He literally launched his programme from a stolen Airstream trailer, parked on the edge of a Navy airbase.

3. So he needed a plan – a way to score some big wins, impress the top brass, and prove what he and a few others instinctively felt was right: investing in people and skills over technology was the only way to re-establish competitive advantage.

Here’s 3 key things Pederson did:

1. He gathered a training cadre of 8 of the most experienced and knowledgeable instructors he could find – including from the illicit US “Aviator Fight Club” scene - and forged them into the TopGun leadership team.

2. He made entry to the programme limited places and highly competitive, open only to the best of the best (yeah, you’ve seen the movie).

3. He and his top team brought a strong anti-establishment/rebel mind-set.  But there was nothing rebellious or ad-hoc about their approach.  They spent months preparing their material before the first intake.  

• They were teaching the very best handful of pilots in the whole US Navy, and would have only 4 weeks to create a quantum leap in their capabilities, before each cohort of students would return to their home units.

• They realised they had to deliver the most high-impact, eye-opening, high-performance masterclasses ever devised in the field, to have a chance of the immediate breakthrough success they needed.

Top team preparation:

• Pilots needed to trust with their lives that what they were learning would outperform reliance on multi-$m guided missile systems.  Tactics had to be clear, credible, and compelling.

• The leader team had to be able to walk the talk: instructors would have to fly the new patterns with consummate skill, to prove the superiority of the new approach.

• If tactics weren't simple, executable, and easily communicated, they'd be useless at 600mph, in split-second combat conditions.

• Each lecturer would obsessively hone their material.  Classes had to be compelling enough to change mind-sets and behaviours in a talented, sceptical and very high self-belief student population.  

• Draft lectures were screened by the instructor peer group through successive “murder board” reviews, until ready to be delivered without notes to the TopGun class.  

3 keys to spreading the change:

1. It was no good for only a handful of aircrews, spread across the whole Navy, to develop these new skills.  So TopGun graduates would return to their units as leaders and teachers, to disseminate the new tactics, procedures and weapons systems knowledge they’d gained.

2. The very best TopGun graduates would return as instructors, helping further reinforce the status and mythos that the programme quickly earned.

3. As a result, the TopGun ethos spread far and wide within the fighter pilot community.  Then in the 1980's Hollywood got interested, and it went quite literally global.

They’re probably out there somewhere, but we’re yet to encounter a top business team who are consciously trying to emulate leadership lessons from the TopGun instructor cadre. 

Perhaps more of them should.  Try these 8 questions:

  1.  Like obsolete military doctrine, do you ever feel as a top team you’re relying on an out-of-date   playbook – including top team assumptions, patterns of behaviour and beliefs?

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  2.  Is there a gap for your top team to walk the talk of the mind-set and behaviour changes you want to   see from the rest of the organisation?

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  3.  Can senior leaders channel enough of a rebel spirit to help your people push back and innovate,   against the weight of your existing processes and risk management strategies?

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  4.  Do you as a senior team communicate the “how” of your strategy in terms that are simple, clear, and   executable?

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  5.  How confident are you in the quality of your senior presentations - to each other, and to the rest of   the business?

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  6.  How far do you help each other inspire the rest of the business?

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  7.  How effectively are you as a top team setting up your next-level-down leaders to emulate these same     changes for their teams and key stakeholders?

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  8.  What powerful stories is your top team generating, to help power the take-up and spread of your       leadership approach within and beyond the organisation?