It’s a cliche to ever say you could hear a pin drop during a talk, but that is what it felt like this week, 28 June, at legal tech conference Vis-a-Vis, when former special forces helicopter pilot Sarah Furness spoke about having to leave a dying soldier on a mountain because it was the right thing to do for her team.
Keynotes, particularly when you hear enough of them, often fail to hit home, to be frank. Furness, who is now a keynote speaker on courageous leadership, spoke candidly about her own failures and how we need to change our culture, so that we remove the stigma around failure, and learn to embrace it.
Furness was the first ever female special forces pilot and helps high performing teams to understand how people learn best – under pressure. Organisations and leaders often give so much direction to people to prevent mistakes happening, that it becomes stifling and likely to produce the same results as it has always produced. “You need to trust people and even to push them into discomfort, because that is where peak performance happens,” Furness said.
Give people more autonomy than feels comfortable, she said, adding, “In order to enhance all that neuro divergence we need to replace instructions with information.” Instructions is telling someone how to do something. Information is telling them what the objective and pitfalls are and allowing them to reach the destination their own way.
In terms of failure, Furness discussed having made a mistake in a training exercise in the desert, when the rotor blades of her helicopter hit a eucalyptus tree. Embarrassed, she said that the helicopter had suffered no damage and volunteered to take it on an administrative trip later that day. Clearly there was damage, but Furness didn’t admit it to herself and didn’t speak up, and in doing so could have endangered her team.
One of the final stories she shared was of when her team received news that a soldier had been bitten by a snake in the desert and had no time to get to hospital. It was low cloud and low light but Furness described the desperate measures taken to get to him, determined not to let him die. To absolute silence she described the dangerous attempts to get to him from the moutain, before making the heartbreaking decision that it was too dangerous and they had to leave him. What surprised her was that everyone on the mission had stayed quiet but agreed with her decision. “Everyone was too scared to say ‘leave him’ and I was afraid of what people would think of me if I made the decision, ” she said. “Sometimes we need to ask brave questions that promote dissent and divergent thinking.”
In times of change we need to shake up the way things have been done and take risks. It was perhaps Furness’s last observation that was most powerful within this context. “If you’re not scared, you’re doing the same thing as yesterday, and calling it something different,” she said.
