Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. Today I want to talk about briefings, what they are, why they are useful, and some pitfalls I commonly find myself in with my own briefings.
As is often the case in life and in the blog, taxonomy is important to understanding. Briefing as a noun is a meeting for giving information or instructions, and as a verb, it is the act of informing or instructing.
As mundane as those definitions sound, briefings affect the way we manage our families, our businesses, and our country. Good briefings can set us up for success just as much as bad briefings can leave us exposed to unmitigated risk.
I am constantly briefing. Pilots brief everything. Takeoff, departure, weather, maintenance, passengers, arrival, landing, expected threats, you get the idea. We do a lot of briefing. Those briefings (especially my own) have a tendency to get repetitive and monotonous, and like most things that are repetitive and monotonous, they tend to slip into a state of complacency.
As pilots, we know this, (and are constantly reminded of it by, oddly enough, by union, company and third party briefings) yet we all too often slip into a laissez faire attitude to our fellow aviators’ briefings. I recently had a captain brief me saying “we’re gonna do that stuff”. Does that sound like a professional giving information or instructions?
Briefings should of course be brief. As someone who likes to talk (and write), I know the tendency is to expound and leave no stone unturned. But, these aren’t thesis defenses, and no one wants to be lectured past the bullet points.
Remembering that briefings are a form of instruction or a passing of information, it helps to know what you are talking about on more than just a surface level. Instruction requires a familiarity with the intricacies of the material in order to effectively brief.
As we said early taxonomy is important and so is diction. Understanding the material and keeping your message short, means that your word choices are critical. How many times have you listened to a politician who speaks a lot of words without saying anything?
These are relatively simple rules, but it is not hard to find examples (including in this blog) of briefings running afoul. In a time where information is so readily available we still struggle mightily with the effective transfer of it.
Transferring ideas means more than just slingshotting 280 characters into the void. It demands careful contemplation of your communiqué and curation of you channel of delivery. All alliteration aside, transferring ideas equals effective briefings. Like most things discussed in this blog, it is a difficult and valuable skill that can be practiced, and improved, and one we could all benefit from.
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.