Stop striving for perfection and just fly the bloody plane
“That looks about right” are words you probably wouldn’t expect to come out of a pilot’s mouth, but in innovation, they are words all of us should be using.
Last year, I started learning to fly. I approached it like I did with most things in life: striving for perfection.
Having spent most of my childhood on Microsoft Flight Simulator, I made a good start. I learnt the airfield circuit inside out, the heights, turns and speeds at each stage. I knew my checklists off by heart. I had my flying jacket and aviators. I felt like I was well on my way to flying a circuit like Maverick would (without the high speed flypast, of course).
But several weeks in and I was still struggling to bring it all together for the perfect set piece.
The problem? I wasn’t flying the plane.
I was engrossed in flying the plane through my instruments. Fixating on my airspeed indicator trying to maintain the perfect speed, on my altimeter trying to maintain the perfect height and on my vertical speed indicator trying to maintain the perfect rate of descent.
At every approach something new and unexpected was thrown at me: a strong gust of wind, a patch of turbulence, a slow aircraft ahead, a change in wind direction. I was so focussed on perfection, I couldn’t mentally adjust to a change in circumstances.
The result? Dodgy landings (thanks Dave for helping me out on a few of those!)
Striving for perfection was distracting me from my situation awareness and meant my focus was inside, not outside where most of the uncertainty was. I wasn’t capturing an image through the cockpit window of what good looked and felt like.
The solution? Accept good enough (i.e. safe), and prioritise resources (attention) to flying the plane through the cockpit window.
That looks about right (TLAR) is one of the most important skills for a pilot to learn and practice.
When sh*t happens, there isn’t time to make precise calculations, rely heavily on instruments, fully complete checklists or sometimes even properly think things through. Even on a normal landing, there isn’t time to fixate or obsess.
How do you think Captain Sully and First Officer Skiles safely landed an A320 with 155 lives on board in the Hudson river back in 2009?
They were experts in flying by TLAR.
That looks about right (TLAR) has applicability in the world of innovation too.
Just like landing a plane, most of the uncertainty we face is outside the window, in the market with real customers.
We must navigate uncertainty as best we can, accepting that:
Carrying out customer research and sketch personas doesn’t mean we know for certain our customers’ problems.
Completing a value proposition or business model canvas doesn’t mean we have a product or service that will necessarily deliver the promised value to our customers.
Perfecting and building a feature of our new product doesn’t mean our customers will use it (or at least in the way we think they will).
Being masters of TLAR in innovation means accepting good enough and experimenting to test critical assumptions early, quantitatively and at pace.
Last year, I worked with Atkins and Heathrow Airport. We used TLAR to build a minimum-viable data platform that would enable collaboration in designing and constructing utility diversions for Expansion.
It was clunky, there were buttons on the toolbar that didn’t do anything, some of the text in the help bar related to another project (we had reused some code) but the platform had some data in it. This was good enough because our focus was proving that the data in the platform would deliver value to our customers.
We held a workshop, gave our customers the platform to play with and observed their reactions (before you ask, yes, the platform did fall over several times during the session). So what? We got the evidence we needed that we were on the right track.
Gust of wind dealt with, we were still on course for a good landing.
Remaining focussed on the critical assumption we had made, we were able to use TLAR to successfully navigate the uncertainty.
Trying to build new products and services without TLAR, like a pilot who cannot fly by TLAR, can be catastrophic. Think Boo.com with its $135m marketing spend, Juicero with its perfect but useless product and Rdio, a forerunner to Spotify in the USA, that had a perfect product nobody knew about. Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster, Segway — all failed to look outside the cockpit window.
So, please, next time you’re designing a new product, stop striving for perfection, look outside the window and just get on and fly the bloody plane.
If you’re as excited about Top Gun 2 as I am, check out the trailer here!
Jack is a PPL student at Booker Aviation and a Consultant at Fluxx, a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. Need help taking-off? Or to find out more about our work with Atkins, Zopa, Vogue and Ada. Get in touch, jack.metcalfe@fluxx.uk.com.
