The Empty Chair: What fighter pilots know about Go-Live
Somewhere on a base outside Las Vegas, a fighter pilot sits alone in a quiet room. Eyes closed. Hands moving through the air. She is not asleep. She is flying tomorrow's mission.
The aviators call it chair flying. In a ritual practised by units like the Blue Angels, pilots sit around a table, eyes closed, hands moving in the air, mentally flying the entire show, with the flight leader calling out the radio commands while every other pilot visualises their specific inputs in synchronisation. By the time the boots hit the tarmac, they have already flown the mission once. Sometimes twice. The point of the exercise is straightforward. When the real flight happens, the brain recognises the pattern, and the pilot is not reacting, she is executing a memory.
I have been thinking about this practice a lot lately. Most of the delivery work I do these days has a fixed go-live date sitting somewhere on the horizon, the kind of date that does not move regardless of how the sprints around it behave. So the question I keep asking myself is the question a fighter squadron asks two days out from a mission. Have we actually flown this in our heads, or are we just waiting to find out what happens?
The mission is not the brief
Most project teams the week before go-live do not look like a fighter squadron. They look harried. Tickets flying. Slack on fire. Plans getting torn up and re-glued every six hours. The team is not visualising the mission. The team is running.
This is the failure mode. Activity dressed up as preparation.
The fighter pilots have a framework for this and have had it for fifty years. It is called PBED: Plan, Brief, Execute, Debrief. For every flight or evolution in military aviation, even moving aircraft in and out of the hangar, the same process applies. The plan is the artefact. The brief is the team walking through it together, in detail, before anyone leaves the room. The execution is the mission. The debrief is the lesson, captured before everyone scatters.
Three of those four phases happen on the ground. Only one happens in the air.
In our world, we obsess over execute. Cutover plans. Hypercare rosters. Standby support. We barely brief at all. We hand out a Confluence page and call it a brief. We rarely chair fly. And our debriefs, when we do them, are watered-down retrospectives where the loudest voice carries and the senior person decides which lessons survive contact with the room.
There is a reason fighter pilots do not run their post-mortems that way.
Nameless, rankless
In the Vietnam era, US air-to-air kill ratios sat at roughly 2.5 to 1. The pilots, the airframes, and the missiles were all good. The post-mission analysis was not. Starting in World War II and through the Korean War, US Air Force and Navy pilots debriefed the way most organisations still do: informally, at the bar, dominated by the loudest voice in the room. The most experienced pilot won the debrief. Nothing analytical took place. Lessons died with the mission.
Then Top Gun was founded in 1969 and the structured debrief became doctrine. The kill ratio climbed from 2.5 to 1 up to 12.5 to 1. Same pilots. Same aircraft. A better learning system. During Operation Rolling Thunder between 1965 and 1968, US forces lost roughly 900 aircraft. After the military institutionalised disciplined brief-and-debrief practices, aircraft losses during Operation Linebacker in 1972 dropped to approximately 134, against a denser and more lethal air defence.
Nameless and rankless is the part that scares organisations. It means the squadron commander walks into the room and says, "I made the first error. Here is what it was. Here is what I will do differently." It means the most junior pilot can challenge the most senior pilot without consequence. It means the only thing that matters in the room is the gap between what we expected and what actually happened, and the cause of that gap.
If you have ever sat through a project retrospective where everyone agreed it was "a good outcome despite some challenges" and walked out without a single owned action, you have sat through the opposite of a fighter pilot debrief.
Premeditatio malorum
The Stoics had their own version of chair flying. They called it premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils. Seneca taught it. Marcus Aurelius opened his Meditations with it: when you rise in the morning, think of what awaits you, the difficult people, the work that will not yield, the things that will go wrong.
Begin the day by mentally rehearsing what could go wrong. The data migration that fails the integrity check. The stakeholder who pulls support in the steering committee. The integration that times out at 06:30 on cutover Sunday. The user who cannot log in on Monday at 09:00.
Not to catastrophise. To inoculate. To make the mind familiar with the failure mode in advance, so that if it arrives, the body does not freeze. The pilot does not pull back on the stick by accident, because she has already flown this scenario in a chair, alone, with her eyes closed, a dozen times.
The fighter pilot and the Stoic share a thesis. The moment of contact is not where you make the decision. The moment of contact is where the decision you already made shows up.
What this looks like next sprint
If you are a delivery leader heading toward a go-live, three practical moves.
First, brief the mission. Not the plan document. The mission. Get the cutover team in a room, walk through every step in order, name the person responsible, name the dependency, name the rollback trigger. Do not skip steps because everyone "already knows." If the Blue Angels do not skip steps, neither do you.
Second, chair fly the worst day. Block ninety minutes with the core team. Walk through the worst plausible cutover scenario in full sequence. Who calls the rollback. Who notifies the steering committee. Who rings the change manager at 04:00. The point is not the plan. The point is to make the team's first encounter with the failure mode happen in a room, not on the day.
Third, design the debrief before you run it. Decide now that the post go-live retrospective will be nameless and rankless. Decide who facilitates. Decide that the senior person speaks first and owns the first error. Decide that no more than three actions come out of it, and that those actions feed directly into the next mission.
The empty chair
The fighter squadron's chair is empty most of the time. The pilot is in the cockpit. The mission is in the air. The chair just sits there.
But when the pilot is in the chair, eyes closed, hands moving, she is doing the work that wins the mission. The aircraft is not yet running. The runway is empty. The fight has not started. And that is exactly when the fight is being prepared for.
If your go-live is in your headlights, find the chair. Sit in it. Fly the mission. Then fly it again.
The aircraft will tell you the rest.
Manny writes The 31 Brief on Mondays. Company31 helps senior leaders deliver complex transformations without the avoidable scars.