MAN: Decisions, decisions, decisions.
What is decision making?
KIRK CAMPBELL: Pilots are humans.
They don't always make good decisions.
We, in general, don't always make good decisions,
but it comes back to training and trying to expose them to the different elements
of the business and how we work, and giving them as much education as they can
so that they're prepared to make a decision that's outside of the box.
MELANIE TODD: Making good decisions at the right time
is harder than it looks sometimes, and I think we also think that
it's easy to make good decisions, you know, we say, "Well, I would never have done that."
Well, of course you would never have done that.
Given the choice, neither would they.
It's not a matter of flipping a coin and saying,
"I'm choosing this outcome, I'm choosing to do this," necessarily.
People work with the facts they have at the time,
and they will make the best decision from the facts they have, the goal they have,
and what, in the broader scheme, they're trying to achieve.
"What has the biggest pressure at that point in time?"
You're going to get that wrong every now and again.
CHARLES GALEA: Years ago, if you roll the tape back,
you will see that perhaps, you know,
there was an issue with decision making
and we would say, "Well, OK, that was a poor decision,"
and say there was a certain outcome associated with that.
Whereas, in a more modern context, we're looking at things
like organisational issues in terms of state of mind perhaps that that person was in.
What was their individual situation?
Were they fatigued?
Why were they fatigued?
These complex human factors
may be underpinning the decision that was perhaps made in the cockpit.
ADRIAN PARK: Decision making, to me, is an art and a science.
There are certain models that you can use.
There's the SADIE model, there's P-SWOT-P that we use.
There's all types of models, but there's also an art to it.
You can't provide prescriptively an answer and a process to every single contingency.
Maybe, in the future, super-computers and artificial intelligence
will be able to do that, but, right now, that's not possible.
So, for me, decision making is really about guiding principles.
I don't like to tell people what to think.
I don't like to tell them how to think.
I like to give them the capacity and the ability and guiding principles do that.
Right now, this machine behind me
could leave from here, fly to the Blue Mountains,
then fly to a hospital, then be called out on another job over the water
at night on night-vision goggles, and then return in cloud.
So, you can't systematise all those things.
LOUISE KIRKWOOD: Knowing when to analyse and when to make a decision is key,
and knowing when to analyse then comes back to
you being able to identify the cues that exist in the environment.
GLENN SINGLEMAN: There has to be some emotional objectivity
so that you can maintain an intellectual objectivity
in order to aid your decision making, but we are human beings, we're not robots.
We can't just turn all of that stuff off.
But we can get better at managing it by recognising it,
and I think, the better we do that, the more situationally aware we become.
So, that's why I'm very thankful that I've got this background
in critical care medicine and in extreme sport
and I'm able to take that experience
in terms of the parts of my brain that I can activate,
and other parts of the brain that I can shut down in order to make better decisions.
If you do actually invoke a full fear system, a full amygdala overload, it's a hijack,
and one of the first things that gets shut down by an amygdala hijack
is your capacity for critical thinking and you're just responding out of emotional panic.
And that's one of the things that doctors have to avoid.
They've got to maintain a level of emotional objectivity
so that they can engage their critical cognitive abilities.
And, you know, that happens to a pilot, as well, you know?
"The engine just failed."
"Hang on, I've got systems in place, I have an algorithmic approach that I will follow.
"Step one, step two, you know?"
If you have all of that stuff,
it's a way to overcome that potential amygdala hijack from an out-of-control fear response.
- When we make a mistake,
it's fixing the mistake before it becomes a big problem.
- And my favourite quote around this
was actually from a Flight Safety article years ago,
and this sentence just stuck in my head, which was,
"If you start your day and it's beginning to read like the start of an ATSB report, stop."
'Cause how many times have you just persisted with something,
and you've just pushed through and you've pushed on?
"It'll be OK if I just get this bit done," you know, and then you can actually start to see it.
You can start to read through the context of an ATSB report
or, you know, the factual information, "And then the pilot did this,"
and you kind of go, "Oh, yeah, that actually...
"that's not the outcome I'm after."
WEBLEY HIRT: And the old adage - if ever there's doubt, there's really no doubt.
You know, that's a situation that we always pass on to our students.
Yesterday, I was debriefing a student and we'd done an IFR pre-licencing.
She'd found herself in a situation of being a little unsure,
and the big focus in the debrief was get certainty back
and give yourself time.
Remove yourself from an area where there's potential risk.
Get your headspace such that you know exactly what is happening again
before going any further with the flight.
So, it's a key one.
TODD MICKLESON: Good decisions are made
based on a number of things.
Firstly, good information processing.
We can't make a good decision
without having good information to base that decision on.
The second thing is building that picture in an accurate way.
So, if we only have half the picture, then we're probably
only gonna be able to make half of the decision or a decision that's half as good.
So, building up that picture of where we are, then we need a way of making decisions.
Now, a lot of that comes down to experience,
but we can have pilots with 10,000 hours of experience making bad decisions.
We can have pilots with 1,000 hours of experience making very good decisions.
That requires a framework to follow.
That might be a simple pneumonic that we keep in our mind.
It might be a way of just working through what information we're looking at,
what we look at next and what we expect to see.
As those decisions, though, become more complex,
or the situation is more complex with another crew member,
we need to make sure that we articulate what we're doing, why we're doing it,
and see...you know, check for that level of agreement on making that decision,
putting in place the decision that we intend to do,
following that through and then evaluating was that the right decision,
do I need to change it, do I need to make another decision?
BEN COOK: The one thing that really defines decision making is time, because,
if I give you enough time, you'll make a good decision, you'll get there eventually.
The way you get there might vary.
So, critical to good decision making is good time management and ability to prioritise.
RICK SELLERS: Is it time critical?
In other words, do we not have a lot of time for discussion?
And then it may be a directive or a recognition-primed decision.
Something like, "Oh, there's an engine fire in number two engine."
You're not gonna sit around and have a five-minute discussion about that,
you're going to identify, confirm, select,
run through the actions and then think about diversions, etc, if necessary, etc, etc, etc.
Versus, "OK, we're 40 nautical miles out,"
and, if it was a helicopter DMS operation, you've got several hospitals to go to.
One might look after burns patients at a trauma centre,
whatever it may be, but there's a fuel requirement that's just come on.
You might have a bit more time to discuss as a crew, "OK, what are the requirements
"now for us to work out what's the best way for us to make a decision?"
- So, it's understanding there are some responses
and some checklist items that you know you need to know,
you need to be able to do them accurately, you need to get it right the first time.
There are other scenarios where you need to know that, "Can we buy more time?"
As long as, in any scenario, the more time you can actually buy and create
to give you that little bit of extra space to take away some of that pressure
is going to significantly enhance your ability to make good decisions,
and it's a matter of getting exposure.
It comes with experience. It's gotta be experiential learning.
- And for us, what we do with decision making,
we call that, if you like, rational decision making,
you've got a little bit more time, so we use a model, which we call A-GRADE.
These models aren't for everybody and it doesn't matter.
You don't have to use models.
Lots of people do decision making intuitively and that's fine.
LOUISE KIRKWOOD: We often do use our own personal experience
versus using another model,
which helps you more gather and analyse,
actually make the decision, and then evaluate,
and then overlay that with stressful environments -
you're fatigued, you're not travelling well on that day -
and that's where the teamwork really comes in to help,
I suppose, intervene if you need to, then having a culture that enables that to happen.
- It's trying to give as many models and work cycles as possible.
At the very highest level, say,
in the multi-crew cooperation course, we look at DODAR or GRADE, which essentially
come from airline best practise, and they've been developed in the airline industry.
But, if we go right back essentially to the very first lesson,
the stable approach criteria that we use as we come in to land
is no less of an important decision-making tool, and it's one that
every student, every instructor, arguably every pilot uses on every flight coming in to land.
PETER GASH: Decision making comes again back to the old word 'teamwork',
conferring with your teammates and asking, "Have you dealt with this before?
"How did you that?"
"Well, I just stopped in Moranbah and I had this issue.
"How did you deal with it last time?"
It's decision making based on teamwork.
- Working together as a team to get as much information as you can
to make the very best decision.
TREVOR WRIGHT: I think you look at a task, you dissect the task down,
and then you go through it with them.
I think it's really important,
just having a casual talk with them and say,
"Well, you're going from here, an example, to Ayers Rock.
"You've got a bit of weather.
"If it comes in a bit rough, what are you going to do?
"Where are you going to divert to?
"What are the airstrips going to be like?
"What's your communication situation?
"How much reserve fuel?
"How's the community going to treat you when you're there?
"Who do you go and get in contact with?"
We refuel there full.
We bring a couple of empty ones that we'll use there back to there.
- Oh, yeah, yeah, that's...
JOHN GARVIN: I also find it's actually useful to have a really active imagination
because one of the things I encourage my team to do
is something called pre-visualisation.
That's where you find some quiet time before the dive
to sit on your own and go through the entire dive in your head beforehand.
By visualising what I would do in that situation, if it actually happens,
it's not a surprise to me and I can deal with it in a much calmer, much more effective way.
- The reality is, when I look at the highest performers
I've seen in any industry,
they will spend more time visualising and actually picturing some of the scenarios
that maybe they haven't had time to train to the level that they would like,
but they will run that through their mind.
So, they will work on, for example,
"I've never experienced a generator failure similar to what we see at air time,
"and, in fact, it's a little way away before I get into the sim,
"and the scenario they create for us when we do that's not overly realistic."
Even if you can't get access to that happening in real time,
it's working through the different scenarios that can go wrong,
taking the time to sit down and work that through your mind,
and you see that with Matty Hall,
from some of the work we've done with Matt,
where you see the Red Bull Air Race pilots, you can see them visualising on the ground
and picturing what they're doing as they're going through different gates
and they're expected to provide high performance under time pressure.
Don't picture that everything's going well and everything's perfect.
In your mind, let's say we're working with a generator failure,
picture that there's just been another distraction
and then visualise that,
you're now moving your distraction away from where it needs to be,
that you've missed a step in the checklist,
and then work on what is the habit pattern that's gonna bring you back to the checklist,
back a few steps,
to make sure I methodically work through and deliver the outcomes I need?
People that visualise over and over the different scenarios,
both on the ground and/or when you're flying and you've got some downtime,
then you're gonna be far more prepared
to be able to manage some of the scenarios
that potentially will occur under time pressure and know how to manage it.
TIM FRANKEL: First and foremost, we try and hire seriously experienced aviators
to man the aircraft, and then we train the hell out of them.
ADRIAN PARK: So, what we try and do with a team at the end
is build their basic skills, try to program into the sim
and into our human factors program a lot of scenario-based training,
so that, at least, if they haven't flown it themselves before,
they've already kind of seen it and so that, straight away, frees up some neurons.
Anything that we can control on the ground right now, anything that we can do
on the ground, we have a whole bunch of computer-based systems that help us do that.
All that, then, frees up their capacity for when they're actually out on the job,
when new things are coming, to be able to make, hopefully, clear-headed decisions.
- So, even when we've got a guy
who's got 20 years of experience, say, in defence
flying Black Hawks or Sea Hawks or MRH-90,
once we've completed the type transition on them,
which is between 20 and 40 hours,
they undergo another 40 to 60 hours of line training
in the combination of the aircraft and the simulator
to make sure they're equipped with the right tools to make the right decisions.
So, we give them as much mission exposure as we can before we put them in the aircraft.
MARK DELANY: For example, a recent training evolution we had
over in the ACE Training Centre for a offshore rescue problem.
So, the crew was in the CATS, under the virtual-reality simulator.
They were getting airborne from Nowra just to come back to Bankstown.
They got told, "Hey, you've got a rescue job offshore and here's the details."
So, they had to make the decisions immediately, "What do we do?"
For example, does the paramedic say, "Hang on, stop,"
grab his wetsuit, get his wetsuit and all his kit on, the pilots making their planning decisions.
So, they make all of those decisions.
So, then, we get them out to the rescue site in the VR simulator
and say, "OK, stop, walk next door,"
and they get into the swimming pool in the nets
with the full sea state and everything running.
So, the paramedic who decided not to put on his wetsuit
is now in the pool without a wetsuit, and so on.
So, it's real. These are the decisions you are making.
Now you've got to run through the whole rescue scenario.
And I'm not saying it's the wrong decision not to put on the wetsuit,
'cause it might have saved him the three minutes time that saved a life.
I'm just saying that the decisions that are made
during these real-time training evolutions are priceless
because we run them right the way through to the end, and then everything's videoed,
everything's captured and, at the debriefs, everyone can pick up so many learnings.
'Cause, I mean, the idea of training is to get better.
It's not just to tick a box.
We don't tick boxes anymore, we don't do that.
It's to improve your outcomes.
So, by having high-fidelity training and training in real scenarios
allows us to improve our outcomes
for all the crews as we move forward on further operations and contracts.
- So, whatever you can do to free up cognitive capacity
is a precondition for good decision making.
- A number of organisations proactively manage devices.
Some workplaces put mobile phones in lockers.
I know of low-level aerobatics pilots,
they won't log into something as simple as a computer with access to work emails
the morning before they're gonna do something that's an important routine.
A simple policy for me is I prefer to actually turn my mobile phone off
when I'm expected to deliver high performance.
And what you'll find is, and this is without a word of a doubt,
those people that are so wedded to their mobile phones and novelty and distractions
are just not gonna be able
to provide the attentional focus required when that curveball's thrown your way.
- At the end of the decision-making cycle,
one of the questions we get and are actually asked around the crew is,
"Is there anything that'd make this a bad decision?"
And it's amazing how, even when you go through the full process,
somebody in the crew might pipe up and say, "Well, what about if this, XYZ?"
And, all of a sudden, you go,
"Yep, maybe we need to review, but at least we're heading in a safe direction.
"We've got a safe option.
"It may not be perfect or the best one but it's one we've decided on.
"Now we can evaluate it."
And it's the evaluation bit that people usually leave out at the end.
- So, it's good mentoring. It's good teamwork.
It's having a culture that stays focused on understanding
that, at any given time in this environment, things can happen and they can bite quickly.