[Mary] Hi there. Welcome to Safety Labs. If you're listening to this show, I assume you agree that safety and organizational success go hand in hand. But as I'm sure you know, not everyone really understands how the two interact. Today's guest operates at the intersection of those ideals, and will talk about that dynamic, as well as diving further into the technique of debriefing — what it is, how to do it, and how it can contribute to safety.
Brandon Williams is a speaker, airline pilot, and human factors professor with over two decades of experience leading teams in dynamic, complex, and high-risk environments. A former US Air Force fighter pilot, Lieutenant Colonel, and safety officer, Brandon brings a unique blend of military precision, safety expertise, and real-world leadership to organizations striving for excellence in high-reliability industries. Brandon equips leaders with the strategies and tools to build HROs and high-performance teams across sectors, including transportation, healthcare, energy, construction, and manufacturing. His keynotes and training sessions are grounded in military aviation principles and safety science, offering actionable insights into systems-level thinking, human error mitigation, and decision-making under pressure. Brandon joins us from Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome.
[Brandon] Thanks, Mary, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show.
[Mary] I think most of our audience understands how safety and organizational success are intertwined, and those intersections are naturally going to come up in our conversation. But not everyone sees that link. What are some misconceptions you've come across regarding the relationship between safety and excellence?
[Brandon] Great question to start out with. Obviously safety leadership is a big part of what I do, as you alluded to. I think oftentimes in these industries, we talk about safety in a "program mindset" — a safety program, a safety function, a safety officer, the EHS person, something we have to comply with. Versus, in the world I come from, aviation, safety isn't just a program, a function, a tool, or a resource — it's literally intertwined in everything we do, from planning to briefing to execution, and, as we'll talk about later, debriefing. So many things — even checklist usage, which is a big thing other industries have adopted from commercial aviation, extreme checklist discipline. Everything we do in aviation, and we used to say this in the Air Force too, every process and procedure for safety was "written in blood" — meaning there's been a serious incident, a mishap, something that happened in the past that drove why we do these things, how we learn from it, how we make things better.
When you think about the intersection of safety and organizational success — the job of any leader, owner, or manager in these high-risk industries, what should be top of mind? Safety. Safety of their people, reducing mishaps, certainly no fatalities, no damaged equipment. To do that, leaders have to understand human error, human factors — not just from a program standpoint, but from a systems-thinking standpoint, in how we build and design our teams, implement things, as a natural way of doing business. That really drives success, because safety success is organizational success, especially in high-risk industries. Yes, these businesses are making money, profit is the end goal — but I always ask in my talks, what's the number one goal of any leader? Performance improvement, period. Performance improvement of the organization, of your team, your individuals — all of that drives organizational success. A high majority of that, in high-risk industries, is safety — our safety statistics, our safety record, our safety performance. When you intertwine that, really understand it, and have leaders who embrace it, that's where organizational success is truly tied to safety.
[Mary] You've framed your ideas about safety into what you call the Six Pillars of Operational Excellence. I'd like to go through each to better understand them. The first is clear intent — aligning action through purpose, clarity, and commander's intent. Tell us more about that.
[Brandon] That last part is really where I got it from — you mentioned my background, twenty years, twelve of them active duty, Air Force fighter pilot flying F-15s, Lieutenant Colonel, aviation safety officer, several leadership positions. A key component of the military is what we called commander's intent — when we ran an operation, or really anything going on across the world today, there's a commander's intent, the desired end state — when operations cease, what does success look like? The idea is that your tactical leaders, knowing the commander's intent, the clear intent, can come up with their own tactical objectives — a big part of my planning process, clearly defined objectives, the building blocks toward your yearly goal, quarterly goal, five-year plan, whatever it is.
But the second part, maybe even more important to clear intent, is prioritization. With a clear intent, a commander's intent, there should ideally be about three top priorities you want your people thinking about — all the way down to the frontline employee, frontline leader, middle manager — three overarching priorities for when they go do their job or task. Because when people make autonomous decisions, which you want them to, especially in high-risk industries where they don't have a choice, like aviation, you want them to have that backdrop, those three top organizational priorities. It's not strategic initiatives, just things you want them thinking about — "here are our three organizational priorities, keep them in mind every time you do something." That's what clear intent is — it's alignment, but it also gives your people priorities to make sure they're rowing in the same direction for the organization.
[Mary] Have you encountered organizations where this pillar wasn't well developed — where there were obstacles or trouble implementing it? No one ever intends not to be excellent, but things happen.
[Brandon] Absolutely. Two things there. First, yes — I can usually tell pretty quickly. When I work with teams and organizations, talking to the leader, whether a VP, CEO, or frontline leader, I'll ask about clear intent, what their priorities are for the team. Inevitably, a lot of times they'll list one big pie-in-the-sky thing, or rattle off strategic initiatives, quarterly goals — and I'll say, that's great, those are goals, but what are your real priorities, the top three things you want your team thinking about when they execute? For example, in my job as a major airline pilot, as captain, my company's given me a lot of responsibility — when that door closes and we push back, I'm in charge. I have a team, a lot of people helping me, but I get fifty-one percent of the vote, I'm ultimately responsible for whatever happens on or to that airplane. My company's given me top three priorities: number one, safety; number two, passenger comfort; number three, on-time performance and schedule. Every decision I make follows that order — yes, we want to be on time, that's what we do as an airline, but passenger comfort and safety come before that. That's what they trust me to use when making decisions.
To your other point, which I think is even more important — what are the obstacles? Because we all want to do good, but it comes back to human factors. When I was flying that F-15, imagine that cockpit — over 200 switches, dials, displays, buttons — an environment the human body was never designed to operate in at a high level, moving 300, 400 miles an hour, in combat or peacetime, dealing with weather, flying the airplane, managing all the systems, the bells and beeps. Clear intent is critically important there, because what happens to humans in that environment? We get distracted easily. If you don't know what's most important, you can lock onto or focus on something that isn't, even if in the moment you think it is. That clarity only comes through good training, but also through leaders — my instructors, my flight leads over the years, mentors who told me, "Manson," that was my call sign, "when you're flying down low in this environment, here are the only two things in the cockpit you need to worry about, everything else needs to be outside," to keep you in the right airspace. The biggest thing is distractions — we're naturally wired toward the bright shiny object, it's a survival mechanism, but the problem in high-reliability industries is that what distracts us usually isn't the most important thing. That's the biggest thing standing in the way of clear intent. The critical part, again, goes back to leaders and their priorities — and the closer you get to the frontline, the more tactically focused those top three priorities need to be, versus high-level priorities trickling down. That's why it's so important to give people clear, well-defined priorities, because we will get distracted, and that's why we have to keep re-caging that focus.
[Mary] Clarity really is the key there.
[Brandon] Absolutely.
[Mary] The next pillar is situational awareness — enhancing perception and anticipation across teams. Talk a bit about that, then I have a question.
[Brandon] Absolutely. A lot of you have probably heard about situational awareness — it's something you learn on day one of pilot training or any flight training, and it's been adopted across industries — healthcare talks about it a lot, other transportation industries, high-reliability teams focused on safety. It's also talked about a lot in the self-defense world. But really, it's the perception of all the variables around us, and how they affect our current state and, more importantly, our future state. Situational awareness is so important because it lets you start predicting what happens next — flying an airplane, there's weather ahead, dealing with air traffic control, you need high situational awareness to predict what's going to happen fifty, a hundred miles ahead, whether to go around weather, above it, below it. You're constantly trying to stay ahead, keep high situational awareness.
This matters because, going back to human factors, a natural state for humans is complacency — probably the most contributing, if not causal, factor in most mishaps, in aviation and many other industries. We like habit, we like to be comfortable, and once we get there, complacency sets in, and situational awareness drops. Maintaining situational awareness starts with a very good briefing before execution — we have a plan, but before walking out the door, let's talk about clearly defined objectives, obstacles, areas of vulnerability, where things could go wrong, roles — not just your own role, but understanding everyone else's too — and finally, the "what-ifs," things we haven't thought about, unexpected things that probably won't happen, but if they do, what's our plan? If I'm flying and a thunderstorm rolls in unexpectedly, what's our game plan? Or if we're going to an airport with one runway, and an airplane in front of us blows a tire and shuts it down, what do we do, where's our closest piece of concrete, do we have enough fuel? Situational awareness starts before you even walk out the door to execute.
Once executing, a technique I give frontline teams is what I call healthy paranoia — when I was an instructor, I'd tell students, when you're flying along and think you've got everything wired, everything's going well, that's exactly when you've missed something — that's when you need a quick mental double-check, "what have I not thought about?" There's a technique to that, takes practice, but good situational awareness is the first step in good decision-making.
[Mary] You mostly answered my question, but I wanted to note — when most of us hear "complacency," we hear judgment, laziness. But that's not at all what you're describing.
[Brandon] Not at all — it's a natural human factor. That's a great point, and it gets right into my whole concept of human factors leadership, which is exactly what you just said: no professional shows up to work saying, "I'm going to make a mistake today, I'm going to make a bad decision, I'm going to cause a mishap." Nobody does that. It's always human factors at play — even if a human factor isn't the literal root cause, and often it is, it's always going to be a contributing factor, whether it's complacency, mental or physical fatigue, poor communication, poor situational awareness, task overload, lack of knowledge — there are so many. Complacency is a natural, conditioned human state we strive toward — we want to be comfortable, and when we think we've got everything wired, our minds relax a bit. It's not that you should never relax, just understanding that it happens. Like they say about pilots — who's the most dangerous, the brand-new pilot with maybe fifty hours, the mid-range pilot with five hundred hours, or the experienced pilot with thousands of hours? I always say it's the thousands-of-hours pilot, most likely, because they've been doing it so long, especially if nothing's ever gone wrong, and that's where complacency creeps in. The new pilot doesn't know what they don't know, but they're cautious. The five-hundred-hour pilot is at their peak — they know a lot, but they're still very aware, still building their toolbox.
[Mary] That's a good way to define or explain complacency. The next pillar is decision-making — leading under pressure with agility, clarity, and confidence. Easy to read, very hard to do.
[Brandon] These two really tie into the situational awareness discussion, I usually talk about them hand in hand — situational awareness is the first step of decision-making. When I talk about decision-making, there are three components — when we debrief, I always frame it as perception, decision, execution. Typically people just look at execution or decision. Execution is the actual skill set, knowledge — did they actually know how to do the task? If they were never trained, well, there's your root cause. But if they knew how to do it, let's look at the decision — why did they skip a step, do the wrong procedure? What was the decision-making process? If the decision was good, they went down a path they thought was right, didn't skip a step intentionally — then we look at perception. What was their perception? That's where situational awareness comes in — maybe they didn't understand the job or the task, missed a variable they should have caught, didn't brief well before going in, so if something went wrong they didn't know what to do.
When you're under pressure, real-time, something's going wrong, everything's coming apart, you've got to decide quickly — in aviation, with an aircraft emergency, adrenaline starts going, and what do we do, human factors-wise? We get tunnel vision, survival instinct, focus on one thing we think is most important. To slow that body response down, we'd say "hack the clock," or "wind the clock" — this comes from older airplanes with analog clocks you could wind for timing certain functions. The first step in any emergency we trained for was always to hack the clock. There are emergencies where time genuinely matters, like electrical issues — but the real reason was to slow yourself down. Seeing that clock go to zero resets your mind — okay, take a breath, assess what you have before pushing buttons and reacting, because that's when we make things worse, when we think we need to act immediately, get tunnel vision, and go down the wrong path. That's the technique for decision-making under pressure — hack the clock, assess what you have, then decide.
[Mary] I've heard that described as engaging your frontal cortex, because your limbic system, the reptilian brain, is freaking out, sensing a threat, and just wants to focus on whatever seems most urgent — but the problem is, in the world we operate in, we're not actually being chased by a tiger, there are other things at play.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary] I'm going to move to the next one, which we've actually talked about quite a lot on the show — mutual support, driving peer accountability. We've talked a lot about psychological safety specifically, so maybe focus more on peer accountability, how that works.
[Brandon] Absolutely. This comes from my time as a fighter pilot. We always took off and flew, peacetime or combat, with a wingman — what we called mutual support. It wasn't something we did sometimes, it's how we always operated — flying single-ship alone felt really odd, we just never did it. Sometimes another jet, sometimes four in a formation, depending on the mission, but always with mutual support. That's that peer accountability piece, built in — and it's not "calling you out, Mary," or pointing out something just to do it, it's how we trained, how we operated. When that canopy comes down, or that debrief room door closes, rank comes off — there's no rank in the jet, no rank in the debrief room. We made that very clear, because in those environments, you have to be able to speak up — when you see someone going down an unsafe path, or there's a better way to do something. That's where this culture of mutual support in everything we did came from. If we saw something, we spoke up, whether on the radio, in the brief, or during planning.
It's not something you can build overnight — like most things, it starts with leadership, but really with trust, mutual support, holding each other accountable, and leaders holding themselves accountable. As a leader, if you want your people to provide mutual support to each other, you have to open yourself up first, be vulnerable about your own questionable decisions or missteps — admit it, or if people bring it up, accept it. That's the biggest thing you can do, because if you want mutual support, you have to model it, showing care and concern for your people as people. Simple things — if I'm talking to you, getting coffee, and I ask how things are going, or I know your mom was sick and I ask how she's doing — that starts to build that tribal kind of connection, that feeling of being one team. That's part of why mutual support worked so well for us, because we had such a high level of camaraderie — we knew each other, knew about our families, hung out outside work. So when I provided mutual support, it wasn't just because it was my job, I truly wanted you to succeed, wanted the team to look good. That's just how we operated.
We even instilled it as students in Air Force pilot training — when I was an instructor, a flight commander, you were graded every day, every ride, with a grade sheet, ranked. When you finished training with your class, say twenty or twenty-five students, you were rank-ordered, partly on daily flying scores and check ride scores, but we also had a "commander ranking," a very subjective ranking from instructors based on how well students supported their classmates, how well they shared information they'd learned — because we didn't have enough resources to teach all of you everything, you had to share among yourselves. That embedded the mutual support mindset, because we knew that's the world they were heading into, flying fighters, they'd need that. Mutual support is so important in high-reliability industries, because when you have autonomous people making decisions, you need a culture where everyone feels they can speak up. In my talks, I give examples, because it's hard — we don't want to be the bad guy, the fun police, or feel like we're calling someone out to make ourselves look better. I'll give examples of mutual support comments, like, "hey, confirm you want this," or "I know you said this, and maybe I'm missing something, but what about this" — that's better than, "Mary, I think you're wrong, we need to do it this way." There are better ways to do it, and I cover that in talks and workshops. It's so critical, it's literally the lifeblood of high-performing, high-reliability teams — without that level of peer accountability, gaps are going to open up.
[Mary] It seems to me the military is so hierarchical by nature, that's how it's organized, so it's powerful to say, in this context, this room, this time, there is no rank.
[Brandon] It is, it's one of the reasons — everybody laughs about call signs, mine was Manson, there's a long story there, and usually you get the name for doing something stupid, which also goes back to humility, mutual support, being able to critique yourself. But part of that tradition exists for a reason — those call signs strip away rank a bit. When you go out and execute, it's very clearly defined — I was often a flight lead leading a formation, not necessarily the most senior-ranking officer in it, but I had fifty-one percent of the vote on everything we did, responsible for that formation regardless of everyone's rank, because I was the assigned flight leader, the assigned instructor that day. Because of the nature of aviation, like any high-reliability industry, you have to be able to take the rank off — canopy closes, rank comes off, debrief or briefing room door closes, rank comes off — and then you go back to your normal job, the rank structure returns, because the profession of arms obviously needs one. But at a tactical level, you've got to be able to let the experts run things — what I call flattening the hierarchy, letting the person with the most relevant knowledge speak up or take the lead.
[Mary] I want to get to all of these, so let me move to the next, which is just culture — and we talk about this quite a lot too — reframing accountability, moving from "blame and train" to "learn and grow."
[Brandon] You basically just said it. Just culture ties into debrief culture as well, I use them somewhat interchangeably, but just culture is the basis behind it. From my aviation safety background in the Air Force, where I was an aviation safety officer, qualified to investigate mishaps and run safety programs — I've taught aviation safety at several universities — just culture was kind of psychological safety before "psychological safety" was even coined. We embraced that idea in the aviation safety world, especially commercial aviation, a long time ago. It's this idea of a non-retributional environment where you identify safety hazards, or admit, again, nobody shows up intending to make a mistake or have a bad day. It's a non-retributional environment of, "I saw this today, we did this wrong, here's why, here are some lessons learned," that debrief culture mindset. Now, it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card for willful disregard of rules or negligence — there's a clear line there.
Healthcare has done a pretty good job here too, taking a lot from commercial aviation. I worked with one organization with a really good chart — when there's an accident, a mishap, maybe the wrong medication given to a patient, they investigate or debrief it using this chart, with one end being willful, almost criminal negligence — almost never the case, the far extreme — and the other end being someone genuinely trying to do a good job, but human factors got in the way, fatigue, complacency, gaps in the system that set them up for failure, missing information, poor communication. Almost always, you land near that second end — someone intending to do a good job, but undone by fatigue, poor communication, poor situational awareness. The real reason for a just culture is wanting people to report when they see something, to speak up when something goes wrong or could have gone better.
[Mary] I'm going to get to our last pillar, debrief culture, but first let's hear a bit about the company behind the podcast, Safety Products Global.
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And now, back to our show. We're going to talk about debriefing — the principle here is "debrief to improve," embedding a culture of accountability and learning.
[Brandon] Debriefing is probably the thing I talk about the most when discussing my methodology, because everything we just covered really feeds into it — you need a mutual support culture so people can speak up, because that's going to come out in the debrief. You need to assess situational awareness. You need clear intent, which comes down to clearly defined objectives, and a lot of the time, that's the actual root cause we find in a debrief — we didn't have clear objectives. You need something to debrief, my point being, what was our objective, did we achieve it, why or why not.
I call it a debrief culture, going back to the fighter pilot debrief — people always ask how I operated at such a high level, flying at those speeds, pulling eight or nine Gs, doing all that. There's nothing special about me, or anybody I ever flew with, as a human being. Looking back, how we learned to focus, what was important — all of that goes back to debriefing. After every single mission, training or combat, we'd come back, get in a room, shut the door, rank comes off, and we'd debrief — what happened, why did it happen, and more importantly, what are the lessons learned, what are we going to implement next time, what did we learn individually, and is there anything for the organization to take back, organizational practices, standards, processes, gaps in the system. Part of the debrief is pulling out which human factors were at play, because there are always human factors involved — distractions, complacency, poor communication, task overload, where human error seeped in and why. As a leader in a safety environment, your job is mitigating human error, designing teams and systems to close those gaps, those catches meant to trap human errors before they cause harm. Debriefing is all about performance improvement — moving from "blame and train" to "learn and grow."
A debrief is not an investigation, and we intertwine these terms a lot, but they're different.
[Mary] What does an investigation try to do?
[Brandon] An investigation tries to find blame, to pin it on someone or something. A debrief's goal is purely improvement — why did this happen, Mary? You may have made mistakes, but we're trying to understand why, because you didn't show up intending to. Why did you forget a step, or do something incorrectly today? Maybe, like the healthcare example, there was poor communication, you weren't given a piece of information, didn't have a clear objective, weren't given clear intent, were given too much, or asked to do something you weren't really trained for, or there's significant mental and physical fatigue and the ops tempo is too high. We're trying to find out why. A lot of the meat of the debrief is the root cause analysis — there's a technique, the Five Whys, asking "why" five times, and where it goes off the rails by the fifth is usually where you find it. Often, though, we get it wrong by saying, "Brandon, you didn't do that right, we need to train you up" — stop, let's actually ask him why, what were you thinking, what were you looking at, what was your perception — that perception, decision, execution model. Did you understand what you were doing, have the right tools, what was communicated to you? You want to understand why it happened, because they may well know how to do the job — there are bigger root causes, bigger human factors at play. That's the mindset of the debrief, but the whole purpose is pulling out lessons learned. That's it. It's not an individual evaluation, not for leaders to come in and evaluate their people. I always say a debrief is kind of like Vegas — what happens in the debrief stays in the debrief, because all we need is the lessons learned.
People ask, what if you have a continuously poor performer? That's a different conversation, for leadership, outside the debrief — maybe they need more training, different expectations, the wrong role, who knows — but that's separate. A debrief is purely looking at our actions and why they happened, from a systems-thinking standpoint. I call it a "debrief culture" because a debrief doesn't always mean a closed-door, hour-long meeting — for bigger projects it probably does, but it can be five minutes. I do this with healthcare teams, construction teams — "let's talk about this real quick, just you and me, that task went fine, but was there anything better we could've done, did it take a bit longer than expected, let's talk about that," a quick five-minute step. A debrief culture means we're all consistently trying to get better, always improving, always in that debrief mindset — and a big part of it is setting that tone, the rank coming off, talking as peers. For any of this to work, you've got to have a solid debrief culture — if teams embrace just one thing from all this, that's the one I'd recommend, because it really drives better performance, which is so critical for safety and any organization trying to improve. But again, you need that mutual support culture, leaders who hold themselves accountable and participate in debriefs — there's a critical way to set that tone as a leader. One of my offerings, actually, is a debrief workshop, where we go really in-depth, having teams debrief things they've actually done in the past, walking through the four-step model.
[Mary] One difference I noticed — investigations usually happen after something quite catastrophic, often after the fact and at a different scale. But it sounds like debriefing happens regardless of how well things went.
[Brandon] I'm so glad you brought that up, that's one of the biggest misconceptions about debriefing. Most teams think, well, everything went fine, why debrief — we even see this in aviation sometimes still. I work with a lot of big flight schools and their young flight instructors, bringing this military fighter pilot debrief model into that world, because flight schools have a high ops tempo, going from one flight to the next with brand-new students, and they'll say, "we debriefed in the airplane," or "we debriefed walking back from the airplane." I'll say, think about how well you can actually debrief when you're in the airplane, sweating, a student — there's some stuff you can show in the moment, sure, but the real learning happens, I always say, at zero feet, zero knots, one G, sitting in a room, maybe with something to drink, when you can really absorb that learning.
In the military, every mission, training or combat, we always debriefed. I always ask people, how many of those missions do you think were successful — a very high percentage, we achieved our objectives, essentially did what we set out to do — but we always debriefed, and always found things we could've done better, better decisions, better planning, near misses. Finding near misses is a big thing in safety teams' debriefs — a lot of times "everything went well, great, let's move to the next task," and maybe somebody else saw something, but it never surfaces because we didn't debrief. That's why I call it a debrief culture — we don't just do it when something goes wrong. It's sometimes even more important to debrief a big win, to understand why it went well, what best practices we can pull out. The key is a solid structure to it — without that, you just get a discussion, what I call artificial harmony, "anything to add? No, went okay. You? No, all good. See ya." Instead, going through a quick step-by-step process adds structure, which tends to help, especially with something inherently difficult for us to do.
[Mary] That's such a critical point. I'll ask about the structure in a minute, the elements of what is and isn't a debrief — but you talk about respectful truth and a tone of accountability. Even if you're walking quickly and everyone just wants to get somewhere, the tone set isn't one where people can learn. If people are still nervous, adrenaline still flowing, they're not going to be learning. How does a leader set that respectful truth tone, with a structured, sit-down environment?
[Brandon] I touched on this earlier, but just like with mutual support culture, if you as a leader want that with your team, you have to show your own accountability, hold yourself accountable, open yourself up, be vulnerable about things you could have done wrong or better. One of the best techniques I've seen, and used myself as an instructor or flight lead, is before you even start the debrief — even before sitting down — the very first thing you do as a leader is name something you could have done better that day. "Here are some things I think, for the team — right off the bat, here's something I think I could have done better, could've provided better tools, made a better decision here, changed this." For example, as an instructor flying the T-38, a supersonic jet trainer the Air Force uses to train future fighter pilots, I'd always come back with a brand-new student, just a few hours, maybe barely a hundred — and I have thousands. The very first thing I'd do is find something I could have done better as an instructor or pilot — "I demoed this maneuver, here's something I didn't do well." Or, "Mary, I noticed your landings were a little long today, and I think your power pull was late — but I never actually talked to you about when to pull power, so I'll take some of the blame, if I'd covered that, your landings probably would've been better." What does that do? It starts breaking down those communication barriers — that reptilian part of the brain isn't so defensive anymore, because debriefs are hard precisely because it's not natural to talk about our own missteps in front of peers, we sense it as a threat. This brings down those defensive barriers, so people feel they can speak up — that's the tone of accountability. If you skip that step, and people don't feel safe speaking up, even pointing out things other team members did, you might as well not debrief at all, because you're just having a discussion, that artificial harmony, not actually getting at the "truth data" needed to improve.
One of the best examples I use in talks is a Blue Angels documentary, showing how they start their debrief — they go around, call it a "safety," and fess up right away, all the way up to the team leader, the "boss" — they all admit something they could have done better, before even getting into the actual performance analysis. I think that's so powerful — when you lead a debrief, whatever your rank, position, or title, starting right away with something you could have done better, because if the leader can speak up and admit shortcomings, surely everyone else can too.
[Mary] We obviously don't have time for the depth of a full workshop, but what are some structural elements key to a good debrief?
[Brandon] Absolutely. I just described the first step — set the tone of accountability. It's a four-step model, "SCALE" — S, set the tone of accountability. Next is E, execution — what were our clearly defined objectives, and if we didn't have them, that's part of the problem. Did we achieve them? What was the "truth data"? As fighter pilots, when we'd go back and debrief, we had tapes from the airplane recording what we did, pods recording our track so we could put it on a board and see everything that happened, airspeeds, altitudes, the truth data. That's the first step, because before pointing fingers or asking why something happened, you want everyone on the same page about what actually happened — make sure there are no unvalidated assumptions. A lot of people listening have probably sat in a "post-mortem" meeting where someone says, "that's not really what happened," or "I think we're going down the wrong path." So E is critical — what were our objectives, and what was the actual truth data.
From there, if you have a lot to debrief, I say, identify your debrief focus points, DFP — narrowing things down to the two or three biggest gaps to actually talk about. Say you're doing a maintenance procedure, lots you could discuss, but a crane component fell off because a pin wasn't installed — that's a DFP, let's dig into that one. That guides your focus for analyzing, which feeds into A, analysis — the real root cause analysis, the perception-decision-execution framework, asking each other, what were you looking at, did you understand what we were doing, what gaps did you see, what human factors were at play — pulling out those contributing human factors. Then, after analyzing and discussing, comes L, lessons learned — what are we taking away, individually and as an organization, any best practices, anything we need to recommend changing to leadership — that's where we summarize. I always say finish with something you could have done better, something the team did well, and what you're going to commit to going forward.
It's a lot, I know, but it's very flexible and scalable — something you can do in minutes with one or two team members, or dig into for an hour or two for a large project, a quarterly goal, a strategic initiative. The key is that it gives you a structure to follow — because without setting that tone first, you'll just have a discussion, and won't really get that truth data out.
[Mary] Zooming out, looking at everything we've discussed, if you had to boil it down into one actionable step you'd recommend to safety professionals listening — I realize that's not easy — what would it be?
[Brandon] I'll call it human factors leadership, since that's everything I do, why I named it that. It all comes back to safety leadership, or anyone in high-reliability industries, high-performing teams — everything I've built this model on is based on human factors, which comes from my safety background, learning that aviation safety is really all about human factors — why did this pilot, mechanic, or person make this decision, what were the variables affecting them? That's what it boils down to — everything we've discussed embraces that concept. Leaders have to understand, as we said at the start, that when their people show up, nobody intends to make a mistake, skip steps, or cut corners. We're all trying to do our best, and there are human factors at play. Everything from clear intent to the debrief has an underlying basis in human factors — how do we mitigate human error, embrace human factors, and use that understanding to drive better performance?
[Mary] How can our listeners learn more about the topics in our discussion — any resources you'd recommend?
[Brandon] I'm trying to think of anything specific externally — nothing comes to mind by name, but there are so many tools out there, especially with AI now. For situational awareness, for example, I've worked with companies that use dashboards to help maintain it. For debriefing, I'm experimenting a lot with AI right now — how you can use it to better analyze performance, feeding in your objectives, your results, ideas about contributing factors, and asking what it thinks of the assessment, as another resource to help analyze. I'm definitely not saying you should use AI to debrief — it has to have that human component, and that's another important point about debriefs, who should be in them: only the people who executed it, who were actually there, part of that team.
There are a lot of tools out there to support debriefing, though — working with flight schools, there are apps now, like ForeFlight, very common in general aviation, where you plan your whole flight, get weather, everything on an iPad or phone, fly, and it records all the data, bringing back that "truth data" I mentioned, which then helps you assess where to debrief. I also help teams build customized debrief guides, posted in common areas, based on that structure and methodology, tailored to their team — what are common human factors for us, what should we make sure to look for in this area. That's probably the best thing that comes to mind, even though nothing specific by name jumps out — there's just a lot out there that can help.
[Mary] Where can our listeners find you on the web?
[Brandon] Thank you so much for asking. BrandonWilliamsSpeaker.com is my website — you'll find a lot of what we talked about there, my background, what I do, keynotes, workshops, coaching, and consulting, working across different teams. On LinkedIn, I'm Brandon Williams Speaker — that's the platform I'm most active on. Also on Instagram and Facebook as Leadership Speaker Pilot, if you're interested. You can always reach me at brandon@brandonwilliamsspeaker.com — happy to provide any resources we discussed, including a free debrief guide I hand out to teams that covers the model I described in more depth, which you can customize for your own team.
[Mary] Sounds good — we'll provide links in the description of the show. Thank you, Brandon, for your time.
[Brandon] Thank you, Mary, thank you so much for having me on, I really appreciate it, and I hope your listeners get something out of this.
[Mary] Thank you, and thanks to our listeners. Please find us on LinkedIn to discuss the ideas in this and other episodes of Safety Labs. I'd like to give a shout-out to the Safety Labs team for all their production, logistics, and writing work, and for just being wonderful people. Okay, bye for now. This podcast is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice, and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Until next time, stay safe.
