Peak Performance Is Built in The Small Moments
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The discipline of the everyday
So how do you prepare someone for that kind of consistency?
Alex’s answer starts with the things that can look almost trivial from the outside.
“The uniform is to be in immaculate condition. The creases on your sleeves are to be in the correct place, your shoes are to be polished,” he says. “It’s that daily routine, that daily discipline, which then builds into the bigger picture of you performing at your best.
“If you’re paying attention to the small things, then the big things start to piece together.”
It is an idea familiar far beyond military life: how we approach the small things often shapes how we respond when the stakes are higher. Military culture makes that idea unusually visible. From the outside, it can seem ceremonial. Alex’s explanation is much more practical.
“It starts on day one. In basic training, everything you do, you’re told to do. If you’re going to eat, you’re told to go and eat. If you’re told to sleep, you sleep. If you’re told to change your uniform, you change your uniform.
“As you progress, it starts to relax because you’re now in the habit. Then when you move into learning your trade, those standards are simply expected of you.”
If you’re paying attention to the small things, then the big things start to piece together.
There is an operational reason, too.
“When you’re living in the field for a week or two at a time, why is it important that your hygiene is good and your uniform is kept clean and tidy? Ultimately, because it’ll make you ill. If you don’t focus on those little bits, you’re going to be ill and ineffective.”
The routines may look strict from the perspective of a civilian, but their purpose is ultimately to protect the individual, the team and, in safety-critical environments, the people who depend on them.
It is similar to how a trainee controller at NATS spends a long time practising before taking responsibility for live traffic. Theory, simulator runs, handovers, takeovers and working alongside other controllers are repeated until the technical skills and communication begin to become second nature.
Aviation is hardly alone. The World Health Organization’s surgical checklist contains just 19 checks covering the patient, procedure and potential risks. None is particularly dramatic. What matters is doing them reliably every time.
For Alex, all that preparation eventually comes down to one thing.
“I should be able to trust the person sat next to me, irrespective of the environment that I’m working in.”
Get comfortable being uncomfortable
The military places emphasis on sport and adventurous training.
“If you’re going to be good at a sport, you need discipline, focus and resilience,” Alex says. “Those elements start to feed into the military because it isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle.”
Adventurous training can mean walking up a mountain, scrambling, rock climbing, cycling, skiing or snowboarding. The activity itself is only part of the point.
“It’s designed to push you beyond your comfort zone. As you push beyond that comfort zone, you start to see what your limits are. You start to see the physical and mental indications that you’re approaching that limit.
“And what we do in the military is push you past your limit and show you that you can actually do this. If you’re rock climbing up the side of a mountain and you’re scared of heights, it’s: keep going. Get yourself past that point.
“Then, when we’re operating in our jobs and starting to push beyond what we’re comfortable with, you can recognise those same physical and mental reactions. You’ve felt it before."
It’s designed to push you beyond your comfort zone. As you push beyond that comfort zone, you start to see what your limits are. You start to see the physical and mental indications that you’re approaching that limit.
The point is not simply to see how far somebody can be pushed, rather it is to help them recognise what pressure feels like before they encounter it in an environment where the consequences are much greater.
The same thinking can be seen in how we train and assess future controllers at NATS. Candidates can be placed into simulated airspace, given feedback and then asked to go again. The point is not to be flawless at the first attempt, but to see whether someone can process what happened, adapt and perform better the next time.
The mountain and the simulator could hardly look more different, but both give people somewhere to experience challenge before the stakes are real.
Alex has his own, slightly less glamorous example.
He has been snowboarding with the military for around six years. He once broke his arm doing it. He also races.
“I come last every single time,” he says, laughing.
But he keeps turning up.
“I’m still racing, I’m still pushing. As you start making progress, you get that competitive element where you’re like, I want to win.
“As soon as you’re at that starting gate, irrespective of how good you are, you want to win. That’s the mindset the military put into me. When I go into work, I want to do my best. I want to come out of that going: I did everything that I could.”
Standards and support
Protecting people does not mean removing standards, in fact, for Alex, the harder part is knowing how to hold both simultaneously.
Alex has spent almost 15 years in the RAF but is relatively new to the Squadron Warrant Officer role. He has already reached the highest rank available on his current career path, yet he chose to take on more responsibility.
“The knowledge and experience I’ve got, I want to pass that on to everyone else, irrespective of their rank,” he says.
That means maintaining standards. It also means recognising when the person who has fallen below one might need help.
“There is a line. If needed, I’ll correct you and I’ll get you working back onto the other side of it.
“But even when this happens, I’m still checking: are you okay? What’s actually going on? Is there anything I can help with?”
For Alex, offering that support means understanding what may be behind a lapse, helping someone deal with it where he can, and then returning to the routines, discipline and attention to detail the job demands.
That may be the clearest description of his leadership style.
“Myself as a leader, I am nothing without the people who work around me, above me, below me and next to me. Everyone has a key part to play.”
Welfare, he says, is an “absolute priority” across 78 Squadron. There are open-door policies, health and wellbeing days, forums with different ranks, military chaplains (known as padres), service charities, medical teams and specialist mental health support. But Alex makes the point most powerfully when he makes it personal.
“I don’t necessarily need to know the finite details. If someone’s having a tough time, it could simply be: Alex, this person is having a tough time. Can you give them some time off? Absolutely. I don’t need to know the whys. I just need to know how I can help.”
He is equally open about his own experience.
“I’ve been through the Defence Community Mental Health Team. I’m completely open about it. They’re absolutely phenomenal.
“I participated in about three months of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and I sat there thinking: this is going to help me for the rest of my life. It’s not just this one situation. I’ve now learned a skill that’s going to help me for years and years to come.”
Knowing when to stop
For an organisation built around readiness, knowing when not to push is just as important.
Alex has worked 36-hour stretches on operations when the mission demanded it. Day to day, though, the aim is very different.
“Yes, enjoy the lifestyle, but don’t burn yourself out. Because if you burn yourself out, you’re not going to be as productive as you might want to be.”
Sometimes that responsibility sits with leaders.
“It’s not turning around at three o’clock on a Friday and saying, I need this done by Monday morning. It’s taking a step back and going: do I really need this by Monday? Why am I asking for it on a Friday?”
And sometimes it means saying no.
“Sometimes protecting people means preparing them to go further. Sometimes it means knowing when to stop. Because the reality is, the environment that we work in is safety-critical. If we push people beyond what they’re able to do, someone could die.”
A no, however, should not be the end of the conversation.
“What solutions are there? It might be: no, we can’t do that, but if you move your timings right an hour or left an hour, we can support you. We don’t just want to be told no. We give solutions at the same time.”
Human judgement still matters
Any conversation about modern performance eventually arrives at technology.
Air traffic control is increasingly supported by systems designed to make work more efficient and protect against human error. Alex welcomes that. What he does not want is for assistance to become abdication.
“There are elements that help us, but they don’t make decisions for us. We want that balance where technology assists us and allows us to work more effectively, but we don’t want to step away from it and go: you can just run that.”
It turns out the public draws a similar line.
In this year’s NATS Aviation Index, 57% said they would be comfortable with AI being used in air traffic control. Take the human away, however, and that figure falls to just 19%. 76% said they would be uncomfortable with air traffic being managed by AI without human oversight. It was the least acceptable use of AI tested in the research.
Alex thinks there is something else involved, too.
“With human performance, because we’re humans, we will make mistakes. What we want is for those mistakes to be small and not catastrophic. That’s why we assure, that’s why we examine.
“But with human performance you also have human emotion. When you put the severity of some of the things that we do on the line, that is what makes us different from machines.”
There are elements that help us, but they don’t make decisions for us. We want that balance where technology assists us and allows us to work more effectively, but we don’t want to step away from it and go: you can just run that.
Technology may calculate probabilities faster. It may even offer the more efficient answer. But in the environments Alex works in, someone still has to own the decision.
“If you said, ‘AI made me do that’, that’s not going to cut it.”
After almost an hour talking about performance and people, the conversation had covered discipline, sport, mental health, leadership, rest, technology and even Alex’s reliably unsuccessful snowboarding career.
Yet it all came back to the point he had made at the very beginning.
“If you’re paying attention to the small things, then the big things start to piece together.”