Fighter squadrons don’t always hit their objectives, but they always debrief.
A dogfight can be over in three minutes, but the debrief after can last twenty minutes or six hours, mission accomplished or not. The flight suits are still on, adrenaline hasn’t fully drained, and the group takes the mission apart, however long it takes, until we understand why it went the way it did. Rank means very little at the debrief table. The newest pilot in the squadron can point out an error made by the most senior one, and the senior pilot nods, writes it down, and thanks them for it. It may have just saved their life.
Most businesses only do this when something visibly breaks: a blown deadline, a lost client, a launch that flops. Even then, what passes for a debrief is just a sanitized recap in the next team meeting, or a review scheduled two weeks later that mostly covers the numbers. Nobody says out loud what actually went wrong, because saying it risks making someone, or yourself, look bad. So what people really think gets said later, in a text to a work friend, in a smaller, safer group. That version might be more honest, but it isn’t useful. It’s now speculation masquerading as evidence, because the people telling it don’t have the full picture. You can’t find out what actually happened with half the data missing.
Most teams don’t have a ritual forcing the honest version of events to surface in the room where it matters. So it might surface later, less accurately, and the team doesn’t improve.
Every meeting and every project has an objective, whether or not anyone said it out loud. For a debrief to work, you need to start with a goal and a willingness to look at what actually happened. A mission has four parts: plan, brief, execute, debrief. Fighter squadrons treat the last one as more important than the first three combined, because it’s the only part that improves the rest. Get the debrief right, and the next plan is sharper, the next brief is tighter, and the next execution is cleaner. Skip it, and nothing gets better. You just make the same mistakes again next time.
Aviation has been debriefing for decades, and a 2013 meta-analysis in the journal Human Factors, pooling 46 studies across military, medical, and corporate teams, found structured debriefs improved performance by 20 to 25 percent.[1] A twenty-minute conversation, done well, likely outperforms most training budgets.
The debrief runs on a small number of standards that guide the group toward the truth.
Recency
Begin while it’s still fresh so memory doesn’t have time to edit itself into something more comfortable. You want your team to vividly recall the sights, sounds, decisions, and feelings so the team’s actions are understood accurately.
Fighter squadrons debrief within the hour, because getting to the truth often means asking specific questions. What did you see? What did you hear? When did you decide? Why? Those answers degrade fast. A day later, people aren’t reporting facts anymore; they’re reporting the story they’ve told themselves about the facts. Squadrons also record what they can on every mission (cockpit data, radio calls, jet tracking) because even a fresh memory is still just one person’s angle and up for debate. Find your relevant data to track: the metrics, the message history, or meeting notes — anything helpful that doesn’t depend on anyone’s recollection. Hard facts are more accurate than memory, and people trust them more too.
The two-week-later retrospective might as well be a folk tale. The story everyone remembers by then is the one that makes them look reasonable. Debrief the day it happens, or as close to it as you can get, while the actual data is still data and not yet a narrative. You can’t improve off fiction.
Rankless
Fighter squadrons like to say our rank comes off when we enter a debrief. Everyone at the table is a professional trying to get better. Facts outrank titles.
When a debrief starts by blaming others, people get defensive. They put up a wall and stop answering questions honestly. They start protecting themselves, and when someone withholds information to save face or look good in front of the boss, everyone loses, including the boss. The goal of a debrief isn’t to find blame for errors, but to understand why people made the choices they made given the circumstances, so the team can improve next time.
That’s why the pilot leading a debrief often starts by naming their own mistakes first. The moment the leader starts pointing the finger at themself, guards come down, and people join in with their own mistakes and honest perspectives instead of protecting themselves. That’s when the real learning happens. It isn’t magic. It’s a deliberate posture (humble, approachable, credible) that lets everyone in the room speak the truth without retribution. It’s why the parking lot conversation later that evening doesn’t need to happen. Whatever would have been said outside the room gets said inside it instead, to the people who can use it to make the team and themselves better.
This is also where accountability lives. A mistake doesn’t need a story or excuse attached to it. It needs an owner, not for shame and not for blame, but because a mistake without an owner never turns into a fix. The room agrees on whose call it was; a name gets attached to what happened, and that person leaves with one specific thing to do differently next time.
Stick to the Objectives
Anchor the entire debrief to what the mission was actually trying to accomplish. Nothing else is on the table.
A mission usually has a couple of specific objectives. A debrief doesn’t relitigate every decision, but it narrows to the moment things diverged from mission success and works back from there. Squadrons write that moment down on the whiteboard as a single question, a debrief focus point, with the contributing factors underneath it. Once the real cause is clear, the squadron writes down the fix too: specifically what changes to improve before the next mission. Minor issues, unrelated frustrations, and tangents wait for a different conversation. This focus on the objective is what prevents the room from turning into a hunt for who to blame and keeps everyone’s eye trained on improvement.
A debrief that spirals into airing unrelated complaints burns the time available on grievance instead of determining the one lesson that would have prevented the miss. Stick to what this project, this launch, this meeting was trying to do, and pull the lessons from that alone.
Squadrons even debrief the debrief because running one is a skill too, and it degrades without proper scrutiny.
Debriefs happen whether the mission objectives were accomplished or not. There is no rank at that table, and there is no version of the conversation happening later in a parking lot, because it already happened, honest and fact-based. It’s not about blame. It’s about improvement.
Debriefing turns experience into learning. Learning turns effort into performance.
At The Squadron, this is exactly what teams do inside the simulator: they brief, fly a mission, and then debrief it themselves, under the same standards a fighter squadron would use, with a facilitator there to guide them. It’s the difference between hearing how fighter squadrons debrief and actually practicing it under pressure, with your own team — something you can take back to the office and implement on Monday.
Taylor Fox holds an MBA with a focus in finance and real estate investing and is a 13-year U.S. Air Force veteran. He flew the F-16 before becoming an instructor pilot and mission commander in the F-22 Raptor, with combat deployments to Syria and a tour in Korea. He now flies the Boeing 767 for Delta Air Lines out of JFK.
Taylor is the author of “Combat Ready“, which draws on his experience as a fighter pilot to explore how the decision-making frameworks, situational awareness, and leadership principles developed in high-stakes military aviation translate to business and everyday life. He speaks to companies and leadership teams on those themes and brings that same background his role as a facilitator at The Squadron — helping clients think more clearly, decide more deliberately, and perform under pressure.
[1] Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394
