1755 – The Four-Step Afterburner Methodology with Christian Boucousis

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's christian boo bukusis aka we're just going to refer to you as boo from now on you're because your website is callmeboo.com also boo your other website afterburner.com and i should point out that you are also a podcaster and your podcast is called The Few with Boo. And again, to our friend that's listening to us right now, just do a quick search on that and you can find that podcast. Boo, it's great to have you. Thanks, Josh. It's a pleasure to be here. My son's name is Josh and you can probably hear him screaming in the background. Well, I may scream from time to time as well, but not today.

1:39We'll hold off on that during this and we'll leave that to the other Josh. All right. So, give us a quick overview of the work and the impact that you have today, what you do? I think for me, it's about connecting purpose and passion with doing something every day. And often when you hear those words, they're a little bit flowery, a little bit fluffy. So where I come from it is really from the structure of being a fighter pilot and what worked to take the dream of being a fighter pilot for me and for many fighter pilots, what starts as a dream and turning it into reality. And when you look at startup businesses, when you look at product launches, when you look at anything that is a concept that needs to become reality, there's just not a lot of structure around that.

2:21And I think the methodology that was actually founded by a gentleman called Jim Murphy, former US fighter pilot almost 25 years ago, what he calls flawless execution is a really great platform. So for me being introduced to that as a concept 10 years ago, when I was an entrepreneur in my own right, I had founded a humanitarian projects business in the Middle East to help rebuild Afghanistan. I sold that, moved into proper development, built a 17-story hotel, sold that business. And during that, I became acquainted with Afterburner. So I guess Afterburner is about fighter pilot mindset in business as a theory.

2:54I was fighter pilot mindset in business for real. So I became quite enamored with the brand. I got involved. I acquired a license for, as my accent can probably attest to, I'm not from the US. I'm Australian. I live in the US now. And over time, got friendly with Murph. And early this year, I acquired the business from him and became the CEO because I feel it's just such a powerful message. It's not even a methodology. It's a belief system that happens to have steps to it. So for me, my call me boo was hand in glove with Afterburner, whereas Afterburner is very specific around fighter pilot ways of working.

3:31For me, I really wanted to unpack the psychology. My journey is a little bit more around neuroscience, the five brains, why it is that fighter pilots came up with this system and way of working. The simple answer was because a lot of fighter pilots were getting killed in accidents and in combat. So that's the very high level. And it's very hard to find university studies where you come up with systems and thought models and cognitive programs where people were killed to figure out the best way of working. So that's kind of rare. So my job, or I feel my mission now as a human until when I kick the bucket, is to use other resources and other research to prove up the fighter pilot mindset and way of working.

4:14That is because lots of people died, plus plus his research that also shows that it's a really smart way to approach life. Yeah. So tell us a bit more about, you know, kind of this afterburner mindset or this, you know, having the mindset of a jet fighter pilot as a leader. And I'm not so concerned about what's grit and its determination, but what is behind that that drives that? So it's not like, well, I just need to have more fortitude, right? It's deeper than that. Yeah, and that's where we diverge a little bit from, I guess, the models for working that have their basis in special forces. You know, you've got Jocko Willicks, and it's all great work, don't get me wrong.

4:56ours is just different because whilst you need grit and determination it's a very different type it's a you know we're a very analytical science-based type of environment where everything happens very very fast everything happens fast on the ground or in the air but we are literally going very fast like thousands of miles per hour so that's what's very different the other is the third dimension and again on the ground you've got the third dimension which is up but in aviation we have the third dimension, which is going down. And if you go down badly, you hit the ground and you get killed. It's not a zero sum game being a fighter pilot.

5:32So fundamentally, if you look at the fighter pilot model, it connects two states, that being the unknown, which is where the airplane's going and the known, what I can control, the cockpit, the airplane and the pilot that sits inside. So if you start with known and unknown and you want to turn that into success. So the unknown is more the art of strategy. If we take those two states and we say, yes, despite that being unknown, I still have to get things done and I still have to be successful. We've got to come down a level and go, well, let's articulate the unknown in terms of the art of strategy.

6:07So that's storytelling, it's creativity because we're working with a future that hasn't happened yet. And let's call the known science. So the science of getting things done, we can work there. And being a fighter pilot is an exercise in bouncing between the two very quickly. So when we talk about the art of strategy, we talk about what's our story that's compelling enough to invest in the science? Because whilst the science is very tangible, it's still resource intensive. And that is you as an individual, getting something done in a day, you only have so many resources available to you. You've only got so much brain power, so much food, so much time.

6:41So we have to make sure that we point the science in the right direction. So we help organizations create a great story. And we like to call that a high definition destination. because the story has to be clear. It has to have chapters, has to have characters. Everyone has to know what their role is. If you looked at Lord of the Rings as a story, could you imagine all of that activity going on without the story? Just a bunch of hobbits floating around and jumping in trees and throwing, and then some elves just come in. Oh, there's some dwarves too. It's chaos, right? You've got to have a story.

7:10But equally in that story, you know what the Lord of the Rings is before you open a book. You know what Star Wars is before you open the book. It's a story of good versus evil, right? So it's very simple. and there's a purpose to the rebels and there's a purpose to the empire there's a purpose to the orcs and there's a purpose to the hobbits so everyone has a role yeah in business we're led by science financial projections and so therefore our stories aren't very compelling we've got 263 hobbits that eat this much food it's important but it's not going to engage people right so what we do as fighter pilots is we create a great story even the fighter pilot themselves and afterburner tells the story.

7:47It's a belief system. It's green suits, patches, our ethos, pathos, Lagos, everything is very well articulated and passed down to generation to generation. And it's all consuming. Every fighter pilot is the same everywhere. It doesn't matter what country you come from. We all have this weird fighter pilot code during World War II, during Vietnam, Korea, what's going on now around the world, Russia, Ukraine, put a bunch of fighter pilots in the room and we all speak the same language. So that is what's incredibly unique about our world. So flawless execution is, hey, let's create a compelling story, something that has a sense of purpose to it.

8:23And then let's do some purposeful action. And it's really created around four key steps, which is aligned with time. So our plan is all about the future. It's called plan, brief, execute, debrief, PBED. Our plan is about the future. Our brief is connecting the future to today, execution is today, and our debrief is yesterday, what actually just happened. And it's very elegant in that most organizations are unable to connect the three states of time in four steps. And if you think about an enterprise of 200 ,000 people, if those 200 ,000 people can have the same conversation and talk about tomorrow, today, and yesterday in a way that is aligned throughout the organization, imagine, we don't have to imagine, we know.

9:07It just cuts through the noise. It creates very simple alignment. It reduces ambiguity. And it just means that we help the human brain out, which doesn't do tomorrow and yesterday and today very well. We just mumble it all up, right? We get anxious about a future that doesn't exist. We get upset about a mistake that we made in the past without really understanding why. So it's a very elegant system because through the four steps, not only do we, if we look at the art and science of execution, What we also start to manage is the feel, think, do loop inside a human, our emotions, our thoughts, and actions.

9:43Again, just through four steps. That's the power of it, right? So what we do, particularly managing the emotional energy and the engagement and the well-being side or psychological safety of a team or an individual, is we break out that debrief step. So plan, brief, execute, debrief. That's tomorrow, today, and yesterday, all linked together very nicely. But the debrief is all about, you know, let's unpack what just happened. So let's have another four-step conversation. So four steps to execution, four steps to debriefing. And we call the debriefing process the orca. The orca is a big black and white dolphin.

10:17Some might call it a killer whale. But an orca is known as one of the most intelligent animals in the animal kingdom. It has an accelerated learning curve. So we use orca for our debrief. And what orca stands for is objective, result, cause, and action. And again, that's really when it comes to being successful. That's the four steps to being successful, having a clear objective, being very honest about where you are today, your result. And this is the bit that gets a bit tricky. It's the cause. Why am I here? And this is a very personal conversation. And this is where we start busting the 200 odd belief systems that live in each and every one of us, our cognitive biases.

10:56And we do a debrief in a peer group in an environment we call nameless and rankless. And the beauty about a peer group is a supportive peer group can see your blind spots. All right. Because as we all know, self-awareness is one of the hardest things to have. We want to be self-aware, but at the same time, we don't know how to do it. So we do this in a peer group because we're very analytical. Objectives are clear. Results are clear. They're numbers. And really, all we're trying to find is one cause as to why I might be where I am today compared to where I want to be. And when we find that cause, the most important part of debriefing is doing something about it.

11:30In clinical psychology, this methodology is akin to what they call CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, where we logically unpack our emotions through action. And the brain and all of our habits, the way we learn, the way we feel better about ourselves is through action, not just thoughts. So another way of thinking about it is Simon Sinek says, start with why, which is very powerful. That's your purpose. Now I clearly understand why I'm doing this. But fighter pilots have another why. And we say, well, why am I not there yet? Because that's just as important. And when it comes to positive psychology, when it comes to positive thoughts, we can't fool ourselves.

12:09Mindset and positive intention is great, but we also have to win. We have to actually achieve some stuff on that journey or we lose faith in this positivity, which is why positive psychology can be a bit of an empty shell. And actually, it's starting to create a generation of kids where all of these positive thoughts aren't delivering results. And therefore, I become more depressed and anxious because I've got all this great material. My school's telling me about positive thoughts, positive intentions. But I'm not in the first football team. I'm not on the first netball team. I'm not getting 98 % on my exams.

12:48And now it's like, what's wrong with me? It must be me that's the problem because I'm being positive. So what do I do next? Well, the thing you do next is actually have some wins. That's where we have to start scaling back our positivity and start to connect our weekly goals into something that's a bit more real. So what we've done in the last generation is take a goal, which is I want to be a welder and that's a great job to have to I have to be a multi-billion dollar entrepreneur. And that's the expectation. And that gap is not a happy place. No. So what we achieved with fighter pilots is we have an incremental system because the day you come in, I joined as a 19-year-old idiot, and I had to start flying fighter jets as a 21-year-old competent man.

13:35Yeah. And that two-year process did that. And we can unpack a lot there around comfort zones and all sorts, but I'm aware of time. But it's a very, very conditioned system that is designed to be successful, but to get a human being on the steepest learning curve possible. Because we had a saying in the Air Force, anyone can be a fighter pilot, but we have to get this fighter pilot trained within 408 missions. And that's the benchmark. Yeah. So, Boo, you've worked with McDonald's, Johnson & Johnson, 7-Eleven, Microsoft, Pfizer, and I'm on your website right now. It's callmeboo.com. speaking, coaching, workshops, mentoring.

14:16Tell me a little bit about engaging with you and who should be engaging and what is the specifically like, what do you do with these groups? Normally, because of the commercial reality of paying mortgages and scaling out your business model, we work a lot with large enterprise. And one is a commercial reason, but the second one is also that's typically the biggest problem. They're so complex and they're so big and there's so many people. But for me also, I love working with enterprise because ultimately that's where most of the workforce is. So if we can create great enterprises that have billions of dollars of resources at hand, and we can mobilize those resources into the greater good, that's where we want to influence as Afterburner and where I want to influence personally.

15:01Having said that, we have a program and we love to work with small, medium business too. But you've got to be very clear around your purpose. And we're not, I'm not for everyone. Afterburn is not for everyone, because we do need people to see that investing in the organization and the development and growth of the individuals in the organization is a great investment. And sometimes for some people, that can be a hard conversation for themselves and people can be in denial, particularly in large enterprise. So we tend to work with those who, you know, kind of understand what the importance is of having a growth mindset.

15:38Yeah. So again, your website, callmeboo.com, and then also afterburner.com, which is a great domain name, by the way. Yeah. It's an easy one to remember, right? And so afterburner, these would be more on the team building side of things? So afterburner, we have keynotes where we deploy our intellectual property. We have experiential programs where you get to experience what it's like to be a fighter pilot and which is in your office, conference centers. We work with thousands of people at annual conferences or 10 people at an executive team. And then we have a learning and development module. You're looking at our website, which is about six days from being updated to our new product suite.

16:18But Afterburn is amazing. It's phenomenal because what we do is we put real fighter pilots into enterprise to work and develop people on this fighter pilot model. It's the way we scale fighter pilot mindset and ways of working. and and it's you know when you see it and you see these fighter pilots they're just as excited as the enterprise we're working with it's two worlds coming together and when that collides it's phenomenal magic happens yeah well where do people go from here they've enjoyed our conversation gotten to know you maybe they were researching you and they've stumbled upon this podcast and what's next in their journey with you yeah reach out i always say to somebody when they reach out to me first.

17:00If you had a magic wand and you waved it and either me or the Afterburner team were there, what would happen? Because I'm pretty confident we can make that magic happen. So reach out on afterburner.com, reach out, call me Boo. If you look at me up on LinkedIn, just type in B-O-U-C-O-U-S-I-S. There's only two of us on LinkedIn, my dad and myself. So you'll find me there as well. And pop a DM, you know, just let's start a conversation. I love it. All right, Christian Bu Kusis, aka Bu. It's been great having you again, your website afterburner.com and callmebu.com. Bu, thank you so much for joining us.

17:38Thanks, Josh. It's a real pleasure. Love you to meet.

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