Blue Angels and Feedback

The Blue Angels fly close-formation aerobatics at high speed, where a small error is not a small problem. Getting to that standard means the team has to find every imprecision in a performance and correct it before the next one.

That happens in the debrief. Every pilot’s work is reviewed out loud, in front of the people who flew it with them. They critique themselves first, then take the critique of everyone else. Vulnerability is not a nice quality to have in that room. It is the mechanism.

This video puts SLG founding member BGen Dan Shipley, USMC, callsign Knuckles, in that seat. He flew Left Wingman for the Blue Angels, and here his own performance is the one under review.

It is worth watching for a specific reason. Most organizations say they want a feedback culture and then build one where feedback flows downward, arrives annually, and is softened until it carries no information. This is the opposite: immediate, specific, mutual, and survivable. The question it leaves you with is whether you would open your own work to that, and whether the people you lead would believe you meant it.