What pilots and surgeons can teach us about managing high-pressure situations

With our industry moving through a period of significant change, management teams seem to be becoming more open to the possibility of learning from other industries and professions.

In opening ourselves up to those influences, it’s tempting to start closest to home and follow some of the trends and initiatives from other professional services firms. Hence the frequent references to the fortunes (sometimes literally) of the accountancy profession in considering the trend towards consolidation and a more corporate style of management.

But, what about professionals from more distant walks of life? What might we learn from them? Something perhaps about operating effectively under pressure – if two of the recent ideas I have been exploring do not lose too much in the translation.

With the increased competitive pressures affecting our industry, our people increasingly have to perform their roles under conditions of uncertainty (one irony being that low certainty is often a product of too much information rather than too little), but with very short reaction times. They may have a day – or sometimes less – to submit a fee proposal to a major client, for example, complete a risk and conflict assessment for a major new matter or decide whether to complete the final stages of a lateral hire process.

What goes wrong in these situations and could those problems be avoided? Important steps might be missed, too few (or even too many) people might be consulted, budgetary concerns might be overlooked, relevant information held elsewhere in the organisation might be overlooked, or decisions might be made that seem to make sense locally but add nothing to the firm’s wider purpose. And so on. Bad decisions are made quickly under pressure, sometimes having serious consequences.

Which professions face such challenges, but even more acutely? Pilots and surgeons would be two that come to mind.

At our most recent partner conference, we invited a former Red Arrows pilot to be our external speaker, to see whether any such lessons might be learned. Now, although the label of ‘fighter pilot’ is sometimes used pejoratively in our industry to refer to high-performing individuals who will only do things their own way, the characteristics of an actual fighter pilot seem to be very different.

Fighter pilots typically have a strong emphasis on teamwork and a commitment to focus hard on how their individual contributions to that team performance could be improved – with the senior ranks being expected to set the example in modelling such an approach.

In terms specifically of high risk and high pressure scenarios, we looked at how worst outcomes might be avoided in very difficult situations through strong preparation and a very sharp focus on the fundamentals at the time of crisis.

The (related) practices of commercial pilots in response to emergencies (which are thankfully rare) are one of the subjects discussed by surgeon-author Atul Gawande in his book The Checklist Manifesto, which was kindly given to me by a colleague.

While 200-odd pages might seem a lot to devote to the discussion of such a humble document as the checklist, it is a fascinating read and prompts consideration of how we could be working to simplify our approach to the most high-pressure situations faced by our people in a way that is relevant, widely adopted and transformative in reducing the actual instance of major problems being caused.

Put another way, what is the law firm equivalent of a cargo door detaching mid-flight, or a patient suffering a cardiac arrest midway through a routine operation? Both of these instances are vividly described in Gawande’s book. If you can identify those scenarios and create a usable framework to respond to them, with an emphasis on highlighting what gets missed, rather than stating the obvious, you may have a money-saving and face-saving (if not actually life-saving) tool on your hands.

Now, although as lawyers we are going through a challenging and unpredictable phase of development in our industry, I would accept that there are few life-or-death decisions to be made in most areas of legal practice and am concerned not to draw parallels that stretch the point beyond what’s useful.

But, if other professionals in whose hands we routinely place ourselves and our safety are prepared to accept the benefits of anticipating the unlikely, setting strong processes, and emphasising teamwork (meaning that we each give up just a little of that precious autonomy along the way) might we not take a little inspiration from that?

Ian Jeffery is the managing partner of UK law firm Lewis Silkin (www.lewissilkin.com)