Top Gun Governance

Governance and management have a big problem. Organizations must learn to thrive in our highly interdependent world, even as that world is changing more rapidly and in more unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. Organizations need to become much more situation aware.

Situation awareness is a mainstay of air force and military doctrine, nuclear power plant management, aviation, and ERs, among others. These are all disciplines where mistakes in understanding a situation and predicting its outcome may not only be costly but also fatal. Top-Gun Governance adapts and scales insights and practices from the field of situation awareness to promote better sense making and prediction throughout your whole organization.

More than "big data," this next-generation governance will help you challenge your decision-making biases, recognize when events and trends are breaking current rules and assumptions, and manage the changes they inevitably bring. This is a book for leaders and those who must see changes with clear-eyed dispassion and create, implement, and sustain a culture of change in a highly dynamic world.

How did this book come about?

In a word, COVID. How did public health guidance, which had been successful in managing past epidemics, become so contentious? This question led to the following train of thought:

Why change programs are so difficult when even simple interventions, like mask wearing, are rejected by large segments of the population, to...

Thinking that different situations, characterized by their degree of unpredictability, require different communication and change-management techniques, to...

Understanding how cognitive biases take hold and reinforce positions that become very entrenched, to...

Realizing that concepts and practices in situation awareness, a discipline used extensively in environments where mistakes can be fatal, could be a good approach, to...

Using experience in organization architecture to describe ways in which situation awareness could be scaled to the organization level under the umbrella of governance

So yes, a somewhat convoluted path but one that I hope demonstrates the breadth and depth of focus in looking at very complex problems and one that informs this book.