No plan survives the first five minutes of contact with reality – so how should we prepare for what follows? Kevin Fong has spent his working life in high-risk, high-performance teams – flying as doctor with the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, working with NASA’s human space flight directorate, and serving as National Clinical Adviser to NHS England during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as being part of the UK’s frontline response to several major incidents and terror attacks. Drawing on these experiences, Minute Six provides key insights into how teams and organisations succeed against the odds and why they sometimes fail.
At HEMS, Kevin asks us to look past the heroic figures in the foreground, and to focus instead on the systems that underpin them. Recasting the role of leadership, he explains the importance of being a good follower and why decisions in the face of irreducible uncertainty are the ultimate team sport. But the success of teamwork depends in turn on the crucial partnership between humans and technology, and too often we misunderstand the place of the human in the loop and why – when it comes to managing the unknown – the edge of chaos is a good place for us to be.
Examining some of NASA’s greatest achievements, Kevin asks why the average age of the flight controllers in Mission Control during Neil Armstrong’s first landing on the Moon was just 26-years-old, and what this tells us about deferring to expertise. He also explores NASA’s failures in the 1990s, when half of their deep space missions either malfunctioned or disappeared, and how they recovered, introducing the concept of graceful failure. We learn also from a team of social scientists and psychologists who went to sea aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier, developing new theories of how to create safety while sailing an ocean of risk.
Finally, Kevin draws on his experience helping to lead the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and shows how all the lessons he learned throughout his career were crystallised in the worst national emergency since World War II. Minute Six is a timely and essential survival guide for an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world.
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