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Erica D'Eramo 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the Two Piers Podcast. I'm your host, Erica D'Eramo, and today we have Christian “Boo” Boucousis, who is the CEO of Afterburner, a global leadership and performance consultancy that has spent over 30 years helping organizations execute at the highest level. Former fighter pilot, Boo brings the mindset, precision, and discipline of military aviation into the world of business. He's worked with more than 3500 organizations and over 2 million leaders worldwide, helping them perform under pressure, lead with clarity, and drive consistent results. Bu was also the author of The After Burner Advantage, an Amazon best-selling book in the leadership category, and he's here to talk to us today about flawless leadership. Hi, Boo. Welcome to the podcast.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 1:00
Hello, Erica. How are you? Thanks for having me.
Erica D'Eramo 1:03
Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. It's really great to have you on. I was really excited to connect, because we support quite a few people who are either in the Air Force, have have served, or are now navigating different transitions. So, I love this topic, and I love getting to chat with somebody who can really distill it down for our listeners who maybe haven't spent time in those spaces, so thank you so much for being on.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 1:31
That's a pleasure. It's interesting, isn't it? How we all put ourselves into boxes, you know? I've been in business for 20 years, not being a fighter pilot, but for some reason, that's the angle that everyone wants to approach every conversation from. I'm not going to argue with it, I'm embracing it, but we do tend to put people in their kind of little pigeon holes, don't we?
Erica D'Eramo 1:53
Yeah, identity, right? It's a, it's a complex and interesting thing, and that I'm sure for a lot of folks it feels very, very beyond their, their scope of knowledge, and so it must be an interesting, interesting story. But I'm guessing that there are a lot of through lines that you probably pick up on that are quite applicable to people navigating the corporate world or leadership in general.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 2:19
Yeah, it's fascinating, I guess, because I've lived both worlds more as a practitioner than a coach or an advisor. 11 years as a fighter pilot, 20 years, nearly just over two decades in business. The first decade of those two decades was as a business founder and running my own businesses, and I've gradually kind of morphed into this world of building capacity and others, which can accumulated in me acquiring Afterburner, a 30 year old organization that was founded in 1996 on the premise that we can take fighter pilot mental models and ways of working and implement them into into business, and it's been an incredibly successful business. So, looking, you know, through both of those lenses, you appreciate that it doesn't matter what it is you're, you not so much what you do, but what you're trying to achieve, that everything is a human endeavor. In some, through some lenses, you might be a solopreneur. In other lenses, you might be the CEO, or in the executive leadership of a company that employs three, 400,000 people. But generally speaking, the kind of rules, the rhythms, and the way of approaching things is is all really the same, because you're you can really only control what you can control, which is yourself, and the better job you do doing that, the better you are at influencing everything around you that you can't control. So, it's yeah, it's been a fascinating journey, and flawless leadership is really the culmination of gosh, almost 40 years of life, which encompasses 17 years of wanting to become a fighter pilot, 11 years of being a fighter pilot, and 20 years in business, and, and really mapping out those through lines that are applicable to really unlocking potential. I think, for a lot of us, we operate well below our potential. I think there's a lot left inside a human being, the average human being. I think we see athletes kind of get there, and even within that sphere, there's probably athletes that don't achieve their full potential. We've observed that, you know, in the NFL, but you know, there's a lot of.. you can say the words are you're not fulfilling your potential, but I think what's more useful, and what we do is equip people with a systematic way of thinking that enables you to fulfill that potential.
Erica D'Eramo 4:53
Yeah, so I'm really interested in the systematic way, because I, you know, as an engineer, like I'm. I joke, you can take the gal out of engineering. You'll never take the engineering out of the gal. I find myself continuously coming back to systems, and I work with a lot of people who are very oriented in that way. So, tell me a little bit more about the systematic approach.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 5:14
The reality is, we live in a system, whether we're conscious of it or not conscious of it, that's how humans are. I mean, we, our community is part of our system. The way in which we wake up in the morning, brush our teeth, make decisions, it's all subconscious programming, bias, bias-based systems approach to living. What we're missing is the intentionality and understanding that, you know, when I see a system in an organization, it feels like control, it feels like it's dampening my innovative mind, my ideas, and that it's restrictive, but the reality is it's the opposite, like systems set you free, because systems normalize the basics, and if we're expending, yeah, we're in the era of, we're in the cognitive economy now, right, where the ability to create space to think and troubleshoot, problem solve, and approach the world critically, which is not happening, we're just approaching the world through our own eyes, and we're getting, we're seeing more and more conflict as a result, we, we need to understand that the systems that we have around us, you know, set our set us free. It gives us the ability to be more thoughtful, and obviously, as a former fighter pilot, that's how I was trained, because everything is a system, you know, there's standard operating procedures, the airplane itself is the hydraulic system, the pneumatic system, the electrical system. It's a system of systems, and you learn as a fighter pilot. If you don't know how this bit of the system connects to that bit of a system, when you get a red light or a yellow light and something's going wrong, a little bit like a doctor, it's like, oh, I've got a sore elbow. It's like, well, where is it inside the elbow that it saw? Where is it inside the airplane? And then, when you start looking at the application of air power, you're now looking at a system of multiple airplanes, platforms on the ground, in the air, different speeds, and you've got to like the conductor inside an orchestra, which has a violin system, a cello system, a bass system. You have to work out how to integrate all of those resources. What's wonderful about that is you realize that whether it's an airplane or a product, a radar or a service, it doesn't matter. Like, it's how you integrate things together is where the magic happens, and as human beings, we're not really trained as integrators. We're trained to become subject matter experts. We're trained to memorize at school. We're trained at school to be very good at doing what we're told. And then all of a sudden we go into business, we're given a role and responsibility. We've got to be really good at that role. We become leaders. No one trains us how to be a leader in the corporate space. So, here I am, all of a sudden I've got to lead people, but all I really know is how to do my job. So, we end up with leaders that go from being really good, and then they get promoted to lead 10 people, and they're trying to do 10 people's jobs. So, just when they need the cognitive bandwidth to lead, it's completely saturated, because they're trying to do everything, so systems are habits. I mean, you can call it, it's, it's habits by design, not not habits by accident. So, when we, when we, when I come at systematic thinking, I come at it from a perspective as an entrepreneur, where you have to build a system that doesn't exist into a market that doesn't exist into an organization that doesn't exist, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of unknowns. So, what's the best system to have to deal with an environment where there's a lot of unknowns? Well, it's a system that's infinitely curious that understands how to build context rapidly, and then how to test and adjust relative to that context, a little bit like the scientific method or engineering architecture. It's all, it's all quite similar. So I encourage leaders to use a methodology I called Orca ORCA, like a killer whale, which is objective, result, cause, and action. And basically, what that means is, as a leader, your job is to take people into the unknown. That's what leadership is.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 9:30
We confuse it with management, which is to just do what we're currently doing better, and to tell people what to do. That's not leadership. So, if you think about leadership, it's always into the unknown, so when we're going into the unknown, we've got to, we've got to put a flag in the sand somewhere, so we call that an objective, right? So the objective is, you know, let's stick with the fighter pilot stories to go and hit that target, right? So then what fighter pilots do is we work backwards from the target, we don't work forwards from where we are to the target, which is...
Erica D'Eramo 9:59
Target-out planning, right?
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 10:01
Yeah, but it's, you know, but it's planning with the destination in mind, not it's not planning and say, hey, I've got some wood, I've got a hammer, I've got some nails, what can I do with it?
Erica D'Eramo 10:10
Yeah,
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 10:11
It's like, hey, I'm going to build a house, well, what do I need? Well, I need some hammers, I need nail, and they need to do it. And then, you know, in the book, I spent a lot of time exploring biases, and a lot of the biases that sit around planning, the planning fallacy, the optimism bias, and often when it comes to planning, particularly with leaders that don't do anything, like they're not doers, they're leaders of people or leaders of other leaders, is the mere act of planning in itself feels like accomplishment, so often an organization will build a business plan for the year and feel a great sense of achievement in December before we've even started, because I'll look at this plan, we're going to make a lot of money next year, and then they wonder why during the year, it's like, whoa, what's going on, you know, so the R in Orca is the reality in as a fighter pilot. After every mission, that's what you do. You come into a room and you say this was the objective, this was the reality, this what this is what happened. And given that we as human beings make 95% of our decisions based on our perception of the world and not reality, it's important that we test against reality, because that's really what's happening, not what we think is happening. And when we create that gap, we have to become curious as to why it's there, and that's what the C stands for, curious or the cause of the gap. And unlike how most people do reflection reviews, post mortems, wash ups, the focus isn't on everything that went wrong. We just need to find one thing, because the, the, the orca method is engineered towards the A, and that's action. So, the problem is, if, if, if we reflect infrequently, we find a lot that went wrong, we create a lot of work, and the work doesn't get done because we're too busy doing the work that we already have to do, so nothing happens. Whereas Orca is run daily, and it's run in a way that ultimately it becomes your entire mindset. That the objective means that every conversation you have with someone, you're like, what, what's the purpose of this conversation? What does good look like at the end of this conversation? What objective are we meeting about? And then that way you can say, well, I don't need to be in the meeting, rather than, oh, let's, let's hop in the meeting and try and figure out, figure out what we're doing. So, you become very.. it's not intentional, because intentional is probably a little bit too storytelling, a little wiffle, wiffle, waffle. You become more destination driven, and why I like that word, destination, is in aviation, if you hop on an airliner and you fly to Cancun for a vacation, the captain doesn't say, "Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen, our goal is to get to Cancun. If you hear that word, goal, you automatically know the probability of that happening is low. That's where we're at with humanity, right. Goal setting is irrelevant. It's almost like, oh, that would be nice, whereas a destination means I have to get there, which is why they use that word on an airliner. So, when you become a destination-driven leader, you're really focused and committed to a rival rather than the work to get there, and the great thing about that, if you're a destination-driven leader, is if you define the destination and the context, you free up your team to do the work to get there. I mean, most organizations are full of very smart people that we tell what to do, which is really underutilization, and in my opinion, why engagements down at 21% now around the world, the lowest it's ever been in history. Because we've got hugely informed, intelligent people being told what to do, because leaders don't know how to ask a question and say, "Hey, this is the destination. How do we get there? Let's work that out together, guys.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 13:57
So, flawless leadership is the whole pretext of the book is in a world where we almost give up before we try being a flawless leader means I'm going to try and get as close to the perfect outcome as possible, but I understand that perfection is impossible, and as I've researched the book, I really wanted to research the origin of these two words, because humanity tends to conflate words that sound the same and make make them the same, but they're quite different. Perfection has its origins in Latin and in scholarly pursuits, so it's almost like it's a theoretical term, which means that everything is whole and complete.
Erica D'Eramo 14:39
Yeah.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 14:39
Both both what I can control and what I cannot control. Whereas the origins of flawless come from the Nordic people, it's a Viking word, and it's how you define an unbroken stone. And then, over time, the English language converted unbroken stone to broken stone, which was, which was a flawed stone, so. So flawless defines something you can control and something that you can see, and then you use that in a world that you can't control, and flawless is really a leader who is committed 100% to what they can control and highly adaptive to the world that they can't, that's really the pretext of it, and what's great about the concept of flawless is you liberate yourself from everything in the world that you feel anxious about, can't predict, can't control, and you realize that, hey, look, I can, I can plan up to a point, the in the short term, where I kind of know what's probably going to happen, and when I get there, I can make another decision. So we take what we do at Afterburner is we take enormous annual strategies for very, very large companies, and we help them missionize it into a daily what do I need to achieve today mission, and that's not just for the company, it's not - it's it's 200,000 missions per day for 200,000 employees, and in 30 years of doing this, we've never seen it once. This is no company ever runs this way. There is no such thing. We got a little close to it with Agile, and we came up with, you know, the week sprint and the two week sprint, but even in, even in that world, you know, the idea of the stand up and the retrospective, it's still, it's still kind of generic stand up and too far after the fact. When we reflect and we don't link the retro to the stand up, we don't say what we discovered in the retro frames tomorrow's stand up, it's all disjointed. So we connect it all and we say, well, what we plan is the best guess. We then brief that to make sure people understand where we're going, what's real, what's assumption. We go out and have a go, see what happens, and then we connect, and we ask ourselves, did we achieve the plan or not? And if not, why not? How are we going to tweak it tomorrow, not collectively, but individually, what am I going to do differently tomorrow? But we do that together to make sure that when six people decide what six things they're going to do tomorrow, they're aligned, and we all agree that's that's good aligned effort there. We're not just treading on each other's toes. So, there's a lot about the fighter pilot world that was engineered for a very good reason, which was to not die really. That's the whole point of it. And if you look at John Boyd, who originated this whole idea of the OODA loop, which is observe, orientate, decide, act, it really means before you do anything, just look, have a look at what's going on, and then put yourself in a position to take advantage of what you see, and from that point, then make a decision, so you're already kind of there, and that decision has to drive the action, and then the action is going to influence the system, and then we observe it again, and we end the loop complete. So everything we do as fighter pilots is iterative thinking, it's always connecting intention to action, and then the result of the actions to tomorrow's intention.
Erica D'Eramo 18:03
All right, so I mean this, this process sounds great, and I'm, I'm curious, like, where do you see organizations failing to see the value here? Like, why is everyone not already doing this?
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 18:15
I think it's, I've spent a lot of time pondering this, and I think it really comes down to what is the core purpose of a human being, and a human being's core purpose is to survive and propagate the species, like that's that's what we're engineered to do. Yeah, so iteration requires a leader to escape from that discomfort, you know? If you look at most businesses, it's they're generally run politically. People have close hold cards close to their chest. They typically want to hold information, because by liberating some information they have and someone else using it, it might give someone else credibility over me, and that person may get, get promoted. Mind you, AI is completely annihilating this. I mean, is you know, in an era where information is infinite, as long as we give it the right context, the information is power, conversation is gone, and if you look at anthropics, mapping out of all of the jobs that are at most risk of AI, it's everything in the intellectual space, so you know, as a fighter pilot, you have to survive. You have to thrive. You can't just survive, because inevitably you won't one day, because survival means I need to stay in the cave, I need to preserve my energy, and every now and again, I have to go and hunt a lion, or the whole caveman thinking that that runs the primal structures of the brain. So, what happens in the world of a fighter pilot through the training system is you effectively reprogram a human being away from the linear thinking model, which is here's who I am and what I'm capable of, to this is where you need to get to, and you're just not there yet, and that's a really powerful way of living life. Life, because I think everyone wants to be in the NBA, playing the NFL, be a billionaire. I think everyone wants something really big for their life, but the fear of it is what holds people back. And there's also, and I learned this when I was a young fighter pilot trainee, I'd finished my basic training, and we go from like a little propeller airplane to a small jet to the big jet. So I was on the small jet, and I was learning, learning how to be a baby fighter pilot. And halfway through my course, my uncle, who I grew up with, who was a helicopter pilot, crashed and was killed in an aviator in a helicopter accident, and at the time I absorbed the information, and I was like, yeah, that's sad, and but I'm so committed to my job, I'm only 22 years of age here, and but my performance started to drop off, and I started to go from, you know, I'll sort of average to above average, I was never a stellar fighter pilot, thanks to my ADHD, you know, and I was dropping into kind of average to below average, and my commanding officer stepped in, and he's like, 'Hey, look, is there anything going on that can explain this, you know, we're we're just seeing you on the missions and you're not quite there, and then I just kind of burst into tears, and I was like, because I hadn't really thought about it, and when someone asked me, has something happened, I'm like, yeah, my uncle passed away, is probably the only thing, but I was not expecting the emotion to come with it, if that makes sense, like, and it hit me out of nowhere, and I was kind of inconsolable, and he just said, "Okay, look, we're going to take you off the program for a week, and I want you to go and go and talk to the pastor, because in those days there weren't psychologists. The pastor was a psychologist, so I went and saw the pastor, and I was kind of thinking, you know, what am I going to get from this?
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 21:59
This is not going to help me much, but it was really fascinating, because he said to me, he says, you know, within us as human beings, often as part of grieving, we sabotage success, it's unconscious, but we feel that we don't deserve it, or how can I give something to someone to show that I care, and I was like, oh, that's kind of weird, but there's this element of truth, I think, within as much as we need success to be successful, success in itself is scary, and it's kind of scary because you're only as good as your last win, and when you're successful, I think what happens is you build a level of expectation of the people around you, and you've got to do it again, and then you succeed on top of succeed, which builds more expectation, whereas if you don't succeed ever, and you just exist, you, no one's ever going to ask of you too much, if that makes sense. So, so this is, there's this kind of, again, why I love this reflective practice of orca is it kind of level sets you every time, and it sort of says, well, today's win was was great, and there's stuff we can learn about that and apply tomorrow. So, what if you think of mission one, you fly as a basic fighter pilot to mission two, obviously you developed a skill set somewhere along the way, you're a little bit better, and by mission 400 you're a little bit better again, but there's still, you know, a 40 year career to go, so it kind of level sets you, and, and where something new for most people is it's kind of unexpected. Oh, look, I just won. Whoa, that was where did that come from? I just landed a deal. I just like, like, success is like a surprise, whereas, as a fighter pilot, success becomes a habit. You start to program and capture the new thing as the thing that you just do, and that reinforcement loop of reflection is so important because it's something that you do, it's not done to you, so you anchor the intention, you demonstrate through the result being success that there's a reason for being successful, you explore that in the cause, and often it's just, well, hey, I worked hard, I invested time and effort, so I should have won, and the action tomorrow means that what was new today becomes standard practice tomorrow. So it's almost like it's a systematic approach to developing a growth mindset, and for many of us, mindset is who knows, it's some people say it's who I am, some people say it's the aspiration I want to be, and really it's all of those things, but the only way to change a mindset, and I think of a mindset as it's your conditioned biases and beliefs, so the bias is the program of the past, the belief is what you think. You can do in the future, and they're interconnected, so you're what you think you're capable of, generally anchors down your beliefs. So somewhere along the way, we have to reprogram the bias to give us more belief, and that intentional reflection is what does that, and how we see that in the world is that we behave differently. Some people call it confidence, some people call it competence, but what happens is, as the autopilot, the bias gets reprogrammed, you believe in yourself, you have more self-worth and more self-belief, you behave in a way that is more confident, but most of us just leave that to chance, or it happens by way of ego or being an alpha personality. It doesn't happen as a result of a systematic approach to growth, and that's what I, that's what I love this realization, and the ability to bring those two worlds together by, you know, quite by fluke and purchasing afterburner to help people understand that it's like growth is systematic, success is systematic, fulfilling your potential is systematic. You don't have to leave results to chance. You can't control the time in which it happens. Took me 17 years to become a fighter pilot. I wanted to when I was five, I was one when I was 22 So that took a long time. I wanted to be a millionaire. It took me a long time.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 26:24
It took me three years of running my first business. To you know, as a fighter pilot, you just realize, "Oh, I'm not a fighter pilot yet, I'm not a millionaire yet. You know, I haven't written my book yet. Is there everything you do, you, when you have those moments, which are the survival instinct, which is like, oh man, this book's too hard, doing social media is too hard, getting on this podcast is too hard. You realize that, well, it's not really, it's just a stepping stone, it's just, it's a really little bit of effort that inches you towards your goal. And for me, my, my ultimate destination is to build 2 million flawless leaders around the world in the next five years, so you and I, what we're doing now is a stepping stone, maybe, maybe no leaders, maybe one leader, maybe someone will listen to this in six months, might be two leaders, maybe that particular leader wants to do the flawless leadership program, and then they become an agent of change, so it's, you know, it's just this really not yet progressive nature of of of not yet around something very specific rather than something like I'm not the person I want to be yet spoke about that word identity you know often mindset is is crafting the identity first and then living true to the identity, say, for example, a fighter pilot has a specific identity, you've got the flight suits, the jets, the Ray Bans, the call signs, you know, there's from the outside looking in, we're all the same, on the inside we're all different, but to live true to that identity is not to be the best fighter pilot you can be, it's to be the best you you can be in everything that you do as a parent, as a football player, as an academic, you have to show up. The amount of knowledge you need to have as a fighter pilot is just shy of infinite. I mean, it is, you know, every one degree of heading change and five knots of speed and three degrees angle of bank has an infinite number of possibilities when you're in aviation, like it, it can influence everything else around you, so when you understand that even though you're in fully control of an airplane, there's an infinite number of scenarios that's even more powerful proof to just focus on what you focus on, what you, what you, what you can control.
Erica D'Eramo 28:51
Yeah,
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 28:52
Now the key to adapting into what you can't control is to shift from this idea of an existence just existing in the world and move into a world of awareness, where you're aware of the world. I tend to, I tend to, people talk about self-awareness. I feel like self-awareness can be a bit of a trap, you know. If you're self-aware, you got to be careful, because 80% of the programming of a bias is negative. So, if you become too self-aware, there's a good chance you're going to become too negative, and you're going to start to be anxious, and you're going to start to be depressed. And by being self-aware, you're always going to look at the world through self rather than through selflessness, so awareness for a fighter pilot starts on the outside in. So you need to be aware of the environment, the observe in the OODA loop, and then how you fit into that environment in this, in this second, or maybe even. Five seconds in the future, but not five years down track. I mean, no one can, no one can predict that sort of a future.
Erica D'Eramo 30:07
Yeah, I mean, I'm so I'm curious, for our listeners who might want to learn more, connect with you, where can they find you?
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 30:16
Just type my last name into Google or into an AI engine, B O U C O U S I S. I'm the only one out there. We, my, my family is the only Boucousis on the planet. Call Me Boo is my website. Afterburner is the company that I own that does this at an enterprise scale, and I have 25 fighter pilots that that coach and facilitate this, and in October, my new book, Flawless Leadership, comes out. So, if you start to, even if you look now, the Flawless Leadership training programs are out there, the assessments are out there. So, even if you just search for Flawless Leadership, you're going to find, you're going to find me.
Erica D'Eramo 30:58
Awesome.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 30:58
More importantly, find a tool to help yourself, don't worry about me, you're going to find some stuff that's really going to help you.
Erica D'Eramo 31:05
Yeah, absolutely. And folks can also find links, we'll put some links in the in the summary page and in the show notes as well to help to help them find their way to you, so that maybe they can read your book and and see what you're all about. But I really appreciate you coming on the podcast, sharing some of your wisdom. What's the, what's the final takeaway? If folks take one thing from this episode, what, what's, what's your headline for them to walk away with?
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 31:32
Bring intention to two aspects of your life, intention as to where you're going and intention around reflecting on why you're not there yet, and if you just practice those two things, you will find that you will slowly gain the momentum, and inch by inch, you'll start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and your fingers will start to really grip that destination you've set for yourself.
Erica D'Eramo 32:00
Awesome, that's a great one, and I'll be keeping that destination orientation in mind, for sure. I'm sure that that one will stick with me. Thank you so much, Boo. I really appreciate you spending the time and the generosity of your wisdom, and yeah, I'm sure our listeners do too.
Christian “Boo” Boucousis 32:16
Thanks, Erica. It's been an honor to be on the show.
Erica D'Eramo 32:19
Yeah, thanks.
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Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit with Christian “Boo” Boucousis
In this episode of the Two Piers Podcast, Erica D’Eramo is joined by Christian “Boo” Boucousis, CEO of Afterburner, former fighter pilot, business founder, keynote speaker, and author of The Afterburner Advantage. Boo’s forthcoming book, Flawless Leadership, explores how the systems and practices used by fighter pilots can help leaders perform more effectively in business and organizational life.
The conversation focuses on systems thinking, leading through uncertainty, daily reflection, and the importance of staying focused on what we can control while adapting to what we cannot.
From Fighter Pilot to Business Leader
Boo begins by noting that people often approach his work through the lens of his fighter pilot background. That experience is important, but it is only part of his story. He spent 11 years as a fighter pilot and more than two decades in business, including time as a founder before acquiring Afterburner.
That combination gives him a practical view into both high-consequence aviation and the ambiguity of business leadership. Across both environments, Boo sees a common through line: leadership is always a human endeavor. Whether someone is leading a small team, a large organization, or their own business, they can only directly control themselves. The better they do that, the more effectively they can influence the systems and people around them.
Why Systems Matter in Leadership
Erica, drawing on her engineering background, asks Boo to explain the systematic side of his leadership approach. Boo points out that we already live inside systems, even when we are not conscious of them. Our habits, routines, organizations, decisions, and communication patterns all operate through systems.
Many people associate systems with restriction or control. Boo sees them differently. Well-designed systems can create more freedom because they reduce the mental energy spent on basics and create more room for judgment, problem-solving, creativity, and adaptation.
That matters because modern work increasingly depends on the quality of people’s thinking. Leaders need to create enough structure that teams are not constantly reinventing how to work, while still leaving room to respond to complexity and changing conditions.
Leadership as Integration
Boo explains that fighter pilots are trained to understand systems within systems: the aircraft, the mission, the people, the timing, the environment, and the decisions being made under pressure.
Business leaders face a different context, but a similar challenge. Many people are promoted because they are strong subject matter experts, then suddenly find themselves responsible for integrating people, decisions, priorities, and outcomes. Without a leadership system, they may try to do everyone’s job themselves.
That can quickly overwhelm the very cognitive bandwidth they need in order to lead.
The ORCA Method
Boo introduces a method he calls ORCA, which stands for Objective, Reality, Cause, and Action. It is a simple structure for helping leaders and teams plan, act, reflect, and adjust.
Objective
The first step is defining the destination. Boo describes leadership as taking people into the unknown, which means leaders need to be clear about where the team is going. Rather than beginning with available resources and asking what can be done with them, leaders work backward from the intended outcome.
Reality
The second step is comparing the objective with what actually happened. Boo notes that people often make decisions based on perception, assumptions, and bias. Reflection helps teams test their understanding against reality.
Cause
Once the gap between objective and reality is clear, the team gets curious about why the gap exists. Boo emphasizes that this should not become a long list of everything that went wrong. The goal is to identify one useful cause that can inform the next adjustment.
Action
The final step is deciding what changes next. For Boo, reflection has to connect to action. If the team learns something but does not change behavior, the process has not done much. Used daily, ORCA keeps reflection small, practical, and connected to the next mission.
From Goals to Destinations
One of Boo’s memorable distinctions is between having a goal and naming a destination. In aviation, a captain does not say the “goal” is to get to Cancun. The plane has a destination.
For Boo, that language matters. A destination carries more commitment and clarity than a vague aspiration. When leaders define the destination and provide context, they can invite the team into the question of how to get there.
That shift also helps leaders make better use of the people around them. Rather than telling capable people exactly what to do, they can frame the destination and ask the team to help determine the path.
Flawless Leadership and Perfection
Boo also explains the distinction between flawless leadership and perfection. Perfection suggests a complete and ideal outcome, including factors inside and outside a leader’s control. In real life, leaders are always operating with uncertainty, complexity, and changing conditions.
Flawless leadership, as Boo describes it, is about full commitment to what can be controlled and adaptability around what cannot.
That framing allows leaders to stay disciplined without pretending they can eliminate uncertainty. The work becomes more practical: define the destination, act with intention, compare the result with reality, learn from the gap, and adjust.
Why Reflection Needs to Be Frequent
Boo argues that many organizations reflect too infrequently. When reviews happen only after major milestones or problems, they often produce too many findings and too much follow-up work. As a result, little actually changes.
Daily reflection creates a different rhythm. Teams can make small adjustments while the information is still fresh. They can also align those adjustments together, so people are not working at cross-purposes.
This is one of the ways Boo connects fighter pilot practices to business. The plan is made with the best available information, the team executes, and the debrief shapes what happens next.
Success, Growth, and “Not Yet”
Boo also shares a personal story from early in his fighter pilot training, when his uncle died in a helicopter accident. Although Boo initially kept going, his performance began to decline. When his commanding officer asked what was happening, the emotion surfaced unexpectedly.
Through that experience, Boo began to understand that success itself can sometimes feel threatening. Success can create pressure, expectation, and a fear of having to keep proving oneself.
Reflection helps leaders examine both mistakes and wins. If something went well, what contributed to it? What should become standard practice tomorrow? Over time, that process helps people build confidence through repeated evidence rather than leaving growth to chance.
Boo also uses the phrase “not yet” as a way of staying connected to a destination without treating the current gap as failure. He wanted to become a fighter pilot from childhood, and it took many years to get there. The same principle applies to leadership, business, writing, and other long-term goals. The gap can become part of the process rather than proof that the destination is out of reach.
Awareness of the Environment
Toward the end of the conversation, Boo talks about awareness. While self-awareness can be useful, he cautions that too much inward focus can become limiting. In aviation, awareness begins with the environment:
What is happening around me?
How do I fit into this context right now?
What is likely to change next?
For leaders, that kind of outside-in awareness supports better adaptation. It helps them respond to what is actually happening rather than getting stuck in assumptions or internal narratives.
Final Takeaway
When Erica asks Boo what he wants listeners to take away, he points to two areas of intention: where you are going and why you are not there yet.
That combination captures much of the conversation. Leadership requires a clear destination, but it also requires the willingness to examine the gap between intention and reality. With consistent reflection and small adjustments, leaders can build momentum over time.
Connect with Christian “Boo” Boucousis
Christian “Boo” Boucousis is the CEO of Afterburner, a former fighter pilot, keynote speaker, and author of The Afterburner Advantage. His work focuses on helping leaders and teams bring more clarity, discipline, and adaptability to execution.
You can learn more about Boo and his work through Call Me Boo, Afterburner, and his Afterburner speaker profile. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn, follow him on Instagram, or explore Afterburner’s Flawless Leadership program and leadership books.