Christian Boucousis, CEO of Afterburner, is driven by a mission to bring the fighter pilot mindset into business, helping leaders debrief daily and achieve high-impact performance through structured reflection and action.
We discuss the ORCA Debrief framework, which consists of Objective, Result, Cause, and Action. This framework allows teams to expand their comfort zones and improve performance by focusing on small, actionable steps and learning from each experience. Christian shares how debriefing, a core fighter pilot practice, can accelerate learning, enhance accountability, and drive meaningful progress in any organization. He emphasizes the power of disciplined execution and continuous improvement to thrive in high-speed, complex environments. Learn more about how the fighter pilot mindset can transform your leadership by tuning into the episode.
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Debrief Daily with Christian Boucousis
Good day, dear listeners. This is Steve Preda with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Christian Boucousis, otherwise known as Boo, the CEO of Afterburner, who is helping teams achieve peak performance with elite fighter pilot strategies. Boo, welcome to the show.
Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be on the show and also to meet you again. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Yeah. And you’ve got a great Aussie accent, but you are in the United States. So, tell me a little bit about what is your personal “Why,” your personal purpose, and how do you manifest it in your business? And then how did you end up in the United States?
Good question. I’m super lucky in that I was kind of gifted with purpose when I was a kid, when I was five. And I think as I get older and I look back, I realized how lucky I was when I went to an air show and saw fighter jets flying for the first time. And I guess for some kids or people that go to those air shows and maybe they’re not connected with something they’re gonna be, but for me it was, I was always gonna be a fighter pilot. And it only took 16 years, but when I turned 21, I was a fighter pilot. And here I am, only a few weeks away from turning 50, and I’m still donning a flight suit, still talking about fighter pilot stuff. So my “Why” is to translate a way of thinking and a way of working that I was blessed to learn as a fighter pilot, but more specifically applied to business and life. And that’s something I’ve done at a very personal level, founding my own businesses, four of them. And now as the CEO and owner of Afterburner, having acquired this business, which is the fighter pilot mindset, has been teaching fighter pilot methodologies for nearly 29 years around the world.
Yeah, that’s interesting. So is this just why you moved over here because this business was located here?
Absolutely, yeah. If I looked at, I came across a great saying the other day from Gary Brecker and he said, “The pursuit of comfort is what ages us,” and if I’m honest, when I was in Australia before I bought Afterburner, I was in a comfort zone, making good money. I’d sold my businesses. COVID was a bit tough, but bounced back. Everything was kind of cool. And this opportunity came up, which was actually at a personal level, a lot more challenging, a lot less comfortable. The company was quite distressed. I kind of made a decision that I’d never want to be a CEO or run a company again. But when I came back to it, I said, I believe in this and I have to spread this as far and as wide as humanly possible. And to acquire this platform was the best way to fulfill that belief.
Wow, that is exciting. I love this comfort zone. I like this quote that really made me think about some of the things I discussed with my sister over our vacation and she gave me this advice that, hey, get out of your comfort zone. And sometimes you’re a coach and this is what you tell your clients, but the cobbler’s sons go bare feet kind of thing and you forget it yourself. So I love that thing. There’s no growth in our comfort zones, right?
Absolutely, but equally there’s a balance between being crazy and what we would used to call as fighter pilots, NAFOD, No Apparent Fear of Death and those people didn’t make it through where you’re always outside your comfort zone and then I kind of come at it this way, which is to say, don’t push yourself outside your comfort zone, push your comfort zone. So, by incrementally increasing what you’re comfortable with, you will gradually do more and more exciting things without jumping outside your comfort zone, which is where you have your emotional triggers. So being a fighter pilot, it’s actually very rarely are you outside your comfort zone, you just expand it a little bit each day.
Yeah, I get it.
You have to be expanding your comfort zone using language around, hey, Steve, your sister should be saying, you should expand your comfort zone, not you should get outside of it.
I mean, that also reminds me of the definition of fun, which is when you are stretching a little bit, you’re doing something a slightly bit uncomfortable, but that’s stimulating at the same time. And that gets you in this zone of growth and excitement.
Yeah, man, it’s funny that you mentioned fun. I literally just had a conversation with my wife last night and she’s younger and does more fun stuff. Like, what do you think is fun? And I’m like, I don’t know. For me, I prefer something meaningful than something fun. I can’t go on a roller coaster and have fun. I’m not like the Grinch, but I’ve just had so much fun in my life. I’ve done so much stuff that you get to the point where you’re like, like you said, the fun bit is the stimulation, doing something new and outside your comfort zone. But when your comfort zone is enormous, that stimuli just don’t get it anymore. You have to really orientate into meaningful things, and being enriched and fulfilled through a life of meaning rather than a life of fun. Share on X
I think the two is not necessarily mutually exclusive. I think you can do very meaningful things that are really hard to do. You have to stretch you have to reach for them. I love the Eleanor Roosevelt quote that every day do something that scares you. And I think that’s kind of this idea that not necessarily catapult from an airplane, 30,000 feet, that’s one way of scaring yourself.
But what happens when you’ve scared yourself so often and done so much that, like to be scared, there has to be an element of the unknown or an element of anxiety around an inability to do something right. So when you think about it, it’s a rich life, a life where you get to the end and you no longer seek fun or being scared because you’re content and nothing really scares you anymore.
I think scary could be something like for an author. I mean, I’ve written some non-fiction books and I decided to write a business fable and that was scary for me because it was outside my comfort zone. I didn’t know if I was going to be successful with it or even do it.
That’s a good point.
And that’s not like physically doesn’t scare me. I didn’t fear my life in the process but I feared my ego in the process. I mean I could get hurt by doing a terrible job and then my self-esteem suffers. So this kind of scariness. Or try a new framework that with a client that maybe is critical of you and how is it going to come off? Is it going to flip them over and give them the necessary stimulation that will make them buy in more? Or is it going to put them off more? So this kind of stuff.
It’s true and it’s hard. With AI, I’ve just become an AI junkie. I mean, I’m just always on ChatGPT, and I’m the same as you writing a book. And I’m like, well, man, what is it about this book that can be different to what anyone else can find on ChatGPT? And so you’re right. I like where you’re coming from there, Steve. I can see your perspective.
All right. So let’s talk about frameworks. If you already touched upon this idea, and I’m kind of a framework junkie as well as a ChatGPT junkie, I guess, like you are. And I loved your ORCA Debrief framework that we talked about last time. Can you explain to our listeners what it is for and what does it look like?
Well, let’s line it up to the conversation we just had. It’s designed to expand your comfort zone. It’s designed for things that seem scary to be less scary. And maybe because of debriefing, fun things become less fun. So maybe there’s a downside to it a little bit. But really, debriefing is very unique to the fighter pilot culture. A lot of other military organizations and organizations in general, non-military, they have this concept of feedback. But the intentionality around a fighter pilot debrief and the simplicity of it is what makes it truly unique. So the ORCA methodology is an iterative process, so it’s connected, it’s circular thinking, and the letters, they’re a mnemonic for objective result cause action. For example, let’s say you want to do something outside your comfort zone. You want to go jump out of an airplane, right? Parachuting. My objective is to go jump out of an airplane. The R is my current result. Where am I now? Well, I haven’t jumped out of an airplane. I’m only thinking about jumping out of an airplane. I haven’t booked it. I haven’t read about it. I haven’t informed myself. So I’m anxious about it. So what is the cause of that anxiousness to see? Well, all of the things we just mentioned. I haven’t done the work. I haven’t pulled the levers that I can control to get to a level of comfort around what I’m about to do. So what’s my action? Well, my first action is to start with the end in mind. So I’m gonna book, I’m gonna book it. I’m gonna book it in, let’s say three months because I’m a three month believer that anything can happen in three months. You can achieve anything. And then work backwards, right? So I’ve booked it, done. What’s the next thing I’m worried about? I don’t know anything about it. Read about it. ChatGPT, Google, inform yourself. So pull out skydiving and put grow my company by 20%, put in there, I want a promotion, I don’t want to get paid more, I need a raise. Whatever you desire to do is in the future and you’re not there yet. And because of that, there’s an infinite number of variables. So we have to connect the reality of today and slowly reduce the variables through action. So objective is intention, where I’m going, and ORCA, the A in action is the application. What’s really important about debriefing as well is in the flight pilot community, it starts with you. You debrief your own mission first. Then you debrief beside the Air Force, a trusted partner. And then the two of you go in and debrief with everyone else. There’s a degree of peer group accountability and accountability being two ways. I’m accountable to delivering what I said I would do to deliver the result. As a leader, I’m accountable to develop everyone in that room as well. Because for some people, it’s harder than others to deliver that because someone might have been in the squadron for two weeks. Someone else may have been flying for 18 years. So we have this, the ingredients to develop people quickly and unlock what fighter pilots call the accelerated learning curve, a learning curve where you learn three times faster. So imagine that, right? Anything in life. That you can be three times faster than anyone else with a cognitive model that accelerates your learning. That’s powerful, super powerful. It allowed me to build hundreds of millions of dollars business in the Middle East. It allowed me to build a record setting hotel, a 17 story built with prefabricated construction, never been done before. It allowed me to convert a publishing business from print to digital. And it’s allowed me to now be the CEO of Afterburner and teach this methodology. So debriefing is, it just brings clarity. Not total clarity, ‘cause that doesn't exist, but it shifts the needle towards more clarity by leading every conversation with your intention, being honest with yourself, honest with those around you,… Share on X
Okay, so it’s basically, it’s a discipline to always seek for what drives results, what are the obstacles to results and being very intentional about fixing it, taking action and holding each other accountable to executing that action.
And incremental action, an action that can be achieved within 24 to 48 hours, not an action which is just pushing the problem further down the road.
Yes, okay.
And just to really clarify this, Steve, it is action. We don’t create another intention from a debrief and that’s when people talk about feedback what often happens is the feedback is on something that was tried to achieve and the feedback is to create more intention and more intention is just creating more work action is getting the work done.
Okay, so let’s say we unearth some causes that is going to maybe prevent you from jumping out of the airplane or whatever, or it’s going to make it harder. Does that not inform or refine our intention? Because it might be that it’s not enough for you to learn from ChatGPT on how to jump out of the airplane, but maybe you need an instructor, a coach, or whatever. You need to go to a special, I don’t know, exercise place where you’re going to do some practice that’s going to help. So isn’t that going to refine your intention and result in actions that are not doable in 24 hours?
There’s always an action in 24 hours. There's always an action. An action can be as simple as read a book. Share on X Like when it comes to the unknown, the action is make things more known. Do something to be more known. You could go to iFly if you’re skydiving and go to one of those big tubes. You could go and do it, do use a virtual reality training system, but more so in business, right? So because business is so much more complicated now in terms of marketing and sales and drive, you’re driving revenue and awareness and information saturated world is really hard. So where it really works is, what is your intention in terms of visibility of your brand? We at Afterburner, every time we have a question around something, we bring in an expert. So we’re bringing in one of Donald Miller’s copywriters to help us with our story, our brand story. Because we just keep hunting around, it’s like, okay, the action is spend one day with someone that knows how to write a brand story. And from there, that will define everything we do in our organization. Stop putting it off, stop trying to do it yourself. Don’t try and be an expert when you’re not an expert. And a lot of business owners, if you look at a business owner who probably is the highest value per hour employee in the company, doing work that other people can do at a lower hourly rate because they’re pinching pennies is where debriefing really helps. As a business owner, you can only take on so much yourself, right? So that to me is where actions come in, into the equation. Now you’ve got a P and L, you’ve got an intention in terms of your monthly earnings, and that’s where you make your commercial decision on it. I mean, we just had a big win, a big contract, right? We’ve got some surplus funds, we’re not going to take it out of the company, we’re going to invest and take it to the next level. Because overarching intention for this organization is to share a belief system that turns intention to action and creates high impact leaders and high impact teams that get hard things done. So every decision we make has to support that outcome. Every action we take has to support that outcome.
Okay. So when you say that this system makes you three times as effective in execution, maybe I’m paraphrasing, what element of it is that, is it the learning element that you debrief on a regular basis and you are always learning and refining and iterating? Or is it the accountability that you’re doing this with your team and that’s pulling your each other along? So what are those elements that are different from what most companies do and what allows other people to achieve their objectives, whatever they want?
It’s a good question and I would like to rely on my Confucian philosophy here. And Confucius once said, I hear, I forget, I see, I remember, I do, I understand. And where you learn faster is the application of knowledge, not the consumption of information. So when you debrief and you apply the lesson you just learned, you reinforce it and you remember it better. You comprehend it. And when you comprehend a lesson, you go from it being memory into our task networks. So it just becomes a pattern. For example, as a fighter pilot, you have to learn on the aircraft I flew, 427 individual checklist items, right? To get to the airplane, to walk around, make sure it’s ready to go flying, to turn on the engines, get to the runway, take off, get to the area, turn the weapons on, fly and fight the airplane, turn the weapons off, come back down the hill, land the airplane, park the airplane, put it to bed. And in six weeks, we learn every one of those from one to 427 off by heart. And you never forget them. That’s 3X learning. And we don’t sit and read about it. We sit in a pretend cockpit for six weeks and just do it again and again and again. And the application of the knowledge is what creates the memory imprint, the new term memory. The same can be applied with the way that you create marketing emails. The fact that in business, we just try and do everything everywhere all the time and we’re throwing dots, you’ve got to anchor, you’ve got to anchor something and then grow and adapt off that anchor. Just be that one thing. And that to me is what’s powerful about debriefing because you anchor it with that, what’s the objective? Our objective is to get this many inbound leads, this many click-throughs on our email. Boom, boom, boom, and when we have that anchor, we can learn. And through the application of our learnings, those numbers gradually increase over time. So it’s a completely different cognitive model, Steve. It blows out of the water the way humanity thinks. It’s a cognitive model that is engineered for speed and overwhelm, which is literally today’s world. High speed, automation and artificial intelligence, overwhelmed because of the vast amount of information that we can draw from. But all of that has to become wisdom. And wisdom is the right information at the right time to make great decisions. Share on X That’s what this is all about.
Yeah, so what I’m hearing is it’s all about having a discipline around examining the results, learning from it and tweaking the action and then rinse and repeat. And if you do this on a frequent enough basis, I mean, if you do it every day, obviously you’re going to have much better iteration. Some companies, they have annual planning only, some have quarterly planning, some monthly, some weekly, and you have daily. So the more you iterate, the faster you’re going to learn and then the faster you can improve, I guess.
Yeah, you have strategy OS, you get it, right? You understand the importance of the system. So you imagine an enterprise of 240,000 people and every one of those 240,000 is iterating slightly every day towards your strategic goal through debriefing. It’s pretty powerful, right?
Yeah, I love it. So let’s switch gears as we’re coming close to the end of our time. I have this kind of more broad question. Or why do you believe that fighter pilot practices in general are applicable to business? So what is it about the fighter pilots that make them a source of learning?
Well, first, let’s come from a position of credibility. So, Afterburners work with 3,800 companies, all right? Nearly 2 million people. So, we know that it works in every business, every market, every vertical, hands down. Where the value of working with a fighter pilot and not find a fighter pilot anywhere, just recruit one into your business, because the way they think is what’s different. I can put an untrained fighter pilot into a room full of executives and within 10 seconds, they can start to add value because they’re going to ask a very simple question. What’s the point? What are you trying to achieve? What’s your objective? There’s a lot of talk going on here, but what’s the impact you’re trying to make? And that’s just reinforced by Simon Sinek’s Why, it’s reinforced by Clayton Christensen at Harvard. It’s not rocket science, but humans being humans and us constantly falling back onto relationship management styles rather than outcome management styles means we just lose sight of the big picture. That’s just what happens. So we have to be intentional about bringing the big picture back and that’s the value of a fighter pilot. They understand the big picture and how the big picture drives the granular detail.
Okay. And I guess fighter pilots cannot afford to make mistakes. So focus is much more immediate. The need for focus is much more immediate and it’s much more unavoidable.
And it’s a good point. I mean, I didn’t even touch on that, but that’s why this system exists. It wasn’t created by Afterburner, it was codified for business by Afterburner. We are the OG, we are the first company to ever take that. We don’t even call it these things in the Air Force, we don’t call it ORCA. We have a whole overarching plan, brief, execute, debrief cycle. It’s just what we do, it is our cultural practice, it’s our ceremonies that we have that businesses can, through a system, adapt and become the same cultural paradigm, for want of a better word.
But ultimately, it’s all about survival. And fighter pilots are experts in survival, I guess, because they put themselves into very fragile situations, very high speed, being shot at, and so on. And that just kind of crystallizes what the business has to do that maybe doesn’t perceive the threats, but the same threats apply to businesses. I mean, you can get disrupted, your competition can eat your lunch, you can lose your best people who can be pushed from you, you can become toxic internally, and just because it doesn’t happen from one second to the next, it still exists and that kind of focuses the mind to treat yourself as a fighter pilot and just be aware of those dangers and make sure that you action them.
That’s it, Steve, you get it, man. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
All right, well, that’s awesome, that’s very exciting. So what is it that you’re working on right now, Boo, that excites you and that maybe you can share with the listeners?
Yeah, we’re working on releasing a new book, it’s called The Afterburner Effect, and where we articulate what fighter pilots do in terms of a mindset, what we call the fighter pilot mindset and enhancing the ability for leaders to lead in today’s crazy speed world. It’s a concept we’re calling flawless leadership. That to me is where we take the system that we have as fighter pilots, we constantly test it against real world environments, and it constantly stands up to the test. And today’s world of automation, and when you have AI, the speed in which we turn things around is so much faster, which means if we’re unable to build intention and adapt our intentions quickly and alignment, it means very quickly we can disappear off tangents and have absolutely horrific results. It’s artificial intelligence, it’s not human consciousness, two totally different things. So the ability to build leaders who understand how to use all of these modern elements of business as a tool, rather as something to manage your business, they’ll be so much more successful.
Okay. Well, when is this book coming out?
Christmas for Christmas reading.
Christmas reading. Okay. So for the time being, you also have this other book, On Time On Target?
Yeah, we have On Time On Target. We have a load of resources on our webpage, afterburner.com. Every week we put out a blog that’s based on fighter pilot mindset, flawless leadership, the psychology behind why this methodology works. So if you raised an eyebrow and you’re like, this all sounds great, but I can’t see how a fighter pilot could possibly translate, hit the website, read the blogs, and I think you’ll be convinced that actually there’s something to this.
Awesome, so if you listen to this and you like the idea of the ORCA method to debrief daily and iterate to a 3X faster learning, then definitely check out afterburner.com, read Boo’s book, On Time On Target, and then the new book which is coming out soon. So that’s great. So thank you, Boo, for coming and sharing your framework with us. And if you enjoyed listening to this, then make sure you follow us and give us a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to us on YouTube to make sure you’re not going to miss any episodes. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening.
Important Links:
- Christian’s LinkedIn
- Afterburner
- On Time on Target by James D. Murphy and Christian Boucousis
- Test-drive the Summit OS® Toolkit: https://stevepreda.com/summit-os-toolkit/
- Management Blueprint® Podcast on Youtube https://bit.ly/MBPodcastPlaylistYT
- Steve Preda’s books on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B08XPTF4ST/allbooks
- Follow video shorts of current and past episodes on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/stevepreda-com/