https://youtu.be/9Oxw0Qr6LXI
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,
