My experience is primarily in military aircrew training, so I'll let the
readers form there own comparisons.
The debriefing program in the C-130 ATS follows very closely the process Neil
described in his 3 Oct. comments. That probably reflects our common heritage
from the old Simuflite days. One thing I have done is to train all our
instructors as CRM facilitators. The debriefings are like seminars with the
lead instructor (we use two or more on each mission because of the
complexity of the mission and crew interaction) acting as a facilitator.
After the MOST mission is complete, the instructors have a brief meeting to
discuss the details of the mission and crew performance. Both instructors
attend the debriefing. We usually begin with an open probe to the crew at
large like, "Well, how do you think you did?" That question alone is
frequently sufficient to start the discussion. The facilitator leads the crew
through the mission by referring to segments or events based on their
observations. Most of our debriefings last about 30 minutes, but often a crew
will stay over an hour if the mission was particularly interesting or
difficult for them. One of my instructors uses a four-corner graphic to
assist the aircrew in evaluating their own judgement and performance as a
crew or as individuals. The graphic ranges from "Desired Outcome" to "Stupid
and Unlucky."
The part of our program I feel is absolutely critical is that we do
everything possible to prevent the MOST from becoming an evaluation, except
the crew's self-evaluation. No records are kept, except attendance. No
written scoring or metrics take place. All videos are destroyed immediately
after the debriefing.
After almost 10 years in existence the program still gets the highest ratings
from the crews as a great learning experience. I do not believe that they are
just telling us what we want to hear. In other areas of training, they are
not at all hesitant to complain and criticize anything they fell wastes their
time. I know many of the people we train personally and they say in private
the same things we read on the critiques. If they did not believe the
training was good, appropriate, an on point, they would say so.
Many techniques we use came from the commercial aviation experience, but we
have added our own touches. Still, it would surely be nice to have some form
of quantitative measure to lead us to further improvements.
Dave Wilson
CRM Program Manager
HTI crmwilson_at_aol.com