Applications

Red Flag is aimed at aviation applications, and is going to work best when the base model is modified to suit the specific industry segment or organisation. That includes adapting the generic reference materials (ie, producing company or industry segment User Guide and Checklist).

It's personal, skill-based, and the skills are universal. That means it can equally be emulated in other industries and professions. Any beneficial effect, of course, will only be obtained through effort.

Reality Check

There is much in common with other fitness challenges ... mainly, that it's hard to get started.

This phenomenon is explored and explained in the Long Version of The Tools (available in the Members Only section of Papers). Even without that erudite analysis, the conclusion is obvious: You are going to need compellingly good reasons to head into this zone of apparent discomfort. (It really is only apparent. As with physical exercise, the feelgood factor is a real buzz once you do get going.)

Insurance Incentive

Much of the impetus for Red Flag's evolution has come from Australia's leading aviation insurer, QBE Aviation. You can see their interest. Fewer accident claims equals higher profits.

Of course they'll want certainty in your safety status. Design integrity supplies that.

Design Integrity

Evidence that Red Flag will indeed produce (or confirm) low likelihood of accident is set out in the Introduction and its links, especially Design.

In a nutshell, the thesis has been proven, over decades, and in an unforgivingly demanding activity.

They can do it. So can you.

Self-Improvement

The self-improvement industry, World-wide, harvests about $10 billion a year from its clients. They attend excitation sessions – and some come away convinced. A few pay more for further enlightenment. It can be very addictive ... and add up to a lot of $$$$. For the great majority, the investment does not return a dividend. They spend the money, but get no long-term improvement. The feelgood period may have been pleasant, but it was not rewarding.

Red Flag is different in many ways, including:

• There's a free version: The Basic Program.

• You become your own inspiration – and personal trainer.
  • Don't rely on an outsider.
  • There's enough reference material on Learning in The Tools.
    • It's D-I-Y, you work out yourself what's needed.
  • Motivate yourself, and design and run your own programs.
    • Amongst the things you'll learn is why so many well-intentioned self-improvement schemes, like New Year's Resolutions, fall by the wayside

• It's targeted – and a whole-of-life program; daily, weekly, monthly activity in perpetuity.

• It takes account of what you're already doing now.
  • You integrate Red Flag exercises in ways that are mutually reinforcing and synergistic.

• If you don't already, you keep a record.
  • The folder you keep as your record is not only part of your motivational support ...
  • ... it is your Certificate of Achievement and current evidence of your accreditation.

This website is the main Red Flag resource bank. Check it out, especially The Tools.

Stress Management

Amongst the things that are incidentally learned in life is Stress Management.

It starts when you are a baby. You encounter it, get "There, there," and cuddles, and you get the hang of it. The learning just happens. There's no Manual to read, no formal classes – your teacher's an amateur most likely – it's pure find-out-for-youself. And it tends to stay that way through life, no structured training but lots of experience. Get scared/hurt/aroused ... learn to cope.

Learning itself, of course, produces stress, whether in the class room, becoming adept at sport, relationships, whatever. Coming to grips with new skills is stressing – though less so in childhood when you are getting lots of practice. That's why adults are poor skill learners. Preferring comfort, they're change-resistant.

While intimately familiar with the effects produced by stress, few people (who haven't had stress training) can tell you what they are. Start working through the list, though, and recognition is instantaneous: Sense of warm flushing, mental competence declines, sweaty palms, scalp tingling, uneasy feelings, breathing rate increases, motor skill control deteriorates, etc.

But even those who have sat through Stress Management lessons often can't classify the symptoms under a single category heading. There is one: unlearning.

Unlearning: You go backwards down the learning pathway, from adult to childhood competence.

Motor skills give a clue. As a kid, your first skill competence was at very coarse levels. Watch a toddler eating, the food is all around the mouth ... more hits than misses, for sure, but plenty of misses.

And toddlers toddle. We walk. Walking skill finesse grows over years. Adults possess a wide range of skill competencies that have taken a decade or more to refine.

Bring on the stress, though, and you zoom back to childhood. Fine coordination is gone, coarse is all you've got.

That's why there's a powerful self-perpetuation cycle built into the stress responses. You feel worse because you can't do things that are normally easy.

The moving-backwards-down-the-skill-acquisition-stairway shows up at extremes of stress – and in dramatic ways.

One of the early-childhood skills learned is body waste control – toilet training. Very few people experience truly extreme stress events, such as being shot at. Incontinence is common when that happens. Soldiers' first exposure to serious personal danger in combat often results in soiled pants. As above, few of us experience a genuine in extremis, near-death, situation. If it happens, skill competence reverts way back ... to really early childhood, pre-potty-training, well before the waste-retention skill had become automatic.

(Grossly excessive alcohol consumption will do it, too. Stalin and his henchmen were renowned for this at the end of their vodka-fuelled binges. They, of course, had Kremlin servants to clean the beds for them.)

Training offers a defence against skill erosion under stress.

It's not 100%, more in the class of coping competence, but it can be done. Fighter pilots have to learn to fly in close formation. Their first attempts result in stress effects, notably muscle clenching. The consequentially coarse and jerky hand movements make being close to another plane downright dangerous.

The essential attribute to learn is to be able to stay relaxed enough ... while under stress ... to maintain fine motor skill function . Red Flag can show you how to acquire this valuable ability, how to break the self-perpetuation cycle and maintain fine skill management even while operating at high arousal rates.

Reliable Decision

Poor decision is also on the list of untoward consequences of stress.

It's a function of the cognitive overload factor (seized brain). You tend to focus on a single item, and lose the full picture. Part of that problem may be a tenacious unwillingness to admit you're in trouble.

Emotional instability is in there – Who cares? – or an angry Don't bother me. And so cooperating with others suffers ... and the team breaks down, along with the coordinated, mutually supporting, activities essential to safe operation of a complex system.

Stress Management training should help, but its effect can decline as the pressure builds. You need the multiple layers of defence that professor James Reason advocates. Structured decision-making is one such. Operating within a Safety Management System is another. Teams trained to perform under stress do better, and so on. Red Flag opens the door to such an all-encompassing system.

Note, however, that the version described in this website is generic. Profession– and industry-specific systems need to be developed. How this is done is described in Transition.

Healthy Lifestyle

This issue does not need to be argued. See Case Study #8. Exercise is good for you and, once you are fit, more is better. You have to keep it up, too. Workouts must be daily (well, nearly), and perpetual. Keeping a record may reinforce the motivation.

Note the Warning however. If you've had a layoff, don't do it without a check up first.

Ageing Brain

Mental exercise leading to – or maintaining – cognitive fitness is one of the cornestones of Red Flag design. The linked article is just one of hundreds a Google search will throw up. There's no longer any argument or room for doubt. Just do it! Even if you have the genetic predisposition, you can put off the onset of Alzheimers disease. Fight it! Case Study #9.

Fitness

Equally, the proposition that physical exercise contributes to cognitive fitness is so well-established as to need no more support. However, there is a special section in the User Guide on cognitive exercising. There are lots of choices. You can work out how to go about your own program. One thing is clear: Combining cognitive stimulus with physical exercise not only works, it is the best way to do it.

Self-awareness

The skills through which you acquire and maintain Situation Awareness – Attention Management and Information processing – are described in The Tools. Once you begin to take active control over your Attention Management – while engaged in physical exercise, for example – you will be surprised at how much more self-aware you can be. Your life is not only safer, but enriched. (Of course, only the open-minded person can achieve this easily. It may be a struggle for some, but well worth it in the end.)

Decision-under-Stress

You have been reminded of the cognitive clogging, competence-suppressing, effect of high stress levels. (Unlearning.) A program of mental exercising probes the onset of stress effects and therefore delivers you more control – the ability to sit on the edge without toppling over, so to speak. This is an essential skill. You can, at any time, check on its fitness state through a test.

Golf

One of the most complex eye-hand coordination challenges there is, this beguiling sport warrants a page to itself. It will be enacted in the 17 April update. In the meantime, the basic elements of knowledge that enable prescription of golf-improving recommendations are in The Tools.

OH&S (WH&S)

Red Flag's most powerful potential exists in its power to act as a catalyst to enliven other safety systems. A cardinal principle is Integration. Instead of having separate operational safety, and OH&S systems, they should be combined.

Even so, all safety systems suffer from entropy over time.

It's especially a challenge in high-reliability organisations. Here, the absence of mishap inevitable detunes anxiety factors. You simply can't keep people at on guard alert states, day after day. It's a terrible paradox – achieving high safety performance undermines safety precautions.

A Red Flag exercise program, supported by the structured decision aids (eg, The Kit), will counter system entropy. It's a way of continually refreshing defences.

Low Cost Daily D&A Testing

Alcohol is amongst the family of drugs that produces back-to-childhood unlearning effects similar to those originating in stress. Reduced cognitive performance and degraded motor skill competence are the most obvious. D&A testing typically measures biological benchmarks – blood alcohol level, drug traces in saliva or urine. Motor skill coordination checks may not be as accurate, but it are cheaper by far, and immensely more practical (and D-I-Y).

Simple eye-hand coordination games on a computer will do it. You practice enough while unaffected to establish your benchmark. You might – in the name of science – judiciously experiment (when not on-the-job, of course) to note impairment effects. It's quite a lesson when you do it, and such valuable experience that anyone who's done it won't have any trouble with daily testing.

You don't have to use a drug or alcohol to get the experience. Breathing high-altitude air – low in oxygen – brings on the same effects. "Hypoxic Air" supplies are found in many training gyms, nowadays. As above, it is an invaluable learning experience.

While random D&A testing is becoming widespread, there are many occupations where it should not be random but daily. Pilots and surgeons are examples. Introducing daily testing in critical occupations might well prompt reactions requiring a massive exercise in Stress Management. However, you would expect professionals to understand the need and voluntarily adopt appropriate practices.

Hand-held computers enlarge the opportunities for self-assessment. It may take a while before the practice is widespread, but in the interim, you'd expect responsible professionals to adopt self-checking, and to phone in sick if impaired.