Boeing 737-800 flight simulator
On Saturday I will be flying for 2 hours, the Boeing 737-800 flight simulator again, together with an airline captain, at Cambridge Airport, UK.
I have been an enthusiastic pilot for over 20 years, and this is great fun and a great passion for me, but what has this got to do with knowledge management?
Well checklists, based on the best possible knowledge and experiences, and especially lessons learned from flight incidents, are well known and have been practiced by the aviation industry for many years indeed.
Furthermore, the flight deck, especially on landing, is one of the best places to witness a team 'working together as one' with complete trust, respect and competence. This is a great example of effective communications, cooperation, collaboration, rapid learning, knowledge transfer, and information and knowledge management.
But I am flying the 737 for another reason. For the past two years, we have been working on a 'business simulator' that teaches, accelerates, and tests many of our knowledge working skills. On saturday, we are blending established team challenges and skills with new skills required of the knowledge worker into a knowledge team challenge, based on a flying challenge that requires high performance teamwork.
The team will have a 2 hour briefing from the captain to fly the 737 from Manchester to London Heathrow. They will be given as much information as they can absorb in 2 hrs. Then they fly. And because it is as real as it can get, in the latest professional flight simulator used to train airline pilots, it throws you out of your comfort zone in minutes!
If you are interested in following this work, contact me and I will keep you in the loop. If you have any ideas or experiences to suggest that might help us build the 737 simulator challenge to high performance knowledge team working, please please let me know.
I promise to blog post our experience gained on Saturday.
Ron Young
CKO
Knowledge Associates Cambridge
www.knowledge-associates.com
