My best friend Charlotte and I qualified from nuclear prototype school at the same time. She qualified number one. I qualified number two, both on the same day. We played rock, paper, scissors and the loser had to get up extra early that morning for the board, which neither of us wanted. It all depends on the day you asked and who was keeping score, which we both absolutely were, who actually won.

We were two women in a program that was not designed with us in mind, qualifying from one of the most technically demanding pipelines in the military, and competing with each other the entire way through in the way that only people who genuinely respect each other can compete. The kind where you want to beat the other person badly enough to push yourself past what you thought you could do, but you also want them to do well because their success reflects something about what you both came from.

I have thought a lot over the years about what that experience actually produced in me, and I do not think I fully understood it until I started watching what happened when I moved into environments that did not have the same standards.

Nuclear power school and prototype does something to your nervous system that is difficult to describe to someone who has not been through it. It is not that the training is hard, though it is hard. It is that the training is specifically designed to make you deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity in a technical environment, and it does this so consistently, over such a sustained period, that the discomfort eventually becomes your resting state.

When something looks slightly off, you notice. When a number is a little outside where it should be, you do not decide it is probably fine. You go find out why it is where it is, because the training has given you an instinct and then reinforced that instinct through enough repetition that it became automatic, that “probably fine” is not an acceptable conclusion when the cost of being wrong is irreversible.

I carried that instinct into every professional environment I entered after the Navy, and the gap between how I processed a signal and how the organizations around me processed the same signal was often significant.

I would notice something in a program that was technically within tolerance but moving in a direction that made me uncomfortable, and I would raise it, and the response I frequently received was some version of we will keep an eye on it. Which is an organizational way of saying we have noticed the signal and decided not to act on it yet, which is not the same as we have investigated the signal and determined it does not require intervention.

The first is waiting. The second is assessment. Organizations that confuse the two do not confuse them because their people are not intelligent. They confuse them because the culture has not established the difference as something that matters.

What high-reliability training actually provides is a calibrated intolerance for drift. Not perfectionism; that is a different thing and an often counterproductive one. Calibrated intolerance for drift means you have a developed sense of what normal looks like, what deviation from normal looks like, and what the cost of letting deviation normalize is over time. You are not alarmed by everything. You are specifically alarmed by the things that warrant it, and you have enough pattern recognition to know which is which.

The challenge when you take that capability into a standard business environment is that most business environments do not have a shared vocabulary for what you are describing. You say this is drifting and the person across the table hears this person is worried about something that is not yet a problem, which is accurate and also completely misses the point.

The point is that the time to address drift is before it becomes a problem. That is not anxiety. That is the job.

I watch organizations in defense and aerospace absorb surprises that were not, on careful examination, surprising at all. The signals were there. Someone probably noticed them. The system did not have a way to make acting on them the obvious choice.

Charlotte and I both went on to successful careers after the Navy. We are still best friends. We still, in some fundamental way, hold each other to the standard we learned qualifying from prototype together ~ that probably fine is not where the analysis ends.

It is, in fact, where it begins.

See you every other Tuesday.

Alicia

P.S. — Every issue of The Operator's Playbook goes out every other Tuesday mornings. If you are reading this and thinking of someone who runs complex operations and would find it useful, forwarding it is the best thing you can do for both of us.