Kevin Fong has spent his working life in high-risk, high-performance teams – flying as doctor with the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, working with NASA’s human space flight directorate, as well as being part of the UK’s frontline response to many major incidents and terror attacks. Told through gripping stories of the most challenging, high-pressure emergencies across medicine, aviation and space flight, Minute Six provides crucial, counter-intuitive insights into how the best teams and organisations succeed against the odds, even while they all prepare to fail. In this world, heroes do not exist. As Fong shows, decisions in the face of irreducible uncertainty are the ultimate team sport and their success depends wholly on the wider systems that support them. He exposes the key principles for designing those systems, which include distributed leadership, delegation to expertise, graceful failure, embracing complexity and finding the right balance between humans and technology. The ultimate lessons are these- never lose sight of the humans in the loop, and when it comes to managing fast-moving threats in the face of the unknown, the edge of chaos is exactly where you need to be. Marrying hard-won expertise with superb story-telling, Minute Six is the essential survival guide for an ever more volatile and uncertain world.
