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The reason why pilots don't use Power Point
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A helicopter is a jodidamente difficult machine. To fly one, you must coordinate several controls simultaneously. Get one wrong, and things become… let’s say unpleasant. Get several wrong, and your career as a pilot may be short. First, you learn to take off. Then to fly. Then to fly at night. Then in formation. Then, perhaps, in combat. And only after mastering all that might someone reasonably ask you to land on a moving aircraft carrier. In the middle of a storm. At night. Now, imagine the infrastructure industry running a helicopter school. Day one. A consultant arrives. He's never flown a helicopter. But he has a master's degree in aviation strategy. A PowerPoint presentation with 194 slides. By lunchtime… if you have not died of boredom, he's appointed Chief Pilot. By Wednesday, he's leading the aircraft carrier landing programme. By Friday, he's explaining why the helicopter crashed. Unforeseen circumstances. Of course. Or the unknown unknown… Well… We have people managing billion-dollar PPPs who have never managed a construction contract. People allocating risks they have never personally carried. People designing procurement strategies who have never delivered a project. People designing KPIs that have never managed one. People chairing Steering Committees who cannot make a decision without asking another committee… or a new consultant… especially relationship consultants. And people recommending innovative delivery models when they haven't mastered the conventional ones. But they have frameworks. Methodologies. Dashboards. Even an AI agent that one day will deliver an 8 year construction project in 10 min… Well… Let me tell you one thing that has cost me the loss of lots of hair on my head. Complexity doesn't make incompetent people competent. It makes their incompetence more expensive. And more… You cannot replace experience with governance. And you certainly cannot replace judgement with PowerPoint. That’s why there's a reason airline passengers don't ask how many strategy workshops their pilot attended. They want to know whether the person in the cockpit knows how to fly. Funny how infrastructure investors sometimes forget to ask the equivalent question. Anyway. If you're already in the cockpit of a complex project, you probably don't need another training course. You need someone who's flown through a few storms. If interested… click below.
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Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
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