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U.S. Navy SEALs take their name from the environments they are trained to operate in: sea, air and land. Those operations are planned as much as humanly possible, but there is a saying in the military—no plan survives first contact with the enemy. So it goes in civilian life; the best-laid plans can fall apart if they are inflexible.

“A lot of organizations like to plan and plan and plan,” Afterburner executive consultant Aaron Tucker says, “but the second something comes up, it causes mass chaos. We’re always prepared for a dynamically changing environment, and I think that’s a major correlation that benefits the corporate world.”

Tucker and Afterburner executive consultant Chris Gomez will apply their experience as SEALs to safety and business practices at the upcoming ASSE Construction Safety Symposium in New Orleans, LA.

“The methods that we use are something we believe are scalable to business environments or day-to-day operations in the private sector,” Gomez says. “We like to focus in on alignment and planning, making sure that everybody is on the same page.”

Part of that mind-set revolves around a specific model of project management—the plan, brief, execute and debrief (PBET) model. “It’s the debrief that really drives home a lot of lessons learned,” Gomez explains. “We all know that we are limited in the types of resources we have. We’re very keen on ensuring that people are using their resources to the best of their ability.”

The presentation will also feature a deep dive into Afterburner’s continuous improvement model. That includes enhancing project planning, optimizing time and learning to plan on the fly.

“When we talk about flawless execution we’re not talking about perfect execution,” Gomez says, “but we’re striving toward that model. Every single time we go out and we do our job we are constantly getting better, constantly looking for ways to improve.”