Minute Six

Minute Six by Kevin Fong offers crucial insights into teamwork, crisis management, and resilience, making it an essential survival guide for an uncertain world. Fong, a doctor and expert in major-incident planning and response, also known as the writer-presenter of the hit podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, draws on his extensive experience to share valuable lessons.

No plan survives the first five minutes of contact with reality—so how should we prepare for what follows?

Fong has spent his career in high-risk, high-performance teams, flying as a Helicopter Emergency Medical Service doctor, collaborating with NASA's human spaceflight programme, and participating in the UK's frontline response to major incidents and terror attacks. Told through gripping stories of the most challenging, high-pressure emergencies across medicine, aviation, and spaceflight, Minute Six delivers crucial, counter-intuitive insights into how the best teams and organisations succeed against the odds, learn from failure, and persevere.

According to Fong, decisions made in the face of irreducible uncertainty are the ultimate team sport, and their success relies wholly on the wider systems that support them. He reveals the key principles for designing those systems: distributed leadership, deference to expertise, delegation of authority, graceful failure, embracing complexity, and finding the right balance between humans and technology. The ultimate lessons are clear: never lose sight of the humans in the loop, and when managing fast-moving threats amidst the unknown, the edge of chaos is precisely where you need to be.

Blending hard-won expertise with superb storytelling, Minute Six is the essential survival guide for an ever-more volatile and uncertain world.