Minute Six

A visceral journey through emergency medicine and aviation by a doctor who has worked in the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service and NASA

Professor Kevin Fong was flying with the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, making split-second, life-or-death decisions in the most extreme circumstances.

Kevin Fong, doctor, expert in major-incident planning and response, and writer-presenter of the hit podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, shares crucial insights into teamwork, crisis management and resilience in this essential survival guide for an uncertain world.

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

Kevin Fong has spent his working life in high-risk, high-performance teams – flying as a Helicopter Emergency Medical Service doctor, working with NASA’s human spaceflight programme, as well as being part of 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 provides crucial, counter-intuitive insights into how the best teams and organisations succeed against the odds, learn from failure and go again.

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: 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 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.

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