Briefings are a powerful tool for improving CRM, checking configuration/setups, gaining SA and highlighting things that aren't standard.
Couldn’t agree more, especially about the non-standard stuff. I’ve had enough of “it’s a 3deg ILS, the outer marker is 1720, the QDM is 190 blah blah blah...” to last me a lifetime. Starting a brief with “we’ll be using standard drills and procedures” is another one. No !!!!! Sherlock! So that wasn’t an Aresti sequence clipped to your control column then?
As mentioned by others, a briefing needs to to as brief as you can make it but most importantly, must leave the participants with greater knowledge and a shared mental model, otherwise what’s the point? Ad-nauseam recital of basic but unlikely stuff while not covering less usual but more likely occurrences is, unfortunately, quite common. It’s almost like a briefing is something to be endured, rather than embraced to enhance crew performance.
I can understand going in detail through things like RTOs, where deliberate actions have to be performed correctly in a limited time span and the cost of failure can be high: running through actions as a crew builds confidence and increases the likelihood of a successful outcome. Most other occurrences can be dealt with better with a bit less rigidity and a bit more thought. I was part of a brief the other day during which the PF said that if we had an engine problem, he’d rotate slower to a lower pitch attitude. I replied that although I had every confidence in his ability to do what was necessary in this event, would he be following his own brief if we had an engine fire warning but no other indications? This triggered a discussion on the various modes of failure we might realistically expect and what we might do if they occurred sometime other than V1, unlike the sim. So pretty useful, really.
Do many organisations actually teach people how to brief effectively? I must admit I received little or no training in this regard when entering the business and had to pick up bits and pieces from those who were obviously good at it. Even now at my outfit, a recent training module on briefings had a “how not to do it” video, which was pretty funny but made me wonder if those resources would have been better spent demonstrating ways in which briefings could be made better, rather than worse...