Thinking tool: PIOSEE - handle crises, incidents or important projects

Adam Jones

Personally

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31 August 202631 August 2026

Every day thousands of flights hit something abnormal: rough weather, malfunctions, medical emergencies. Despite this, flying is one of the safest ways to travel.

This is because aviation has great systems to handle unexpected situations. You can apply these systems to your work!

PIOSEE is an aviation mnemonic for handling a crisis (and any challenge, really):

1. Problem: What exactly is the problem?

   • Consider framestorming and speaking to users

2. Information: What is the relevant context?

   • Consider scout mindset, becoming a narrow expert

3. Options: What are all the ways you can solve the problem?

   • This is often poorly done: people fail to consider as wide a range of options as they should.
   • Consider do the obvious things, backwards chaining, running the experiment, hunt for 100x opportunities, diverge then converge

4. Select: What criteria should judge options? Then use those criteria to select the best option.

   • Consider make decisions with made-up statistics, optimise only the constraint, simple over easy

5. Execute: Do it!

   • Consider run the experiment, sometimes you just have to grind

6. Evaluate: How did it go? What did you learn? Then go back to step 1 and repeat this loop.

   • Consider recursively self-improve, feedback loops, build systems, more dakka

The loop sounds obvious. But actually doing it explicitly leads to better decisions. Going through this loop explicitly just a few times will likely sharpen your future intuitions.

Presented like the above, PIOSEE might sound time-consuming. But when you get good at it, you can go through it quickly - pilots are expected to run the loop mid-emergency! In most cases, your key decisions will be less urgent than that.

Related concepts

This is part of my thinking tools series. Also consider:

• Diverge, then converge is the Options-then-Select step in more detail
• Do the obvious things: most PIOSEE passes conclude with obvious actions - the loop's job is making sure you actually do them