Five letters pilots use when things go wrong. Why do we need five meetings?
DODAR is a crisis framework from aviation. It takes a pilot a few seconds. In most companies, the same process takes weeks, and still skips the two steps that actually matter.
When something goes wrong in a cockpit, pilots don’t improvise. They run a sequence. It’s called DODAR – five steps that turn a problem into a decision and a decision into action.
D – Diagnose: What is actually happening?
O – Options: What can we do? Not just the first idea.
D – Decide: We choose. Consciously, not out of habit.
A – Assign: Who does what. By when. No grey areas.
R – Review: Is it working? If not, back to the beginning.
Pilots run through this in seconds. The airline doesn’t call a steering committee and no one asks for a slide deck by Thursday.
So why does the same sequence take weeks on the shop floor, in the office, or anywhere that isn’t a cockpit?
In my experience, most companies get to the third step. They diagnose (sometimes), they consider options (rarely) and they decide. People nod, the meeting ends, someone writes a brief summary in the chat. And then nothing moves, because everybody assumed that somebody else is supposed to be driving.
The decision was made but the work was not properly assigned. The outcome was never properly reviewed. One problem, five meetings, same result.
The two missing steps have names:
ASSIGN means one name, one deadline, zero ambiguity. Not “the team will handle it”, that’s not assigning, that’s hoping. No “let’s touch base next week”, that’s not reviewing, that’s postponing. In owner-managed companies, this failure has a specific shape: the owner is the accountability system. When they move on mentally, the task moves on with them. Nobody picks it up.
Review is the step most companies treat as optional. It isn’t. It’s the mechanism that tells you whether D3 was the right decision and, if not, sends you back to D1 before the problem doubles in size. Without it, DODAR is just a fancier way of having the same meeting again next month.
DODAR is not a miracle framework. It won’t fix bad decisions or weak teams. What it does is provide a structure that stops you from having to solve the same problem five times, because the decision was clear, the owner was named, and someone actually checked whether it worked.
One note for next time: I skipped over the first D deliberately. Diagnosis – what is actually happening, not what the loudest voice in the room says is happening – deserves its own piece. It’s often where the real problem gets lost.