Justin Hughes
Expert on building high-performance cultures
Biotech Entrepreneur and Former Red Arrows Pilot: A former RAF pilot with over 250 global displays, now leading as a biotech entrepreneur and applying high-performance insights to business. Renowned Speaker and Strategic Adviser: Expert on leadership, high-performance teams, and decision-making in high-risk environments, with clients like Microsoft, the UN, and Mercedes Formula 1. Author and Media Personality: Author of The Business of Excellence and featured in outlets such as the Daily Telegraph, Independent, and BBC World’s Talking Business.
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Justin Hughes's 2025 Biography
Justin Hughes: CEO, Former Red Arrows Pilot, and Expert in High-Performance Leadership
Justin is the CEO of biotech/climate startup NetZeroNitrogen. Combining that with turnaround experience as a senior corporate executive, and as a former fighter pilot and Executive O icer of the Red Arrows, Justin has ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to building high-performance cultures. He is a renowned speaker on a range of related topics including leadership, building high-performance teams (inc virtual), decision-making under ambiguity, and performance in high-risk environments. Delivery options include keynotes, facilitation and workshops and he has extensive experience with diverse audiences in the US, Europe, the Middle and Far East, and China.
Justin brings an unusual combination of a highly engaging delivery style and clear, actionable insights based on first-hand knowledge of the most demanding operating environments. His passion for high performance evolved from his military experience, flying in over 250 displays worldwide on the Red Arrows. Justin’s BETTUR (Better Understanding of Reality) model is based on personal learning of how you plan, execute and adapt in situations characterised by ambiguity, imperfect information, speed of change and pressure to deliver.
Since leaving the RAF, Justin has worked as a strategic adviser on organizational e ectiveness to clients including Microsoft, the United Nations and Mercedes Formula 1, and he is a regular contributor to BP’s global Leading in Operations programme. He is the author of The Business of Excellence (Bloomsbury, 2016), has been profiled in the London Standard, Director Magazine, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent, and interviewed for BBC World ‘Talking Business’, BBC Breakfast and GB News.
As a result of some intellectual mid-life crisis, Justin has an MBA from London Business School and an MSt in International Relations from the University of Cambridge (both Distinctions). For the latter, he planned a thesis on pandemics but thought nobody would be interested (in 2017!), and instead analysed the threat posed by cryptocurrency to the financial order; he is currently sitting on a return of 1000%; unfortunately he only bought $30.
Justin Hughes's 2025 Talks & Topics
Synopsis:
Highly engaging introduction to the key drivers of high-performance cultures based on 20y+ entrepreneurial and corporate experience, preceded by 12y as a fighter pilot and Executive Officer of the Red Arrows (250 displays).
Take-aways:
• Hire on attitude AND skill, but if you had to choose…
• Communicate not just what, but why
• Know what ball you can’t afford to drop
• Build an environment where people have the REAL conversations
Full:
As a former Red Arrows pilot, Justin Hughes has first-hand experience of the most demanding of high-performance environments. He has now had time to reflect on that experience and also observe and learn from clients. There are 4 factors that he sees consistently in high-performance teams:
• People – choose to be a team player; you need to bring both professional competency and the right attitude, and you can’t compromise too much on either
• Capability – building the human organisational machine with the potential to deliver – clarityalignment-empowerment
• Delivery – performance under pressure
• Learning – learning from experience, fast
Building a high-performance culture always boils down to 3 things:
• The right environment – the tone is set by the senior person in the room
• The right attitude – everyone else choosing the right behaviours required for team performance
• The right processes – optimizing effectiveness
Get these things right and anything is possible
Synopsis
At its heart, leadership is about exhibiting a set of behaviours such that others choose to follow you of their own free will. If they follow for a di erent reason, it’s probably seniority (ie they have to – that’s not leadership). It’s bringing people on the journey with you and is distinct from working out the
journey and the ability to execute.
Takeaways
• Leadership is primarily a moral and emotional activity
• Managers are inevitably placed in the middle of wanting to be good people leaders but getting measured solely on task delivery
• You will be judged on what you stand for in difficult situations
Full
Justin Hughes review leadership as distinct from direction setting (an intellectual activity) and delivery (a physical activity). If those are separated out, the thing you are left with as leadership is bringing others on the journey with you – moral and emotional activity. It’s only leadership if others choose to follow of their own free will. Otherwise, it’s just seniority. Leadership, defined like this, is often the least important of direction, delivery and leadership, in advancement in an organisation. However, it is undoubtedly the lever that can make the biggest difference.
Most people understand and broadly agree with the above, but when talking about leadership, he likes to discuss some dilemmas that have no right answer but present leaders with ambiguous situations requiring tricky trade offs. The point is that people will form an opinion of you, as a person and a leader, by how you deal with these situations. Not by what’s in your head, or what you say, but by what you do. It’s about the representation of your values and behaviours…
Synopsis
Managing risk at a strategic level is about dealing with ambiguity. To do so, we need to gain a ‘better understanding of reality’ by mitigating cognitive and motivational biases. The most powerful tool to do this is to leverage the cognitive diversity of the team more effectively.
Takeaways
• We’re not as good as applying judgement as we like to think
• However, awareness of subconscious biases and tools to address can help significantly
• The ‘crowd’ is generally wise but only when there is an effective process to extract that collective wisdom
Full
Justin Hughes regards risk and safety broadly as the same thing. It’s the chance of an adverse outcome di erent to desired or expected. People generally refer to safety when it directly impacts humans (eg physical risk) and risk when the impact is not physical. The area of risk he focuses on is decision making under ambiguity – most relevant to senior teams or other groups that deal with high ambiguity. You can largely systemize the risk out of running a coffee shop but if you are drilling for oil, flying fighter jets, investing in stock markets or conducting open heart surgery, there are many variables outside your control. You often have to apply judgement, which we all think we’re great at, but we’re invariably not due to the many cognitive and motivational biases we encounter.
One of the most effective mitigations to this is to leverage cognitive diversity more e ectively. You can’t change the make up of you team to be more diverse overnight, but you can employ approaches that facilitate far better outcomes in dealing with ambiguity, and therefore mitigating risk. He explores what the right environment looks like, what behaviours you need from people, and what processes will support building ‘a better understanding of reality.’
Synopsis
Good decision-making under pressure is not genius; it’s largely due to thought and preparation. We need to equip people with the decision-making tools and then empower them (ie not blame them for adverse outcomes) to use them.
Takeaways
• Pre-plan responses to predictable situations
• Use dynamic rehearsal to prepare for semi-predictable situations
• For the completely unpredictable, know what ball you can’t afford to drop
Full
Strategic decision-making is largely addressed in the thinking on risk above. If you have time, and you have a team, it’s about leveraging their cognitive diversity to form a better understanding of reality. Justin Hughes views on tactical decision-making and performance under pressure have come from reverse engineering my experience as a fighter pilot where we routinely made high-pressure decisions in situations characterized by ambiguity, imperfect information and time pressure, often with high consequences. There were 3 scenarios and approaches we deployed:
• Known knowns – if you can predict it, it happens more than once and/or is safety critical, then script the response. Having great standard operating procedures is not what makes you inflexible, it’s what makes you flexible because it frees up your brain for the clever stuff
• Known unknowns – this is when you can half predict a scenario, but don’t exactly when it will happen or how it may play out in practice. For this, we do dynamic rehearsal. Regularly explore what if… what’s the worst that could happen… by doing so, you build a mental database that you dip into then things go wrong – make the high pressure decisions in low pressure environments…
• Unknown unknowns – for the situation that you couldn’t possibly have predicted, you need clear, simple priorities to fall back on; what’s the ball you can’t afford to drop. Fly the plane!
Synopsis
Resilience is not magic or just in some people’s DNA. For sure, some will be more naturally resilient, just like some are more natural leaders. However, everybody’s ability to ride out hard times and perform under pressure can be enhanced through the right mindset and the use of mental models and tools.
Takeaways
• Believe that you will prevail in the long-term, but deal objectively with your short-term reality
• Stress test the assumptions behind your thinking
• Reframe the situation based on more realistic assessment
Full
Justin Hughes explores resilience through a combination of my own personal story, lessons from others and some simple mental models that help with performance under pressure. He came from a very ordinary background – only child of a single parent, was told that the Army wasn’t for him by the recruiting officer and failed at the final hurdle for Red Arrows selection first time around. In different ways, all of these situations have required him to put aside negative emotional reactions and dig deep.
He uses other examples including that of Admiral James Stockdale, who developed the Stockdale paradox in surviving his experience as a prisoner of war for 7 years in Vietnam. And finally, he explains some of the tools that are available to help understand and rationalise one’s reactions in highpressure situations, both from his own learning as a fighter pilot and other models which he has personally found beneficial.
Justin Hughes's Latest Books
The Business of Excellence: Building high-performance teams and organizations
The Business of Excellence offers a unique and compelling perspective on the drivers of excellence in teams and organizations. The author, Justin Hughes, brings an unusual mix of experience and insight, having worked as a management consultant to some of the world’s most successful organizations, in addition to having served for 12 years as a military fighter pilot, where he became Executive Officer on the RAF Red Arrows.
The challenges of high performance and leadership are explored in depth, and are illustrated with insights, interviews and case studies from the military, sporting and corporate worlds. The material includes a proprietary performance model that can be applied to a wide spectrum of organizations, focusing on:
· People: the primacy of attitude over skills
· Capability: building alignment before setting people free
· Delivery: a process to close the gap between desired and actual outcomes
· Learning: how to accelerate performance in real time
· Leadership: exhibiting a set of behaviours such that others choose to follow
· Risk: avoiding the victory of compliance over outcomes.
In The Business of Excellence, Justin deconstructs the drivers of high performance with a rare clarity, insight and accessibility, to illustrate and explain tangible tools and methods, all of which can be applied by readers in their own teams and organizations.
Articles & Podcasts
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