Domitille Kiger's work fits in a sentence that speaks to any leader: getting a group of humans to accomplish something difficult, under pressure. In her case, the group sometimes runs to more than a hundred people, the difficult part happens at thirteen thousand feet, and the pressure comes from one unappealable rule. A record is only validated if the entire team did its job on the same jump. Ninety-nine successes out of a hundred, and everything starts over. That is the heart of her keynote “De l'Audace”: perform together, when each person's success conditions everyone else's.
Management(s) · Domitille Kiger
The sky as a laboratory for management
Freefly world champion, Domitille Kiger has spent most of her energy for more than ten years on organizing large formation records. The principle: building the largest possible figure in freefall, each person gripping the others. The current world record brings together a hundred and seventy-four people head down and ninety-six head up, up to ten aircraft in formation, less than a minute to assemble the whole thing. An exercise where, as she sums it up, the sky and the meeting room share far more than people imagine.
What makes this episode useful to managers is the validity constraint. If a single person does not hold their role, the entire figure fails. Individual pressure is therefore at its maximum, and yet the result is strictly collective. Making a group succeed under those conditions cannot be improvised: it rests on three supports Domitille names herself when she works with companies, a base of structure, a base of trust and a base built around purpose. These are, almost word for word, the three pillars of her RECORD Protocol.
The structure : everyone knowing exactly what to do
Before any attempt, the leadership team writes standard operating procedures and gives each participant a clear view of their role and their steps. Around Domitille work aircraft captains and sector captains, in charge of analyzing the performance of one zone of the figure and authorized to rearrange slots if they see a way to build faster. A safety officer gathers the warnings before they escalate. Nothing is left to chance, and nobody ends up alone facing the unknown.
Her most interesting contribution for a manager is about feedback. Where organizers used to settle for a general debrief, singling out one or two people after each jump, Domitille imposed the individual debrief: the figure is divided so that a supervisor never observes more than fifteen to twenty people, and each person leaves with precise feedback, carried from one training session to the next. As a result, pressure stops being personal anxiety and becomes shared clarity. Everyone knows where they stand, and what they still have to adjust.
The purpose : you do not dare the same way for a symbol as for yourself
The third support is the hardest to build and the most powerful. In 2022, against expectations, she assembled a women's world record around the celebration of the centenary of the amendment that gave American women the right to vote. That shared heading let the team go past its individual motivations to connect with values that made them want to push further.
Domitille draws a principle from it that she passes on to teams: you do not dare the same way when what is at stake stops at yourself. Pride in belonging to a collective, or in taking part in a bigger story, is a performance lever in its own right. And in her view, no team lacks a reason to be proud of what it does. The leader's job is to reconnect it to that why.
The trust does not rule out control
If people follow her on a two year project, she says, it is because she has demonstrated in the past her ability to coordinate that kind of event, both on the highly technical engineering of the jump and on considerable logistics. Trust is earned through proof, then maintained through the small wins that install, step by step, the certainty that everyone will hold their post. Trust in yourself, trust in the team, trust in the leadership: the three feed each other.
She does not romanticize the role, though. The loneliness of the leader, she feels it regularly, at the moment of the hard calls: putting a team together, or telling someone they will not be part of it, or that they will have to leave it depending on their performance. Knowing your people well, knowing who works well with whom, placing each person where they will fit best, is what then allows a fast reaction when a configuration does not take.
Telling apart the risks that destroy from the risks that propel
That leaves the subject of risk, which Domitille splits cleanly in two. On one side, everything that physically endangers people: she puts in place the guardrails, the procedures and the precautions that clear those risks away, with no negotiation. On the other, the daring needed to progress: trying new configurations, new techniques, new ways of debriefing. The question is never taking more risk or less, but knowing where each person sets the cursor, and which risks are worth taking.
That is exactly the mechanism of “De l'Audace”. A team that performs is not a team that dares anything at all, nor a team that attempts nothing. It is a team able to sort, to eliminate what would destroy it and to take on what moves it forward.
- Real shared ownership, where each person's success commits everyone else's and where nobody experiences themselves as a spectator anymore.
- Roles clear enough that pressure stops being individual anxiety and becomes team energy.
- A reason to go beyond yourself bigger than each person's objectives, which makes people dare more.
- Hard decisions owned by whoever leads, without the collective's trust cracking.
This episode illustrates what Domitille works on with organizations, on stage and in workshops: Team cohesion and high performance →