In July of 1999 I was working for Worldcom in Florida and my mother had flown down to visit me and my son. We were making dinner on a Friday evening when a report came on CNN saying that John Kennedy Jr’s plane had gone down. There are a few events in my life that are burned into my memory and this is one of them.
About a year after this tragedy Malcome Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker with the title – “The Art of Failure: Why some people choke and others panic”. You really should read the entire article. Fascinating. He goes on to talk about how choking, a term frequently used in sports, is very different than panic. Choking during stressful situations, activates different parts of the brain than panic. So in terms of Kennedy’s failure – he poses and answers the question: Why wasn’t he able to sense that something was wrong? Some of the answers might apply to how we deal with stress during organizational transformations and why we miss the “signs”, that cause chaos.
In times of low visibility and high stress, keeping your wings level is very difficult . A pilot can’t even detect when he is graveyard spiral without his instruments. Why? In this death spiral, the effect of the plane’s G-force on the inner ear makes the pilot feel perfectly level even if he is not. So did Kennedy choke or panic? He panicked. He did not revert to what he had learned about instrument reading. Instead he just kept scanning the horizon for the lights on Martha’s vineyard.
Panic can cause tragic failure. Scuba divers drown when they forget they can buddy breath with a partner. I’d watch the news and hear about 90 year olds in Boca Raton who drove their cars into canals and drown because they’d frantically try to push open their car door while submerged in water, when the first thing they needed to remember was to release their seat belt. Sometimes failure happens because we trust too much, because we hire the wrong people, or don’t fire the right people, or just don’t set boundaries and say “Enough already”.
So what can we learn from these failures in order to craft our future successes? Maybe:
- pay attention, listen, and look for signs of things being amiss. Poor visibility causes lots of preventable tragedies
- avoid focusing on one or two of the “lights on the horizon”. I think it’s easy to fall in love with the innovation or the thing you are creating and forget that others might not love it so much
- communicate a lot with the “control tower”. These are the people you’re trying to lead, but also your friends. Nothing is more valuable than a friend. They say all the supportive stuff you need to hear, even if at the moment it’s not really true. They get you through.
Unlike JFK Jr., we’re all going to rise from the ashes smarter and stronger. A quote from Andre Agassi’s book “Open” tells us why. He says – “The same court on which you suffer your bloodiest defeat can become the scene of your sweetest triumph”. That’s what we have look forward to. I know it.
