High stakes and catastrophic consequences have a way of focusing your attention on doing things the right way. The aviation industry is like this and holds insights that you can apply to your career and your business. In this post, we’ll explore two examples and what it means.
1 – Use data to challenge your thinking, not lead it
When you are flying a plane, your senses aren’t always an accurate gauge of reality. In the video below you can see an example of the divergence of what your think you are experience and what you actually are.
To a passenger with his/her eyes closed, this would feel like level flight. A disoriented pilot would feel the same way. To help address this problem, pilots have instruments (such as a compass and an artificial horizon) to enable them to a validate their assumptions about the orientation of their aircraft.
Like the instruments help pilots retain their orientation, data can help you retain yours. They key thing to remember is that these instruments are proxies for things that you can’t sense or understand. How can you possibly visualize 10K calls/day or 1MM transactions/hour? You can’t, that is why you need to trust the proxies that help you understand your business.
However, the instruments don’t fly the plane, the pilot does. You need to use data to validate your ideas, not the other way around. Data can be wrong, and a healthy level of skepticism is important to achieve the outcomes you are looking for.
2 – Less is more
We have access to so much data, so much content, and so many reports that it is often times easy to lose sight of what matters. In airplanes, pilots had information overload and it created some dangerous situations.
Like many of aviation’s safety solutions, the parsimonious approach to alerts came from insights born of tragedies. “The original ‘gear down’ warning was linked to the throttle,” recalled Myers, meaning that it went off, falsely, every time the pilot slowed the plane. “So the pilots’ learned response was throttle back, disconnect the alert.” Predictably, this led to accidents when pilots ignored this alert even when there truly was a problem.
Another example: in the early days of the Boeing 727, some alerts were so frequent and wrong that pilots yanked the circuit breakers to quash them.
Moving forward, our largest challenge won’t be gathering data but prioritizing and focusing on what is important. This is important because of our cognitive inability to focus on too many things at once. Making the difficult choices to determine the one or two important things is a key part in building a strategy. Strategy is as much about what you choose to do as what you choose not to do.
This can be difficult in organizations where you want to give everyone a chance to weigh in, or feel validated, or get a chance to speak but making the right choice, explaining why and focusing is an important part about leadership. This is a challenge of leadership:
I wondered whether the designers of individual components sometimes advocate for their own favorite alerts. Myers chuckled. “It’s funny, you’ll get some young engineer whose responsibility is the window heat system. He comes in with this list of 25 messages that he wants us to tell the pilot about his system: it’s on high, it’s on medium, it’s on low, it’s partially failed, you can’t operate it below 26 degrees. . . . He comes out of the meeting — a meeting in which the pilots say, ‘We don’t care!’
You need to put your customers (including internal customers first) and think about the outcomes you want to drive.
Part 3 – What to do? Avoid Vanity Metrics
These two lessons from aviation help us understand create an intellectual framework of when to let data lead us, and when we need to lead data. It is only when we “fly into the cloud” that we come to depend on the metrics that help us understand our business. If we get it right, we can use our dashboards to get home safely. If we don’t, then we don’t know we are lost until we fly in to the ground.
It is tempting to promote vanity metrics in order to sell your narrative and elevate your profile. It will work when times are good, but when things turn south, you won’t be able to explain poor economics for your business and you won’t have an accurate grasp on what customers want.
Choose to measure things that are a true proxy for your customers, even if they don’t look great at the moment. If you focus on things that are important, and avoid distractions, when you fly into the cloud, you will have the tools you need to use data in order to land safely.
Please Think Responsibly 