Why Do Planes Crash? Malcolm Gladwell on Outliers, Work, Culture, Communication (2008)

I'm um if my mother knew I was standing at the front of a church in front of hundreds of people she'd have a heart attack but I I'm very happy to be here I I would be remiss if I didn't my editor Bill Phillips is here the one who was primarily responsible for the success of my first two books and heavily involved in the third I want understand and I you write a book about the collectivity of achievement you can't but acknowledge people like Bill I I was going to give you all a choice I I can either do a kind of relatively short synopsis of my book and we can do lots of QA or I can tell you a story um which and I thought sorry I didn't really sort of stack the deck I realize um so I am a lot of this book is about culture and about how culture matters and by but that I mean how does the where we're from and who our ancestors were make a difference in how we do our jobs and how good we are or what we choose to do for a living and that's a take that idea takes up a whole second half of the book and it's a very it's a very um I think profound and sometimes difficult thing to wrestle with and so the one of the examples I use in the book to illustrate this point of how much culture matters is plane crashes of a whole chapter on plane crashes and sort of thought I do today is tell a story from that chapter and I will warn you though that I'm not going to tell the whole chapter the whole chapter I'm taking an excerpt out and so what I'm going to tell you it makes a good deal less sense then the version you'll read in the book and it's also a good deal scarier than the version you're reading the book but right who in this room will be flying in a plane in the next month or so sorry to hear that um but I think so you did scary but the most important thing about this plane crash though that I want to talk about is that it's scary not because it is unusual it is scary because it is typical which is a very important thing to keep in mind so anyway here goes um the crash when I talk about was I was a was Avianca oh five two which takes off from Colombia modeun Colombia on January 25th 1990 bound for JFK Airport in New York and as most of you know Colombia is not that far from the United States where it's just on the other side of the Caribbean Sea and to get up to New York from Colombia you cross the Caribbean Sea in the Gulf and you go up the east coast of the United States but as it happens this was January and there was a nor'easter along the East Coast and all kinds of planes were delayed that night among them Avianca o52 so here they were on a relatively routine flight from Columbia to New York the captain of the of the plane was a man named Laurie on Oh kevie ettus and the copilot was a man named Richie Oh clots so caveat and clots are flying this plane and they start to get held up by air traffic control and they are held up because the weather is so bad very very thick fog and high winds they're held up first above Norfolk Virginia for about 20 minutes and then above Atlantic City for 30 minutes and then again outside of JFK about 40 miles outside of JFK for an additional 30 minutes so after about an hour and a quarter of delay and they're cleared for landing and they come down into the runway at JFK and they encounter a really severe wind shear when they're about 500 feet above the ground now wind shear as I'm sure most of you know is a situation where the wind is very blowing very heavily in the face of the aircraft and so you add power to maintain constant speed and then at a certain point the wind just drops off boom right all of a sudden you're going too fast now normally in that kind of situation what happens in a plane is that the autopilot will and you'll be able to land safely anyway but as it happens the autopilot for reasons we don't understand was turned off on a Bianca o52 possibly because it was malfunctioning and so the pilots executed what's called a go-around which is simply when you're coming into land and you realize you can't make the runway so you pull up and you circle around and they made a big circle over Long Island and they reappropriation landing the engineer the flight engineer cries out flame out on engine number four right engine and then flame out on an engine number three one by one the engines were just blowing right and the captain says at that point show me the runway because he thinks if we're close enough to JFK I can guide this triple plane in for landing and it won't matter that we're losing all of our engines but they can't see the runway because it's fog and also they're nowhere near JFK there's still 14 miles away from from from the airport and so the crash they come down and they actually crash in the backyard of John McEnroe's father's estate on oysters Bay in Long Island and it's 73 people died and it's one of the worst accidents in the New York area in many years and the next day of course the flight investigators come and they comb through the wreckage and they retrieve the black box and they start their investigation and typically these investigations can take weeks to uncover the cause of the crash but in this case it doesn't take weeks in fact they know by the next morning what caused the crash of a Bianca 5 - and it has nothing to do with the plane the plane was in perfect working order and has nothing to do with the pilots they weren't drunk or high or sick or it was nothing to do in fact with the weather although the weather was certainly bad last that night and had nothing to do with air traffic control they didn't make any catastrophic mistakes the cause of the crash was actually really simple to put it in the argot of of the aviation world it was fuel exhaustion they'd run out of gas now when I said in the beginning that this was a typical crash I didn't mean by that that planes run out of fuel all the time they don't meant by saying that it was a typical crash was that it took out the form of I did not have a catastrophic cause we often think that accidents like plane crashes are catastrophes in the sense that something blows up in the cockpit and the captain is thrown back against his seat and he says dear God and the flight attendant comes rushing in and her face is ashen in the and in the back that passengers are screaming that's our mental image of what a plane crash is right that's what we've seen in Hollywood but in fact nothing could be further from the truth plane crashes rarely take that form at all in fact what they tend to be far more often is a very sort of subtle process that begins very slowly and gradually overtakes the pilots until the plane ends up in some kind of irredeemable crisis so for example if you look at lots of plane crashes what you discover is that overwhelmingly they happen when the weather is poor now not when the weather is so terrible that no plane should be in the sky but just that the weather is bad enough the pilot is under some degree of stress you'll also find the plane crashes invariably happened when the plane is behind schedule right not just behind schedule but enough behind schedule the pilots are hurrying and we always know we all know that you start to make mistakes when you hurry in an overwhelming number of cases plane crashes happen when the two pilots have never flown together before all right so they don't know each other really well they're not comfortable with working particularly in times when when things get difficult they're not good at working together yet and we also know that plane crashes are overwhelmingly associated with errors on the part of the pilots and not just one or two errors but a typical plane crash involves seven consecutive errors each of which would not be sufficient to cause an accident but in combination is enough to bring down the plane and when you look at those areas what you discover is that overwhelmingly they are not examples they're not cases of gross pilot negligence and they're not examples it's not like the pilot turns left and should have turned right or pulls down on this lever when they should have pulled up on that waver rather when you look closely at what causes those sorts of errors that lead to a plane crash they are overwhelmingly errors of communication one pilot is supposed to tell the other pilot something and doesn't or he tells them something and he doesn't say it in a form that allows the other pilot to understand right memens when you look closely at plane crashes what you discover is that they are overwhelmingly not technological or technical phenomenon they are social phenomena and that's why a Bianca oh five two is so typical because it is really the kind of quintessential social accident one of the things I did when I was trying to understand this plane crashes that I hung out with experts on plane crashes and one of the guys that I spent time with was this really marvelous pilot a sri lankan but named Suren wot wotty and he flies for a very big airline and he's an expert on what's called human factors which is that those are the people who study the interaction of technology and humans right which is very much what a plane crash is all about and he sort of walked me through that accent and he points out that it is typical I mean as I described before what a typical accident was all about we've got the bad weather here right as you almost always do got the plane behind schedule as we almost always have and I got the the malfunction the minor malfunction of the of the autopilot which is a contributing factor not something that would triple the plane but just something that adds to the stress of the pilot but in or what it also makes the point that one of the things that's very clear when you look at that plane crash is how tired the captain was Kelly Ennis is flying a Boeing 707 now that was the previous workhorse that's the predecessor to the 737 which is the current workhorse of the aviation world but it's a really an old generation plane and when you when you pull all of your levers the levers are actually connected with pulleys to the sheet metal of the plane it's an actual he said flying up 707 is like rowing the boat it's a physical I mean today you use a little joystick but it's really easy but it's actually really hard to fly this thing and here you have caveat us who is circling around the East Coast for an hour and a Corder and it's actually hard work he starts to get tired if you look in the cockpit of a 707 you see that the all of the the the gauges are likely small like the size of coffee cups whereas today they're like this big it's really easy to see them when you're working hard but in his case it starts to get really hard because he's has to splint and to read in all of his various controls and we know he's tired because he starts to ask for things to be repeated over and over again when we listen to the flight transcript which is one thing that happens to you when you start to get exhausted right you can't process things as easily and quickly as you could before and he also asked for things to be translated into Spanish for him even though he's a fluent English speaker which is another thing that happens to us when we get tired we are kind of peripheral cognitive processes start to shut down and he also starts to make mistakes on the first aboard of landing you have something called a ground proximity warning system which tells you if you're coming in too low and he's coming in too low and the the ground proximity goes off 15 times some voice that says you know and he seems to ignore it as if he's gonna tune dit out and we also know he's high because he um he could easily have asked to land at Philadelphia a good hour before the crash in New York and doesn't it's as if he's kind of locked in on New York as his destination and can't conceive of changing his plan in any way which is another another thing that happens to us when we're when we're exhausted so we know that's that that's one thing that's going on that cockpit is we have a tired pilot but the other thing that um robot he pointed out was what's strange about what was going on in that cockpit was how quiet it is particularly Klotz the co-pilot is the pilot who is responsible for all of the communication with air traffic control he's the one who's supposed to be coordinating bringing this plane in to landing and he seems to be very very passive in a way that seems very peculiar so for example he doesn't tell air-traffic control that they're running out of fuel until the end of the third holding pattern which would be unusual if they are approaching this kind of crisis and he does tell them that they immediately say you know Avianca o52 cleared for landing but what we think Klotz thought they were saying was that he was allowed to go they were allowing a bianca to go to the front of the line of all of the planes that were that were circling around JFK last night laughs at night he thought they were putting them at the front of the queue so they could land first in fact they were putting them at the end of the queue so they could land last of all the ones that were cleared for landing it's a really crucial misunderstanding and in fact one that would true fatal for this particular plane but um plots never once tries to clarify he never once steps in with our childhood control and says are we talking about the front of the line or the back of the line in fact he doesn't bring up the subject of fuel again for another 38 minutes right and when I was talking about water he kept coming back to this silence issue this kind of passivity because he thought it was really at the root of trying to understand what went wrong that night in the cockpit of Avianca who five-two he tells me this really fascinating story rot what he does about what had happened when that day we met in um at his hotel him an N and they just flown into JFK that morning and that afternoon rather and he'd done he flies those huge air buses and he'd just come in from Dubai and he was light and I said well why were you late he said well because we had this issue just a couple of hours out of Dubai you know when you fly from Dubai to New York you go north right you go up over Moscow on the Arctic Circle and then you come down and when they were over Moscow a woman in the back I'm an Indian woman who was trapped traveling with elderly anyone traveling with her husband and had a stroke and she'd started vomiting and having seizures and a doctor they found a doctor he'd gone back and he had said she only has at best an hour to live we have to get her medical attention and he was at that point over Moscow and he had to make a series of decisions about what to do in order to say this woman's life and his first thought was I can't land in Moscow I mean here's a elderly couple they have no money they don't even speak English they're from some little any village in the Punjab if I if I if I plunk them down in Moscow they're going to get eaten alive he's like we'll never see them again right so he's like I gotta find a first world country as exactly Frazee use um I have to find a first world destination for this couple and so he thinks Helsinki right so that's where he's gonna land a plane and his next problem is he's heavy he's 60 tons overweight think about it he just took off from Dubai planes are not supposed to land when they have that much fuel right a plane he's supposed to use up all your fuel get your destination and then you land but he's got 60 tons of extra fuel and the planes electronics are not calibrated to land a plane that that's that's that heavy so he has this decision to make what do I do do I go over the Baltic Sea and dump my fuel right they think that'll take 40 minutes and besides no one's very happy when you dump 60 tons fuel in the middle of the baltic sea so he thinks okay i'm gonna land heavy now landing heavy means that you have to turn off your electronics and basically land the plane yourself as light as a feather and if you don't you could damage you could structurally damage the plane and these are planes are for 500 million dollars each right they're not cheap things it's huge Airbus so immediately he has to start dealing with this crisis and he has a window of 40 minutes right in which to figure it out so he has to get on the plant on the on the radio with his superiors in Dubai and say is it okay if I land heavy I'm gonna risk your brand-new for two million dollar plane but I think I need to write he's got to get on the phone with Helsinki on the airport he's never landed at and that he doesn't even know can handle his plane and learn everything he can about that Airport and figure it out as well he learns when he's talking to them that typically when you landed Helsinki you come in over the water not over the city because they don't want planes coming in over the city for noise reasons but when you come in that way over the water typically the wind is behind you but well he's heavy he can't be landing with the wind behind him he needs to land into the wind so he has to not only get Helsinki to tell him about their Airport really fair I'm into doing what you're not supposed to do which is coming in over Helsinki menaced he's got to talk to the doctor who's tending to the woman the back exactly how much time do I need right he's gonna get an ambulance waiting on the ground ready to right where he's going to land come in immediately get that woman off the plane he's gotta get his flight attendants to to communicate to the people in the back that no we're not gonna crash and no this isn't horrible but we have a woman who's very sick he's got I could go on but if you think about all the things he had to do in order to prepare for that landing right what that meant was that for that 40 minutes he never stopped talking talked the entire time right and in fact what we're talking about when we talk about what it means to be a good pilot because he is being a really good pilot in that moment sure he needs to be able to land heavy that takes technical skills but mostly what we are asking of that pilot in that moment in that crisis is that he'd be able to communicate right he'd be able to get on the phone with his bosses back home and talk them into letting him land the plane get on the phone with Helsinki and talk them into letting him land into the wind get on the phone with the ambulance guys and get them all ready get on the radio with the people in the back and get them all calm down talk to them on and on and on we think when we talk about what it means to be a good pilot that we're talking about technical skills and daring do and that laconic voice and being able to fly a plane through two canyons and roll the plane when but in fact that has nothing to do with what it means to be a good pilot what it means to be a good pilot is to be able to do what about what he was doing right which is to be able to talk to all kinds of different people in a very open and honest and persuasive way and talk your way out of this particular crisis right so with that in mind let's think about what was going on in the cockpit of a Vianca o52 and I'm going to read you now that transcript a little bit of the transcript of from the flight recorder and this is when they're going into JFK for their first abortive landing okay so caveat it says remember they're in heavy fog caveated says the runway where is it I don't see it I don't see it right comes it can't see it and then the they realize they're not going to be able to make it and they pull up and pull up the landing gear and they start their go-around and the captain asked Klotz the copilot to ask air traffic control for another traffic pattern and ten seconds pass and caveated says it's like almost himself in this could mutters to himself we don't have fuel right and then seventeen seconds pass now just to get a sense of this right we've just come from hearing this story about a guy who had a crisis that was this much as serious as the one that's an Avianca oh five two and he never stops talking for forty minutes there's not a moment of silence in the cockpit of rawat yz-plane right we just had ten seconds of silence between captain muttering about we don't know field and now we have another 17 seconds and we're going to do this do the 17 seconds just to understand what this is like ready the plane is you the thing is on empty right you've just botched your landing nothing 14 15 16 17 and then caveat a says I don't know what happened with the runway I didn't see it now that's in the past right and they can't move on they're still kind of thinking about they're not even thinking about how to land a plane to think about oh my goodness we botched the runway right and then Klotz says finally Klotz the one who's supposed to be doing the communicating in this in a situation says I didn't see it the energy after control comes in and says tells me to make a left turn and caveated says to cloths he says tell them tell air-traffic control we are in an emergency and then Klotz says to our traffic control that's right two one eight zero on the heading and we'll try again we're running out of fuel now let's go back to the scene in the cockpit again remember there there there they had the fuel gauge on empty they'd blown their shot at landing they know that there is a whole long line of planes in the sky above JFK waiting to land right there in crisis mode they're somewhere out over Long Island and the captain is desperate he says to Klotz tell them we are in an emergency right he's panicking at this point properly and what does clots say clots says that's right two one eight zero on the heading and we'll try once again we're running out of fuel now first of all that phrase running out of fuel has no meaning in the world of aviation by definition as you are coming into land you're running out of fuel all planes run out of fuel at the very end of their journey right it doesn't mean anything do you hear that if you're an air traffic controller you it doesn't be doesn't check any boxes or spark any special-interest right no and also think about the structure of that sentence he starts that critical sentence with the routine acknowledgment of the instructions and then in the second half is where he puts his concern we're in crisis right it would be as if that's all wrong right it'd be as if you're in a restaurant and you say to the waitress I'll have a refill on that coffee and I'm choking on a chicken bone what's she gonna do she's gonna look at you like oh honey that's not the way we talk when we're trying to communicate about our situation um even the all that he puts between the two halves of that sentence is really important right it serves to undercut the seriousness of what he's saying in fact later during the inquest that they brought laboring in the air traffic controllers who were communicating with a Bianca o52 that night and they all say the same thing which was we had no idea they were in trouble it's like one of them says it sounded like like Klotz was totally nonchalant when he was talking to us there was nothing in his tone of voice to suggest or the structure of his speech of his sentences to suggest that something was seriously amiss with the plane now there's an actual term that linguists use to describe what was going on what plots was doing and it's called mitigation my mitigation is the word that we use to describe situations where where people undercut the seriousness of what they're saying and all of us mitigate all the time right if you're if you want your boss if you're desperate for your boss to read something you've written and get back to you you don't say to your boss you know I need you to read this now and get back to me you say you know if you have time this weekend if you could look at this it would I mean it's not a big deal but I just really that's mitigation right and you do that for a reason if you said to your boss I need you to read this now you wouldn't be employed much longer right it's a very appropriate use of of in that situation of of this kind of social tool on for communicating now no way that's fine but in the aviation world what people began to realize was that they began to get obsessive mitigation because they realized that this was a cause of a lot of problems in the cockpit right the cockpit was a place where mitigation wasn't an appropriate strategy you let me give you an example so suppose that you and I are you're the pilot and I'm the copilot and we're flying and in along and we see that on the weather radar we see that twenty five miles ahead there's a big ugly patch of thunderstorms right and a traffic control has been telling us over the course the last 10 minutes about the really choppy weather ahead but I noticed that you you guys are the pilot that you're just flying straight into it right you haven't made any attempt to kind of so what I want to do is to communicate to you the fact that we really should find a way of going around the thunderstorms right so how do I do it now there are many different strategies that I could use that differ in terms of their level of mitigation so the thing the first thing I could say to you which is zero mitigation would be a a command I could say something like turn thirty degrees right right it's command now that is wholly inappropriate for me to say that to really hard for me instead because what I'm saying is I'm the boss not you and I'm saying you're not a good pilot right which is a hard thing to say to someone who is your superior in that notion so maybe I want to cut it down just a little bit so I could make what they call a crew obligation statement which I could say something like I think we need to deviate right around now that's softer I think and I use we and instead of saying 30 degrees I just say deviate right around now right a little more a little more acceptable for me to put it that way but that might also be too much so I could take it down one more notch and I could use a suggestion I could say let's go around the weather my furnace together to you name this mine is playing let's just go around right that's a little softer but maybe they even that's too hard so what if I could I could just do a simple question I could just say um which direction do you want to deviate right just assume I'm assuming you gonna deviate sooner or later you just are you gonna go right or left right let's go old more so now maybe even that's just wrong maybe I wanted to simply state a preference like ah you know if it was up to me I'd go I'd go left right it's even softer and softest of all would be the hint I could just say boy looks mean up there yeah there is a world of difference between turn thirty degrees right and boy it looks mean up there ahead right world of difference in one case I command an action a response from you and the last case I give you something so soft that's easy for you to ignore it right well this was what people in the aviation world became why people in the aviation world became obsessed with mitigation because when they started to listen to and the transcripts of those black boxes what they begun to understand is that in the minutes and hours before plane crashes what you saw was lots and lots of mitigation right that's what was going on in the cockpit that was causing all of those errors was people were too often relying on hints and too infrequently using the kind of language that would compel action so for example is a famous crash on air Florida crash in the 1980s in Washington and it's a was one of those wintry days and it was sleeping and all the planes you know how you get de-iced will the plane got D ice but it was they were taking off at rush hour you know how they'll have a line of like 15 planes in a row and this one was number 15 so the bhindi ice and they're creeping forward you know and the sleep comes down and the ice begins to reform on the wings so what happens is the copilot who is has flown in bad weather quite a lot wants to tell the pilot that this is not good we have to get D iced again right so what does he say well he says uh he hints he says the first thing he says is look how the ice is just hanging on this back there back there see that right so he says tip total mitigation just throwing it out there look at that right ice he's hoping that the captain kind of fills in the blanks and doesn't work and they're starting to creep forward right they're no longer 15s for takeoff they're now nine three takeoff and the ice is getting a little bit thicker so he tries again he says see all those icicles on the back there and everything now he's like icicles right it's like he's trying to ramp it up a little bit but it's still just a hint right just seals icicles let me Adam just making conversation up there in the cockpit nothing happens couple more minutes past now they've crept up a little closer they're like fifth for takeoff right now the copilot is getting a little bit concerned so what's he say he says boy this is a this is a losing battle you're trying to di snows things it gives you a false sense of security that's all that does right still ahead look strong little like three sentences of hints but it still hits right nothing happens pilots ignoring him they've not crept up there like number two for takeoff and he's starting to get really really worried so what does he do he upgrades he goes from a hint to a suggestion the action suggestin actually says let's check those tops again since we've been sitting here a while he's not only suggesting action finally the captain responds and says no I think we get to go here in a minute just wants to take off right so I get up for first in line' in line for landing and on the runway first in line for takeoff and they take off south up on the South runway it had had wash and Reagan as you know if you know this that when ice forms on your wings it diminishes your lift right the planes ability to take off when it's really really heavy and take off so they take off and then they can't make it starts to go down like this and the Potomac is right bellowing they clipped the 14th Street bridge and as they're going down the copilot turns to the captain and they have the first moment of honest conversation honest open communication since the two of them got into the cockpit and the captain the co-pilot says Larry we're going down Larry and the captain says I know it right and thank Rogers now fighting mitigation has become one of the great Crusades in the airline world in fact when you look at why plane crashes have dropped so dramatically over the last 20 years it is principally because of the success in retraining pilots in how they talk right how they talk to each other for example this was never the case before but now very often cope our pilots are required to call each other by their first names and the idea is if you're talking to someone you're not calling someone Captain Smith but rather calling him Jack you're more likely to communicate openly with him sometimes some airlines have done away with captain and first officer or pilot and co-pilot entirely and they just talk about the flying pilot and the non flying pilot again it's an attempt to foster some kind of openness in communication they also give pilot scripts now you know how it at you know Brown places like that they give you they give freshmen boys all those instructions about how to make out with a girl Jean about this I'm sure you do you know like can I place my hand here yes or no can I move my hand six inches lower is that a yes will you sign here that guy said they they do that with captain's they give you scripts and if you're if you're a co-pilot you're having a trouble communicating with your captain you take out the script and they you just weaned off the things and it's surprisingly effective in in creating more open conversation in times where the social context makes open communication I'm difficult right this has actually been one of the great success stories in the world of aviation okay so let's go back to a v2 Avianca and let's think about what was going on in that but in terms of mitigation right so they've just blown the first landing and they're circling around over Long Island and Klotz is on the phone with our traffic control and he's trying to figure out when they can land again like the critical question and caveat is turns to him and he says What did he say meaning what did air traffic control just tell you and clot says I already advised him that we are going to attempt again because now we can't and then he just his voice chills off and four seconds of sounds right and then caveated says advise him we are in an emergency the second time he said dead four more seconds pass captain tries again he says did you tell him right and Claude says yes sir I already advised him and then clots starts talking Derek traffic control he's going over really routine details and I air traffic control I says here Jeff control one five zero maintaining 2000 Evian cos zero five too heavy and the captain starts to freak out he says advise him we don't have fuel so clots gets back on the radio with air traffic control and he says climb and maintain 3000 and we're running out of fuel sir right there is again does not mention the word emergency no emergency if you are an air traffic controller that is the word you are trained to listen for right the minute someone says emergency you act does Klotz use it no he just says we're running out of fuel which by the way every single plane in the air that night over JFK was also doing right and when does he say that phrase running out of fuel once again in the second half of the sentence preceded by the mitigating ah right he's mitigating now a minute passes a minute an air traffic control says and evie anka zero five too heavy ah I'm going to bring you about 15 miles northeast and then turn you back into the approach is that okay with you and your fuel and clot says I guess so thank you very much right I guess so thank you very much about to crash now what's going on here why you see this way well one key fact is there Kennedy and one thing you have to know about Kennedy is that air traffic control at Kennedy is famous throughout the aviation world these are possibly the finest air traffic controllers in the world they have run one of the busiest airports in the world with an extraordinary safety record over the last 50 years they are also the most obnoxious air traffic controllers in the world they are famous they are bullies they won't put up with anything right as if there's a pilot's have all kinds of great stories and if you ask them to tell you JFK stories are just an endless number and I'm what I heard was uh you know JFK is so uh crazy that I'm so large that it's once--you'll and it's really easy to get lost so there was a pilot once and he's he gets lost and he's trying to find his way to the terminal and he's on so he's like he's just bothering the air-traffic controller so much for directions and finally she turns to him and she says on the radio and the course you know all the pilots are listening in right um so the air traffic controller turns to him and she says um shut up stay there don't move I'll get back in touch with him right when I'm ready right and there's silence and the pilot says ma'am was I'm married to you in an earlier life so here we have so these guys are you know this is what they're like right there total bullies they push you around and the only way to get what you want if you're trying to land at Kennedy is to push back right you've got to play their game and they will only respect you if you're willing to stand up to them and say look this is my issue right I needed to be resolved right now and then they'll then they'll respond and that's what plots can't do he's intimidated that's what's going on here I guess so thank you very much and that's what's so puzzling about this because we can understand intimidation and mitigation when what you're trying to do is avoid a thunderstorm 25 miles ahead right you're going to survive the thunderstorm we can even kind of understand it when we're in that plane on the ground at wash and national because it is possible it's a judgment call about whether you want to get D iced right it's not a sure thing the plans not going to make it and he was just kind of worried and one guy had a risk threshold that was a little bit higher than the other it is really hard to understand mitigation when you're in a plane and your fuel gauge is on empty and you know you're going to crash right unless you do something now so that's the puzzle why is Klotz that way under this most dire of circumstances so the answer I think or one of the answers one one useful way of thinking about this is to use the work of this really fascinating Dutch psychologist named Gert of steady and he works he's a guy who works for IBM in the 60s and when IBM was this sort of Colossus you know multinational all over the globe and what HOF City does is he goes around the world and he gives people and every one of the IBM offices a very detailed psychological questionnaire because he's trying to answer the question of how should we behave as a company differently in different cultures you know do we do we run IBM the same way in Cape Town as we do in Copenhagen right that's what he's trying to figure out and so he's dispatched by the company to go and sort of try and get a read on what it means to belong to a particular local culture and he organizes this in Armus database and comes up with a set of what are called Hoffs teenies dimensions which are now famous in the world of cross-cultural psychology there are ways of understanding the different the ways in which the world the cultures of the world differ right so he comes up with a series of dimensions continuum that he says are the easiest way to categorize differences among cultures so one of them for example is individualism collectivism right and he says all of the countries of the world exists somewhere along this continuum so for example the most collectivistic culture in the world according to Huff's TD is Guatemala the most individualistic culture in the world according to F CD is the United States right which makes sense why are we the only industrialized nation in the world not to have national health insurance because we are individual one of the definitions of individualism is to what extent do you have do you feel responsible for the welfare of someone other than yourself right that's the definition and we feel less responsible for the welfare of people other than ourselves than any other country in the world makes sense that fits with her another one of his dimensions is uncertainty avoidance which is how tolerant is a culture of ambiguity you know when things go hairy and there's a big crisis do you are you willing to be flexible or do you adhere to the rules to the kind of principles that you laid they laid down beforehand and what he finds again once again is that there's wide differences among cultures along that dimension so the countries of the world who are the least tolerant of ambiguity who are the least most willing most most keen on sticking to the rules regardless of circumstance are Greece Portugal Guatemala Uruguay and Belgium right the five countries of the world at the other end of the spectrum the most tolerant of ambiguity are Hong Kong Sweden Denmark Singapore and then the last will come as no surprise to me since my family's from there Jamaica um now it's really important to understand that Hough city is not making a value judgment here right he's not saying it's better to be here on the continuum than there he's just saying look this is just one of the ways in which cultures differ and it's a way to for us to understand when we're dealing with that culture um what their what their frame of reference is right and he's saying that look that these things are also pretty specific the cultures have dramatic differences along these lines right so when we look at that list of five you can see that Belgium is one of the least tolerant of ambiguity and Denmark is one of the most tolerant of ambiguity well Belgium and Denmark are two northern European countries that are pretty close together that'd be roughly the same food that have architecture that's kind of the same that had been democratic for an awful long time that you would think as a stranger going in I must be pretty similar in culture along these cultural dimensions and hostility is saying no they're actually profoundly different that on this dimension Denmark has more in common with Jamaica and Belgium has more in common with Guatemala that's really an interesting a fascinating insight now of all of hostilities dimensions though the most interesting and crucial for our purposes is something he calls power distance and power distance is a measure of a country's orientation towards hierarchy right and he measures power distance by asking questions like how likely in in your culture is it for a superior to express disagreement with firsta Borden to express disagreement with a superior right how much do you guys in your culture respect this how much do you venerate somebody or hold someone up because they are older or um have more have more experience or are of higher social standing how common is it how important is it for people in positions of power to downplay or accentuate the difference in their status in the status of everybody else and he says look there's huge differences so for example he says in you power distance countries you see political leaders very consciously trying to to hide their power so he says if you go to Austria for example very low power distance country you can see he would say I got Austrian I would see the Prime Minister of Austria taking a streetcar to work that's what you do in a low power distance culture right he said also I would you said he would go to a he was once on holiday in Spain and he saw the Prime Minister of of the Netherlands in a in I got one of those vacation trailer parks right it's like that's the Netherlands is one of the lowest power distance countries in the world that's what you do if you're the prime minister of the Netherlands you try to act like as normal a person as you possibly can they says you know compare this to France is a very very high power distance culture he says what are the odds you would ever see the president of France in a trailer park in Spain right zero it's not going to happen that's up and that's a profound difference between two countries that by the way are right next door to each other right so now when people in the aviation world hear about power distance their eyes go wide because they say you know what that's exactly what we've been talking about right we are concerned with nothing more than the issue of the likelihood of a subordinate expressing disagreement with a superior right so they suddenly realize ah this completely helps us to understand how to under to understand and to combat plane crashes this concept they realized says that ena culture that has a high power distance right in a culture that respects hierarchy the task of combating mitigation will be a lot harder and similar in fact they say look it should be possible in fact to understand the likelihood of a cultures having a plane crash just by looking at the level of that cultures power distance and in fact is a very famous paper done in the 1980s where they simply list all of the countries of the world according to their plane crashes per capita and they list all of the countries of the world according to the power distance of their pilots and they discover that the two lists are basically the same but this is the most powerful way to understand the likelihood of a particular airline having a crash right so which countries have the lowest power distance and the lowest plane crashes per capita well the countries that you would expect right we already talked about Austria the United States very low power distance Australia classic low power distance Israel right one of the most low powers and places on earth can you imagine an Israeli having diffident and is really subordinate having difficulty expressing disagreement who's superior right in fact parent that parenthetically somebody was telling me that one of the big problems with Israeli army patrols on the West Bank where they're going and very stealthily at night is that the leader of the patrol just can't get the people who are supposed to be his subordinates to shut up because there's a constant like no no let's not go that way no no way so that's you know and one of the countries that have what is one of the countries that has one of the highest levels of power distance in the world Columbia right in fact the Kennedy crash is not the first time that Avianca the national airline of Columbia has had this particular kind of accident in fact after that crash they have a kind of investigation and they go over the fact that they've had that they had four crashes in quick succession in that period all of which took exactly the same form these were crashes where the plane was in perfect working order where the pilots weren't sick or would where where there wasn't some massive mistake from air traffic control where there wasn't some massive technological failure but still the planes crashed why because there was a social breakdown between the pilot and the copilot in fact there was a crash in in in Madrid and I'll just quote to you the two lines from the invent from the conclusion of the crash from the from the report on the crash and it was this case of of the copilot saw something and tried to bring it to the attention of the pilot and failed and they the the report said the copilot was right but they died the plane crashed because when the copilot asked questions his implied suggestions were very week the captain's reply was to ignore him totally this was a kind of endemic problem at a Bianca the problem that night in other words in that cockpit was not merely one of clots his inability to communicate effectively with caveat Asst it was a problem about a Bianca's problem of the inability of co-pilots to communicate with paths and even more than that it was a symptom of a cultures inability to allow subordinates to openly question their superiors right this can this plane crash cannot be understood just individually it has to be understood as part of a much larger cultural context now it is very easy I think to find this kind of talk offensive we don't like to talk about cultures having traits like this we find that kind of language and that line of argument to be problematic I'm with good reason because so often I think that kind of a cultural stereotyping is used to harm but one of the arguments I make in this book I hope persuasively is that there are times and occasions where we have to talk about cultures in that way because cultures play such an important role in how we behave and how we think and how we go about doing our jobs but if we want to make people better at those kinds of things we have to be willing and honest enough to confront our cultural legacies and say this is an area where my culture does not do a good job and this is an area where my culture does do a good job right unless we're willing to have that kind of conversation I think that we leave all kinds of problems on the table so back to clots I'm you have to understand ways from you have to understand if you want to understand what happened to that that plane that night that he comes from a culture that is deeply hierarchical where it is very difficult for a subordinate to speak openly to I'm a superior right where leaders are supposed to lead and what's going on that night in the plane his leader isn't leading Connie Otis the man who's supposed to be in charge of this plane is exhausted right he can barely listen or hearing it yes everything has to be repeated to him his at the IDI end of his tether he's been rowing this boat around the sky for an hour and a half so clots is all by himself right and then he's dealing with the Kennedy controllers and what do they like they are these totally low power distance obnoxious bullying New Yorkers and he's trying to tell them that he's in trouble but he's using his own cultural language right the kind of language that says when you try and say that kind of thing you mitigate but who are these controllers right they come from a completely different cultural context and when they hear someone mitigate they don't think that person is being appropriately deferential to Authority they think that person doesn't have a problem so this is incredible moment in that in the transcript where the kind of cultural disconnect between between the between clots and the and the air traffic controllers gets so stark that it's almost painful to read it's the last exchange between Avianca and air traffic control and it's just the crash is minutes away and potts has just said I guess so thank you very much right in response to the controllers question about their full fuel state and caveat Asst turns the clots and he says What did he say meaning what did the controller just tell you right now I understand again they are this is at the very very end of the flight and they are in this boggy windy night and they're somewhere out over Long Island and the the fuel gauge is at empty and one of the flight attendants who actually we know the story because she survived one of the few survivors comes into the cockpit at that moment to ask what's going on and she asked the flight engineer and he just goes like this right they know that it's kind of over and then there's clots right and he's absolutely at wit's end because he has been trying using his own cultural language to communicate the seriousness of the plane state to air traffic control and he realizes he has completely failed right he's just completely failed and the only way that he can make sense of that the only way it can make sense of his failure is to assume that he has somehow offended air-traffic control so caveated says to him What did he say what did the air traffic controller say and claude says in this little small voice he says the guy is angry and then the flight engineer says flame out on engine number four right and then caveated says where is the runway because he thinks maybe he can bring the plane in to land but he can't because they're miles and miles away and on the flight transcript after that there's two minutes of nothing but static and the last thing you hear is air traffic control comes on and says hey Bianca oh five - do you have enough fuel to make the runway I think we have time for a few questions unless I've spooked you all as the uh-oh there's the mic right um this is back to outliers just a question about that I was just curious um in the book where you talk about the 10,000 hours of eating practice and I know you don't call yourself an outlier but I think all of us would say you're extremely successful and I was just wondering what are some of the cultural background that you would say contributed to your success or how would you answer that this is for those who haven't read the book there's a section in the book where I talk about what it takes to be good at something and how there's something psychologists have sort of come up with this idea that in an incredibly large number of cases it seems like in order to master a complex task you need to practice for about 10,000 hours which is four hours a day for 10 years so the question was did do I have such a 10,000 hour actually besides that so outside of that that's out of that oh dear um I'm not very good at answering a lot of biographical questions but um did I have a cultural well I mean I grew up in a in a house where um I realized I guess the in retrospect of my parents are borderline workaholics but that was seemed like a really good thing so maybe being being growing up in an atmosphere that venerated work in that way I was it was important but thank you very much so one of the examples you use in your book of people who practiced well was my favorite rock band The Beatles and I'm just curious I understand how their practice in Hamburg increased their technical skills but it strikes me their long-term success was more from their ability to innovate in a sustained way and this wondering do you think that came from practice or something else yes oh this is a reference along the same lines I talk about the Beatles and how before they come to America they have this extraordinary sojourn in Hamburg where they are Germany whether the house band in a strip club and they play eight-hour sets seven days a week for months of stretch and that's really where they get their 10,000 hours in and so the question was to what extent can we credit that apprenticeship for their ability to innovate I think you can credit a lot you know what innovation is is is innovation comes when you have mastered a particular field well enough to be able to understand all of its possibilities right it's very difficult to innovate when you when you don't know what to innovate but what you don't know you know what's wrong with the existing paradigm and they are as rock bands go a profoundly well educated rock band because of their I mean they had played together 1200 times by the time they come to America you know you you would be hard-pressed to find a band today at that age that is paid together half that many times Plato live performed live 1200 times by the time they're in there very early 20s that's installing and I think that it's much easier to see to understand how to innovate when you're you've got that kind of background you know I recently discovered and started devouring the podcasts on the Ted website and you know immediately when you see you want to become part of the event but what I slowly started to realize is that it's probably easier to get invited to speak than it is to get a ticket in the audience and especially with a ten year waiting list it you know on the premise we could spend 10,000 hours and yeah you know perfects a skill and then get invited so I was just curious if you had any tips on how to convince the members of Ted to invite you to the talk yeah I haven't even been invited back since it is that so I'm I'm you know I'm a dime on the same predicament as you are so if I if I hear anything from them I'll be sure to pass along but I really enjoy your books and I hope you keep writing them my question is about women or actually the lack of them in kind of the first half of outliers when you profile both individuals and groups of people who have had success they're all male examples which is not surprising because of those who have had access to success in our society etc and the notable exception is Morita at Kipp Academy who's a student and whose success may be before her so when you talk about kind of the ideal year for a male who wants to earn a fortune in America to be warned being 1835 do you think that the age of the woman is before us and is that you're in our decade is it ahead of us what do you think about female success yeah yeah I mean you're absolutely right there is an absence of women in the first half of this book and it would have been dishonest to put them in write in my whole argument in the book is that success is a function of opportunities that have been that are granted by society and we have as you point out over the last you know going back as long as it's been human history hugely disproportionately granted those opportunities to men and I think one of the ways we we glide we glossed over that fact is by when we tell stories about success pretending there's as many women out there as there aren't because we just haven't you know success is not a matt is not a simple function of people's ability it's a function of ability plus these but do I think that will change I certainly hope so when I certainly hope if I were to write another version of this book in 40 years god forbid I would you would tell a very different story but I mean you know when I was it's so interesting you know I tell the story of you know Jewish lawyers in New York for example their rise well you can't find any in that cohort there are no women I'm instead of amazing like their hair was this this this group beautifully poised to take on a profession for reasons that I explained and yet all of those opportunities were granted to 50% of the of the group's population I mean it's sort of like it's that what it is is a kind of reminder of how tragically we have under eye under you under utilize the talents of our population even Bill Gates school it's an all-boys school I looked that up I was curious about it so it's the same thing yeah thank you hello so I haven't read your most recent book yet so you might have already answered this question but um there's a theorist named Robert Traverse who writes a lot about a self-deception I think he actually cited the same story about the guys with the de-icing on their wings and his idea is that we can deceive ourselves into believing that everything is ok when it's not so I was wondering if that if you think that concept works with your cultural ideas about how people can deceive themselves into taking off then crashing yeah well yeah so it is to apply that to this what I'm talking about maybe what is part of what's happening in a high power distance culture is part of the deception is that the hierarchy will take care of you the hierarchy knows more like the person higher up the chain knows more than you and so you don't have to assert yourself in that way whereas the assumption in the low power distance cultures is that being higher in the ladder is actually a more random fact than a fact that speaks to a meaningful difference in in ability or judgment so there's that element of raps there's an additional element of selfless in high power distance worlds that being said you know it is important to point out that a high power distance is not always a bad thing like a lot of my that chapter is of my book is concerned with Korea which is a very very very high power distance culture but you can make and which has had all kinds of consequences for Korean aviation that really struggle with this issue in the air but in all kinds of other areas of Korean life the high power distance notion has been enormous ly useful I mean a country does not go from being in ruins at the end of the Korean War to being one of the most powerful economic forces in the world in a space of half a century unless it has cultural ideas that support that this enormous organization and effort and I'm an order so those you know it's it's it's um so I hesitate to kind of described as we described hierarchy entirely in negative terms I think could be a wonderful thing just not in a carpet it seems that that a lot of what you're talking about here are things that are out of people's control the the role the luck plays in success the culture we come from and the what we've been raised with where we're at given that the other factor the amount of practice we have to work on our abilities is something that we can choose to engage with are there any any prescriptions is there anything we can choose to do to deal with the culture that we come from and how it interacts with other cultures so this is a good question um and to my annoyance some reviewers of my book have accused me of being a cultural determinist in fact I'm the opposite so the culture that we come from is only deterministic of our behavior if we choose to ignore it right if you never address so that the chapter that I was talking about in that in my talk the plane crash chapter it's really about Korean air and how Korean air goes from being an airline that almost gets pushed out of business because it has so many plane crashes to being one of them now what is now today one of the premier airlines in the world and they transform themselves in the last 10 years precisely because they say they decide at long last to confront their cultural legacy and deal with it and what they discover is if they are honest and open about the fact that in this particular instance the cockpit being acting like you're a Korean is not a good idea then you can change it and they do they take that airline from literally it was this close to being to not existing anymore and it is now an absolutely world-class airline and what they what they showed and I continue this theme in the second half of the book is once we can talk about and confront culture we can change culture we're not prisoners of it we're only prisoners of it if we pretend it doesn't exist and this is my great objection to the way we deal with so-called cultural stereotypes in this that we are we have decided that it is always better to ignore them in the interest of avoiding those few cases where they are misused and that's a shame because I for example have another chapter in the book which talks about math learning math and points out that Asian school children vastly outperformed their Western counterparts at math right so the question and now flip the question if they can learn from us about flying planes can we learn from them about doing math and the answer is yes we can and in fact our culture is Western culture is sorely deficient when it comes to giving kids the emotional equipment necessary to achieve at high school calculus we do a terrible job of it and they do a really good job of it and we can does that mean that we are prisoners of that notion here in the West No if I could talk about house there are schools the Kipp schools which many of you will be familiar with these charter school movement Kipp Academy is essentially just an attempt to set up an Asian school in the middle of the inner city so it is it's like can we get uh you know disadvantaged Hispanic and african-american kids to behave like Korean school children when they do math the answer is yes you can it's not that hard you just you have to be determined about it and honest about it and say we haven't prepared these kids culturally properly for what they're doing so what I would like to do is I think that we should look upon cultural legacies is a big smorgasbord and we should just say look you know these people do this well and these people do this well and let's just have a one let's just let's assume that everyone has something to teach us and and that way we can get around the trap of assuming that um that there is a kind of a hierarchy of of cultures or one

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 176,562

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Keywords: Funny, Crazy, Village, Fun, Dada, Ingrid, Friends, Lol, Ymca, Some, Blogs, Old, Life, Work, Famous, Random, Second, Office, Express, Beautiful, Real, Progress, Arnold, Pineapple, Working, Michaelson, Career, Cowboy, Stuff, Their, Real Life, Interview, Post, Employment, Training, Space, Careers, Does, Worker, Workers, Search, Manager, Professional, Work Progress, Experience

Id: a4TXS7ck8bQ

Length: 67min 13sec (4033 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013