The Plane on the Crane

If you want to teach a Californian kid about cold, have him fly out to New York in January. Have him pack poorly and then have him walk out of JFK airport at 3pm with aforementioned poor packing, and watch what happens.

Wait until the sliding door opens.

Wait for it.

And watch.

I did not understand cold until I walked out of JFK in half a winter outfit. It was likely getting punched in the stomach… with cold. I forgot how to breathe for four seconds. I looked around at compatriots and realized why they stopped INSIDE the terminal to perform what I know is an East Coast (and Midwest) ritual:

1. Pull out the scarf, fold it in half, wrap it around the neck, and tie it like a knot.
2. Gloves. Wool works, but wool won’t always save you from deep cold.
3. Put on that black pea coat that falls well below your waist, and pop that collar up.
4. Beanie. Wool beanie. Over the head.
5. You’re wearing wool socks, right? Gosh, I hope so.

It took a few trips, but one January, I was so proud of my cold-weather habits that after checking into my Tribeca hotel, I decided to walk around in the bitter bitter cold late at night. Stomping around in my fancy black Chelsea boots and eighteen layers of warmth, I turned a corner in Battery Park and saw floodlights on the Hudson. Walking to the river, I looked over the edge and saw a half-sunken plane in the Hudson River.

Are You Prepared?

The two books are on the coffee table next to your bed. Both are being read. Jeans on the floor. The cables for the speaker, the clock, and the desk light — the cables are not organized. Your desk is in the upstairs office. A parking ticket, the reminder to an appointment to get an X-ray for a tooth (probably bad news), both on the left side of the desk. You ate breakfast here this morning, so there is residual… breakfast on and near the keyboard. A clickable gel pen with the tip out on the right side of the desk, the gel dries over time. A plant, well watered.

Is this tidy?

Your staff meeting. Three topics are scheduled. We get through just one of them before we swerve wildly into an unexpected fourth. The unexpected fourth topic has gravity, inescapable organizational gravity, so you stick with it. It’s important to orbit this a bit. Important unrelated information is not conveyed. Important and timely topics are not discussed in a critical meeting.

Are we organized?

The critical presentation. The CEO casually asked you a month ago to define a program (“document the culture”) for the whole company. He asked you in front of the entire executive team, and today you are presenting to all of your peers. You didn’t know it at the time, but the CEO was asking this of you because he didn’t think you could do it.

Are you prepared?

Tidy, organized, and prepared. There’s a deliberate escalating amount of work for each level, going from picking up and folding your jeans all the way to scheduling time with some of the busiest humans in the company to review your drafty thoughts on the slippery topic of culture. Also, at each level, there is a minimum success criterion, an optimal one, and a maximum. For each, there is what you must do, what you should do, and what would represent exceptional work.

Leadership, especially senior leadership, is built on an influential lie: “busy people are more successful.” Now, no one wrote this down and documented this lie. It’s derived from the sense of urgency for this critical project, this high-performing team, or this can’t-fail start-up. In each scenario, the incentive is to act as quickly as possible because there is so much at stake.

The counter to this lie is building a set of small, often inconsequential, thoughtful habits that often pay no obvious immediate dividends, but are essential to your leadership success.

• Being tidy means removing the unnecessary, removing the noise, so that the signal becomes obvious.
• Being organized means taking deliberate action that is efficient, informed, and focused. Organized means eliminating waste.
• Being prepared means anticipating what’s needed before it’s urgent, before you know you need it. It means having the right set of tools ready before you need them.

You can schedule that X-ray appointment that you are dreading — right now. You can choose to let the rowdy, unexpected 4th staff meeting topic go much longer than expected. You can proactively Slack the CEO right after his request and ask, “I’d like to know what success looks like for this project.”

These are short-term investments in the now, but more importantly, they are long-term investments in your ability to find signal, stay focused, and act thoughtfully when disaster strikes.

Two Minutes and Forty Nine Seconds

On January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia, and roughly one minute after take-off, the plane hit a flock of Canada geese, which disabled both engines. The time from when a flock of Canadian geese struck US Airways Flight 1549 to when the plane successfully made an unpowered ditch in the Hudson River was two minutes and forty-nine seconds. For the crew and passengers on that plane, that was the longest two minutes and forty-nine seconds of their lives. To everyone else, it’s just under three minutes. You’ve likely spent more time reading this article.

The now-famous captain of that flight, Chelsea “Sully” Sullenberger, said, “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Disaster strikes unexpectedly. It’s unfamiliar. Its magnitude is hard to fathom. You don’t know what information you need, nor how quickly. Your irrational intuition is to freeze and pray for the danger to pass, which usually means additional disaster.

Find signal, stay focused, and act thoughtfully. It reads like common sense right now, but that’s because you’re reading this in a coffee shop. The biggest disaster currently facing you is the slight chance you spill that flat white on your notebook.

I’ve listened to the cockpit recordings of flight 1549, I’ve watched the interviews, and I’ve seen the movie. What struck me was the captain’s calm response to impending doom. My impression is that he is a human, but my experience is that the habits and skills he used to save those lives are ones you practice every day when the stakes are far lower.

I went back the next day to the Hudson. The plane on a crane was being moved to a barge. Surreal to see a machine meant to fly hanging from a crane. At this point, little was known of what actually happened on the flight except that everyone had survived, and it appeared it was because a competent leader had acted calmly and thoughtfully when it mattered most.