When on the fly, we need airmanship
TURBULENT TIMES CALL FOR LEADERS WHO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX SITUATIONS AND TAKE CALCULATED RISKS
Iwas walking along the Kalk Bay pier in search of a piece of fish, but I was late, there wasn’t much left. I stopped to watch a couple of wiry men repairing an old, but forever solid, fishing boat.
The one guy was clearing old layers of paint with an angle grinder. It was poetry in motion. He was such an accomplished expert at the task, the dangerous angle grinder was like a feather in his accustomed one hand (cigarette in the other) as he went about methodically, evenly, perfectly, removing the old and preparing the surface for the new. He knows what he is doing. He is an expert.
An article in the New York Times sets out an extraordinary analysis of what William Langewiesche thinks caused the Boeing 737 Max crashes.
He describes the experience of many pilots in fast-growing aviation regions as “scripted, bounded by checklists and cockpit mandates and dependent on autopilots”, but lacking in airmanship — a deep understanding of all things flying. It is to this lack of airmanship that the writer attributes the 737 Max crashes.
This analysis has so many applications beyond the field of aviation, in sport, business, government, parenthood — all forms of leadership.
Leadership is incapable of complete definition. It can’t be taught in a classroom. It can’t be replicated by a machine. It can be proven, but not pre-tested. There is no summary, no questionnaire to filter its essence, to find it or prove its absence.
Leadership, like intelligence, is born in circumstances unimaginable, at extremes not found in the manual. Intelligence is discovered in original spaces, where no reference works have value. It is futile to seek out leaders by process, filter, list or examination, particularly when looking for someone to fix something that is broken.
In business, it is trivial to find someone to take the wheel of an already steady ship. In fact, it is the successive appointments of the old guard, in a changing world, that heaps up the legacy baggage that finally brings about their demise. Old captains serve an invaluable purpose in the cockpit, but that doesn’t mean they have to fly the plane.
Technical competence, evidence of training or education, or even old industry experience may be necessary prequalifiers, but they’re not tests of leadership. What you’ve been taught, or what you have learnt, are at best subsets of what you know often defining what you don’t know.
Machines can’t lead. Computers don’t “play” chess. They don’t think. They work through logical alternatives within the rules of the game, move, and then anticipate the countermove and the next moves, and so on, assuming the opponent will do likewise. They are worthy opponents because they work through the iterations fast, without getting bored or caring emotionally. We care. People lead and think — machines assist.
Rules don’t make leaders. In fact, rules are most needed in the absence of leadership. Rules are not a substitute for common cause. If you find a society, or a business, or a government fixated on the rules of their ecosystem you will more often find the wrong people being controlled, not the right people empowered. Everything ends up in court. Policy is different to rules. Purpose is. Predisposition is not policy, it’s a rule.
If you find actual leadership in a position of appointed leadership, for goodness sake don’t contain it. Embrace it, enable it, follow it.
Leadership is not crowdfunded. Leaders create outcomes that attract consensus, not campaigns.
In times of required change, those responsible for getting us to where we find ourselves today cannot be charged with plotting tomorrow’s course.
Leaders needn’t be popular, but they do need to bring everyone along. Generals without soldiers don’t win wars. Soldiers need to be led, but generals need to be informed. Leaders don’t walk among their people to be polite, they do it on purpose, they want to, feel it.
Leaders take calculated risks, they aren’t reckless, they’re just determined. Once they’ve distilled the essence of the facts of the situation they know what to do, it is “in their blood”, it defines them.
Calculated risk taking requires the highest order of understanding of complex, difficult circumstances, as are not found in textbooks. Solutions, while they need to comply with policies and rules will not be determined by routine or process or algorithm.
We need airmanship now more than ever. The skies are turbulent, and when flying, you can’t stall, let alone stand still.