Hi there,
How do you make decisions when it is a matter of life and death?
Sometimes in space, you get a call from a third-grade classroom that wants to see what it looks like to go to the bathroom in zero gravity. Other times, you get a call from mission control saying there’s a hole the size of a golf ball in a heat shield and you might burn up on reentry. I got that call a day or so into commanding my first and only space shuttle mission. A similar issue had killed seven of my colleagues on Columbia a few years earlier.
We could do a spacewalk to try to repair the heat shield, but spacewalks are extremely risky on their own, and there was always a danger we could just damage the heat shield more while trying to fix it. But if we left the hole as it was, the heat of reentry might tear the space shuttle apart. As commander, I had a lot of say in what our approach was going to be.
It would have been tempting to make a quick decision on my own, but over the years I’ve spent leading and following, I’ve learned that the best decisions aren’t made that way. Instead, I found a good time to take each crew member aside one-by-one, in private. I kept a picture of the heat shield damage and a printout of some analysis from the ground in my back pocket so I’d be able to take advantage of a quiet moment. I made sure I spoke to each of my crew members individually to get their honest opinions. I took this to such an extreme that I asked everyone I could. I even asked the astronaut and Russian cosmonauts who weren’t coming back with us on Endeavour.
Why not call a meeting? Why not make a decision together as a group? Well, I’ve seen what can happen when people try to make decisions in groups. One person will offer an opinion, and if that person is knowledgeable or well-respected, everyone else might go along with what they said. Groupthink sets in. People aren’t even conscious of doing this sometimes. It’s something we do as a social species to get along, and it’s often a useful instinct. But in a case like this, it could be deadly.
There’s a sign on the wall in a meeting room at NASA, “None of us is as dumb as all of us,” and it’s a lesson NASA had to learn the hard way. It’s part of what went wrong with the Columbia accident and with Challenger before it. People who raise concerns were silenced because group think had taken over.
– Scott Kelly, a former military fighter pilot and test pilot, an engineer, a retired astronaut, and a retired US Navy captain.
Here we go!!
Decision Making
There is a stage in our lives where we make temporal decisions, not in sacrifice of the dream, but for the sake of [luxury] survivorship, or as a rest stop for a dream that is yet to be coherent.
Students and practitioners of art often find themselves in this situation due to the very nature of art. Let me explain.
In the industrial economy, the pattern is very simple. “Follow the steps and you’ll get the outcome the system promised you.” And since “most frustration and unhappiness in life come from not respecting the rules of whatever ‘game’ you’re a participant of” we follow the recipe. We will call this an outcome-based pattern.
Life’s most important work contains a secret ingredient – ‘something that not just anyone can produce, something that might now work but that might be worth pursuing. It’s often called “art”.
Now here is the tricky bit when it comes to decision making. Art can put you in a very compromising situation.
In its very definition, art is the act of doing something that might not work, simply because it’s a generous thing to do. Art is the work we do where there is no right answer – and yet the journey is worth the effort.
If you can’t replicate the work and get the same outcome, then it’s not science.
If you can replicate the work and get the same outcome, it’s not art.
–Seth Godin.
It is through exploring this premise that I finally fully understood Steve Job’s:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
What he was referring to was the “art.”
Arts inherent difficulty is in its “self-anointing” intuitive nature. It is first a bet on self, without regard for today’s outcome. And second, a bet on our ability to translate the esoteric to an industrial economy language.
This is where we make a lot of mistakes. How do we remain artistic and in tune with the world?
It’s either we do it out of the generosity of our own heart. And expect no pay. That’s the less desirable route. Or we do the work, out of our own generosity and expect pay. If the latter, then there is the meeting of the two worlds.
![Eclipse Pictures [HD] | Download Free Images on Unsplash](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb5bf26cf-b079-4d40-9896-46c22b659c20_1000x661.jpeg)
What determines the success of an artist in an outcome-based world is their coherency and legibility skills for the abstract. And one language that the industrial world understands is measurement.
Measurement replaces intuition which is often infallible.
Measurability simply asks, “If ____ happens, then we’ll do ____.” The metrics then help us to create the right incentives to improve. To build a repeatable model. And to build a great company.
Next week we’ll look into how the measurement becomes a problematic substitute for intuition through the “Goodhart’s Law” lens and possible solutions around this problem when in the conductor phase.✓
Best Stuff I Read
Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a process.
Amateurs think in absolutes. Professionals think in probabilities.
Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand where they have an edge.
Amateurs focus on the next quarter. Professionals focus on the next decade.
Amateurs make decisions in committees so there is no one person responsible if things go wrong. Professionals make decisions as individuals and accept responsibility.
Amateurs show up inconsistently. Professionals show up every day.
Amateurs think the world should work the way they want it to. Professionals realize that they have to work with the world as they find it.
Amateurs go with the first idea that comes into their head. Professionals realize the first idea is rarely the best idea.
2. Personality
“The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.”– Alain de Botton.
This quote resembles another my memory flickerly remembers as – Our personality is defined by what we allow others to get away with.
Listening To
If the Earth was flat, wouldn’t the edge be the most popular tourist attraction on Earth? I would just go set up a taco truck and make a billion dollars with my edge-of-the-Earth tacos.
Scott Kelly shares Lessons Learned from 500+ Days in Space, Life-Changing Books, and The Art of Making Hard Choices
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Until next Saturday, have a happy weekend.
Solomon Muigai.