In aviation this is what Crew Resource Management is about, and in particular, how to make sure the monitoring pilot, who may be the least experienced one, can effectively supervise and review the actions of the other. Many crashes were the result of copilots' fear of speaking up.
Business life could learn from this. The person in charge is not a king, they're simply the person tasked with making decisions. There is nothing scandalous in having another person evaluate those decisions against a set of principles or common sense, and speaking up when something doesn't feel right.
Better that than crashing into a mountain.
> Better that than crashing into a mountain.
Quite literally: https://youtu.be/kamyxB-yKrc?t=1479
Or rolling off a cliff: https://youtu.be/0ga8UFy1M04?t=742
That story in Gladwell about the (IIRC) Korean Air having to switch cockpit languages to English in order to escape the intrinsic layers of deference built into the language was hardcore. They were going to get delisted in Canada if they didn't do it.
Yeah, better than crashing into a mountain. That cockpit voice recording was really chilling. Gladwell gets a lot of flack, but he's told some interesting stories.
And your further point about businesses needing it too should be expanded to organizations of all kinds. This is a human problem, which means it's an ego problem, on both sides.
He recently did a mea culpa about the tipping point stuff. Glad he did.
I really, really disliked Gladwell. And yet Pushkin (his podcast network) carries some of the best stuff ever (Jill Lepore). And I found I was agreeing with a lot of Gladwell's (and Michael Lewis') overall "punching up" worldview. So I was having trouble reconciliing my two views of him.
As we've seen with Lewis' recent hagiography for that crypto freak: people are just people, they make mistakes, everyone's got blind spots, we don't have to agree on everything to learn from each other.
> Gladwell gets a lot of flack, but he's told some interesting stories.
Isn't the flack he's getting due to exactly that, that his stories would be interesting if true but often aren't?
I haven't followed stories about him, but I doubt that all or even most of his stories were made up. I mean, the Korean Air (IIRC) one can't have been fudged, right?
Even kings (nominally) have advisors and some level of contact with the people they rule over; they aren't expected to just make decisions from an empty room with exactly no room for being swayed. In theory, a good king is like that. A bad king, and similarly a bad business leader, shouldn't be used as exemplars though.
It’s fascinating how resistant pretty much every industry is to taking lessons from aviation, considering how much empirical evidence there is compared to almost every other management paradigm, which basically amounts to “just trust me bro”.
It particularly shocked me working in shipping where the lessons can be implemented pretty much without modification since it’s all the same work except they move in 2 rather than 3 dimensions.
The difference is how measurable the consequences are. In aviation when there's a screw up people die right then and there. People dying is a very hard to game metric, and it provides a very strong incentive.
The consequences of bad management in a software project on the other hand are much more nebulous. And nobody died as a direct consequence of some manager being a jerk… oh wait, I'm sure some did (committed suicide or gone postal), but it's easy to just blame the worker instead of the working place.
It’s not that. MV Sewol killed 304, many of them schoolchildren. The captain was put away for life, and rightfully so, but it’s not an incentive to do much else.
For some reason only air crashes seem to make any lasting impressions.