In a Life-or-Death Crisis, Humility Is Everything | Hacker News Reader

In a Life-or-Death Crisis, Humility Is Everything

wsj.com

79 pointsjkuria23 comments

This is a weak article on an important subject. In the aviation community, there's much talk about "crew resource management".[1] This is about how to avoid disasters produced by overly authoritarian captains. There are at least four well known crashes like that.

There's an old tradition in the US Army that, when officers are discussing a course of action, the most junior officer speaks first. This is to avoid echoing the senior officer despite a big problem with the plan.[2] The Army routinely does an After Action Review after doing something, to go over what went right, what went wrong, and what needs to change. If you don't do that, you make the same mistake twice.

[1] https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/what-happened-to-crew-r...

[2] https://verasage.com/blog/after_action_review_the_army_way/

NB: Versage.com is offline.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151004225940/https://verasage....

Interesting about the army officer. I never knew that one.

It looks to me like the article doesn't clearly argue that humility is everything, but perhaps a fourth of everything:

> Humility isn’t a byproduct of heroism, it’s a precondition. Modest people achieve miracles under pressure because they’re far more likely to possess four major qualities that pay dividends in a crisis.

Which are enumerated: Expertise, Composure, Collaboration, Confidence.

Of these, the article discusses Collaboration in terms of humility, but not the other three.

For example, why would a ``modest'' person be ``far more likely to possess'' Confidence (``believing something so unequivocally that it becomes contagious'')?

Confidence based upon comparison to others does not result in modesty. Confidence based upon continual self-work via the search for an aesthetics of existence creates modesty and a necessary humility in order to go a piece of the way with other ways of being in order to sort out what works in each context.

Perhaps a lack of hubris creates an unshakeable belief rather than a projected / maintained belief built on assertion and bluster that gets questioned when things start going wrong?

Expertise - Because you're more likely to know when you don't know.

Composure - Because you know things will go wrong and that you can't fix everything, you focus less on self-blame.

Collaboration - Because you don't necessarily know best, you don't bully others.

Confidence - Because you know yourself without exaggeration, you can be confident when it's deserved.

It's more really about not having the wrong kind of confidence, but rather the one gained by study and example (the article seems to instead equate 'Confidence' with 'charismatic leadership', but I don't agree that's the best style of leadership for most occasions).

The article does a poor job of explaining how truly incredibly the flight crew of United Airlines Flight 232 performed under crisis; I watched a talk[1] by Nickolas Means recently that goes deeper into the events of that day and the lessons learned. Wikipedia also has a good summary of the NTSB accident report[3].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=099cHWSbAL8

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

3: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

I think the connection between humility and ability to foster cooperation is undeniable. Blow hards with big egos can't successfully pull that off.

You might disagree with some of the framing, but there are undeniable lessons to be learned.

The article extrapolates leadership traits from extreme and rare emergencies. In my experience these qualities work when error or poor team work will lead to death or harm of another person (say combat, trauma surgery, or aviation). They don’t apply as well to business or politics.

I would add one important thing: it does not apply to business and politics when you want self serving or short term results. Otherwise, I would argue that it still applies. This is what Jim Collins found with his colleagues in research about exceptional CEOs, and put in book "Good to great"

Interesting ideas in that article but doesn't seem quite right. In case of Sullenberger, the transcript below tells a more complex story, he immediately took over control of the stricken aircraft, not a lot of humility here:

"15:27:07 HOT-1 after takeoff checklist complete. 15:27:10.4 HOT-1 birds. 15:27:11 HOT-2 whoa. 15:27:11.4 CAM [sound of thump/thud(s) followed by shuddering sound] 15:27:12 HOT-2 oh #. 15:27:13 HOT-1 oh yeah. 15:27:13 CAM [sound similar to decrease in engine noise/frequency begins] 15:27:14 HOT-2 uh oh. 15:27:15 HOT-1 we got one rol- both of 'em rolling back. 15:27:18 CAM [rumbling sound begins and continues until approximately 15:28:08] 15:27:18.5 HOT-1 ignition, start. 15:27:21.3 HOT-1 I'm starting the APU. 15:27:22.4 FWC [sound of single chime] 15:27:23.2 HOT-1 my aircraft. 15:27:24 HOT-2 your aircraft. 15:27:24.4 FWC [sound of single chime] 15:27:25 CAM [sound similar to electrical noise from engine igniters begins] 15:27:26.5 FWC priority left. [auto callout from the FWC. this occurs when the sidestick priority button is activated on the Captain's sidestick] " https://www.tailstrike.com/150109.htm

I don't get what that transcript is supposed to show. It's mostly "uh oh"'s and descriptions of sounds to me. Care to explain?

Not OC, but it seems like there was barely any communication at all until he decided to take control of the plane, and he just said "my aircraft" to ask for control.

For every one of these examples, one could provide counterexamples: Gen Patton was anything but humble, and known for his flamboyance and show-boating. But he was the general the US military relied on during the battle of the bulge crisis during WW2. Gen. MacArthur was similarly not well known for humility.

This isn't math where one counter-example totally disproves a theorem. People are just 'far more likely' (as per the article's words) to have these traits and perform well under pressure for the best outcome.

Actually, not just one counter-example, there are several: Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill, Lee Iacocca - and many many others in Business, Politics or Military, weren't exactly paragons of modesty. On the contrary, they were often bombastic and very arrogant. But they all projected a sense of competence, self-confidence and calm and imbued their team with a sense of mission. I think this article makes some fallacious suppositions and arrives at some dubious conclusions IMHO.

I Recently read a biography of Churchhill and he was an interesting combination of humility and arrogance.

His success at leading England during the Second World War largely rested on learning from his numerous past failures. He knew enough at that point to surround himself with people who would stand up to him when he was wrong.

If you look into all the “great” leaders - folks you mentioned - you’ll find plenty of instances where their arrogance led them astray.

Arrogance in and of itself is not what enabled those folks to facilitate great or important work.

Lastly, nobody does it alone.

The article is B.S., written by somebody shilling a book who wants to be as famous as the author of the checklists trope book.

All of the people interviewed denied being heroes, not because of humility, but because they had no choice but to press on and do the job they were paid to do.

In retrospect I think it will be very obvious that the right decision was to never board a flying piece of aluminium in the first place. It leads to nothing of value.

On average we do not have qualities or abilities that are superior to other people. Illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias whereby a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other persons; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

That's known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Stop mentioning this effect. Every time I see it I get a big headache. Maybe I'll write a userscript (some kind of monkey whatever lol) one of these days to regex replace lol.

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