This episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast starts with an interesting question (why do airline pilots typically speak in the same way and all sound the same when addressing the passengers?) but then brings in some tangentially interesting concepts towards the end. One of them is what cockpit crews would call ‘techniques and procedures’ (talked about at 27.19):
‘…everything in flying is either technique or procedure…most of flying is procedure including when you’re descending and you call out the altitude at certain points or when you put the gear down you say “gear down”. It’s like you say a specific thing at a certain moment – that’s procedure. Technique is things like “we have to lose altitude” – there’s a number of ways a pilot could do that.’
In aviation procedures are the specified processes that are published in the pilot’s operating handbooks and regulations. There is a set process or checklist which aviation crews need to follow which is the same every time. Techniques however require the judgement of the crew members. There is still a specific objective and there may be guidelines to support good decisions, but there are no strictly prescribed answers or processes.
As I was listening to that it reminded me of some of my leadership work to help shift businesses to more agile ways of working. A key part of enabling an organisation to become more agile is a transition away from a more traditional command and control style of leadership, to one which places far greater emphasis on empowerment and autonomy.
To do this well leaders need to understand the importance of context. Some contexts require procedures – areas where you can’t fail for example because the risks would be too high (like the checklists that characterise the aviation industry). Or where the domain is well understood and the team is very experienced at delivering, so you are effectively dealing with known knowns. The job here is to do it in the same way every time and perhaps even to remove or reduce variances over time.
More complicated challenges however, have more variables and so require a team to use their experience and expertise to find the right solution. Even more complex and/or adaptive challenges require emergent approaches where a team is experimenting or testing to navigate through to a solution. This is technique. In this context a leader that is micro-managing or trying to impose a strict procedure will hamper the team.
In her upcoming Firestarters episode (watch this space) Alison Orsi, former EMEA CMO at IBM, uses a lovely analogy to bring this to life, based on the idea of leadership being like traffic flow. When you’re seeking to control, she says, it’s a set of traffic lights – red, amber and green. But you can also control traffic flow with roundabouts. Here you need to establish some rules of the road (when to give way, the direction to go round the roundabout, which lane to use, indicating to show that you’re turning) but then the traffic flow can look after itself. In the same way, to truly empower a team to experiment and learn fast leaders need to set a team up for success with a clear understanding of the rules of road (for example the guardrails within which they can try new things out), and the confidence and competence to support good decision-making.
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Photo by Andrés Dallimonti on Unsplash
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