Something else the superstars had in common is they were disproportionately drawn to assignments that were in their early stages. This was surprising, because joining a project in its infancy is risky. New ideas often fail, no matter how smart or well executed. The safest bet is signing on to a project that is well under way.
However, the beginning of a project is also more information rich. By joining fledgling initiatives, the superstars were cc’d on emails they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. They learned which junior executives were smart and picked up new ideas from their younger colleagues. They were exposed to emerging markets and the lessons of the digital economy earlier than other executives. What’s more, the superstars could later claim ownership of an innovation simply by being in the room when it was born, rather than fighting paternity battles once it was deemed a success.
Finally, the superstars also shared a particular behavior, almost an intellectual and conversational tic: They loved to generate theories—lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees. They were somewhat obsessive, in fact, about trying to explain the world to themselves and their colleagues as they went about their days.
The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go. They came up with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them. They told anecdotes about past conversations and dreamed up far-fetched expansion plans. They were building mental models at a near constant rate.
“A lot of these people will come up with explanation after explanation about what they just saw,” said Marshall Van Alstyne, one of the MIT researchers. “They’ll reconstruct a conversation right in front of you, analyzing it piece by piece. And then they’ll ask you to challenge them on their take. They’re constantly trying to figure out how information fits together.”
The MIT researchers eventually calculated that getting cc’d on those early information-rich emails and hashing out those mental models earned the superstars an extra $10,000 a year, on average, in bonuses. The superstars took on only five projects at once—but they outperformed their colleagues because they had more productive methods of thinking.
Researchers have found similar results in dozens of other studies. People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades. Moreover, experiments show that anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These storytelling moments can be as small as trying to envision a coming meeting while driving to work—forcing yourself to imagine how the meeting will start, what points you will raise if the boss asks for comments, what objections your coworkers are likely to bring up—or they can be as big as a nurse telling herself stories about what infants ought to look like as she walks through a NICU.
If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.
Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.”
III.
One year after Air France Flight 447 disappeared into the ocean, another Airbus—this one part of Qantas Airways—taxied onto a runway in Singapore, requested permission to begin the eight-hour flight to Sydney, and lifted into the bright morning sky.
The Qantas plane flying that day had the same auto-flight systems as the Air France airplane that had crashed into the sea. But the pilots were very different. Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use.
“I want us to envision the first thing we’ll do if there’s a problem,” he told his copilots as they rode in a van from the Fairmont hotel to Singapore Changi Airport. “Imagine there’s an engine failure. Where’s the first place you’ll look?” The pilots took turns describing where they would turn their eyes. De Crespigny conducted this same conversation prior to every flight. His copilots knew to expect it. He quizzed them on what screens they would stare at during an emergency, where their hands would go if an alarm sounded, whether they would turn their heads to the left or stare straight ahead. “The reality of a modern aircraft is that it’s a quarter million sensors and computers that sometimes can’t tell the difference between garbage and good sense,” de Crespigny later told me. He’s a brusque Australian, a cross between Crocodile Dundee and General Patton. “That’s why we have human pilots. It’s our job to think about what might happen, instead of what is.”
After the crew’s visualization session, de Crespigny laid down some rules. “Everyone has a responsibility to tell me if you disagree with my decisions or think I’m missing anything.”
“Mark,” he said, gesturing to a copilot, “if you see everyone looking down, I want you to look up. If we’re all looking up, you look down. We’ll all probably make at least one mistake this flight. You’re each responsible for catching them.”
Four hundred and forty passengers were preparing to board the plane when the pilots entered the cockpit. De Crespigny, like all Qantas aviators, was required to undergo a yearly review of his flying skills, and so, on that day, there were two extra pilots in the cockpit, observers drawn from the airline’s most experienced ranks. The review wasn’t perfunctory. If de Crespigny stumbled, it could trigger his early retirement.
As the pilots took their seats, one of the observers sat near the center of the cockpit, where standard operating procedure usually positioned the second officer. De Crespigny frowned. He had expected the observer to sit off to the side, out of the way. He had a picture in his mind of how his cockpit ought to be arranged.
De Crespigny faced the evaluator. “Where do you intend to sit?” he asked.
“In this seat between you and Matt,” the observer said.
“I’ve got a problem with that,” de Crespigny said. “You’re inhibiting my crew.”
The cockpit went silent. This kind of confrontation was not supposed to happen between a captain and the observers.
“Rich, I can’t see you if I sit in Mark’s seat,” the observer said. “How can I check you?”
“That’s your problem,” de Crespigny replied. “I want my crew together and I want Mark in your seat.”
“Richard, you’re being unreasonable,” the second observer said.
“I have a flight to command and I want my crew operating properly,” said de Crespigny.
“Look, Richard,” replied the evaluator, “if it helps, I promise I’ll be the second officer if I have to be.”
De Crespign
y paused. He wanted to show his crew they could question his decisions. He wanted them to know he was paying close attention to what they had to say and was sensitive to what they thought. Just as teams at Google and Saturday Night Live need to be able to critique one another without fear of punishment, de Crespigny wanted his crew to see that he encouraged them to disagree.
“Fantastic,” de Crespigny said to the evaluator. (“Once he said he would be the second officer, it fit into the plan I had in my mind,” de Crespigny later told me.) Inside the cockpit, de Crespigny turned back to the controls and began moving Qantas Flight 32 away from the gate.
The plane sped down the runway and lifted into the air. At 2,000 feet, de Crespigny activated the plane’s autopilot. The sky was cloudless, the conditions perfect.
At 7,400 feet, as de Crespigny was about to order the first officer to switch off the cabin’s seatbelt sign, he heard a boom. It was probably just a surge of high-pressure air moving through the engine, he thought. Then there was another, even louder crash, followed by what sounded like thousands of marbles being thrown against the hull.
A red alarm flashed on de Crespigny’s instrument panel and a siren blared in the cockpit. Investigators would later determine that an oil fire inside one of the left jets had caused a massive turbine disk to detach from the drive shaft, shear into three pieces, and shoot outward, shattering the engine. Two of the larger fragments from that explosion punched holes in the left wing, one of them large enough for a man to fit through. Hundreds of smaller shards, exploding like a cluster bomb, cut through electrical wires, fuel hoses, a fuel tank, and hydraulic pumps. The underside of the wing looked as though it had been machine-gunned.
Long strips of metal were bending off the left wing and whipping in the air. The plane began to shake. De Crespigny reached over to decrease the aircraft’s speed, the standard reaction for an emergency of this kind, but when he pushed a button, the auto-thrust didn’t respond. Alarms started popping up on his computer display. Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four. The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan. The damage would later be described as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation.
De Crespigny radioed Singapore air traffic control. “QF32, engine two appears failed,” he said. “Heading 150, maintaining 7,400 feet, we’ll keep you informed and will get back to you in five minutes.”
Less than ten seconds had passed since the first boom. De Crespigny cut power to the left wing and began anti-fire protocols. The plane stopped vibrating for a moment. Inside the cockpit, alarms were blaring. The pilots were quiet.
In the cabin, panicked passengers rushed to their windows and pointed at the screens embedded in their seats, which, unfortunately, were broadcasting the view of the damaged wing from a camera mounted in the tail.
The men in the cockpit began responding to prompts from the plane’s computers, speaking to one another in short, efficient sentences. De Crespigny looked at his display and saw that twenty-one of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled. The functioning engines were rapidly deteriorating and the left wing was losing the hydraulics that made steering possible. Within minutes, the plane had become capable of only the smallest changes in thrust and the tiniest navigational adjustments. No one was certain how long it would stay in the air.
One of the copilots looked up from his controls. “I think we should turn back,” he said. Turning the airplane around in order to head back to the airport was risky. But at their current heading, they were getting farther away from the runway with each second.
De Crespigny told the control tower they would return. He began turning the plane in a long, slow arc. “Request climb to ten thousand feet,” de Crespigny radioed to air traffic control.
“No!” his copilots shouted.
They quickly explained their concerns: Climbing higher might strain the engines. The change in altitude could cause fuel to leak faster. They wanted to stay low and keep the plane flat.
De Crespigny had flown more than fifteen thousand hours as a pilot and had practiced disaster scenarios like this in dozens of simulators. He had envisioned moments like this hundreds of times. He had a picture in his mind of how to react, and it involved getting higher so he would have more options. Every instinct told him to gain altitude. But each mental model has gaps. It was his crew’s job to find them.
“Qantas 32,” de Crespigny radioed. “Disregard the climb to 10,000 feet. We will maintain 7,400 feet.”
For the next twenty minutes, the men in the cockpit dealt with an increasing number of alarms and emergencies. The plane’s computer displayed step-by-step solutions to each problem, but as the issues cascaded, the instructions became so overwhelming that no one was certain how to prioritize or where to focus. De Crespigny felt himself getting drawn into a cognitive tunnel. One computer checklist told the pilots to transfer fuel between the wings in order to balance the plane’s weight. “Stop!” de Crespigny shouted as a copilot reached to comply with the screen’s command. “Should we be transferring fuel out of the good right wing into the leaking left wing?” A decade earlier, a flight in Toronto had nearly crashed after the crew had inadvertently dumped their fuel by transferring it into a leaky engine. The pilots agreed to ignore the order.
De Crespigny slumped in his chair. He was trying to visualize the damage, trying to keep track of his dwindling options, trying to construct a mental picture of the plane as he learned more and more about what was wrong. Throughout this crisis, de Crespigny and the other pilots had been building mental models of the Airbus inside their heads. Everywhere they looked, however, they saw a new alarm, another system failing, more blinking lights. De Crespigny took a breath, removed his hand from the controls, and placed them in his lap.
“Let’s keep this simple,” he said to his copilots. “We can’t transfer fuel, we can’t jettison it. The trim tank fuel is stuck in the tail and the transfer tanks are useless.
“So forget the pumps, forget the other eight tanks, forget the total fuel quantity gauge. We need to stop focusing on what’s wrong and start paying attention to what’s still working.”
On cue, one of the copilots began ticking off things that were still operational: Two of eight hydraulic pumps still functioned. The left wing had no electricity, but the right wing had some power. The wheels were intact and the copilots believed de Crespigny could pump the brakes at least once before they failed.
The first airplane de Crespigny had ever flown was a Cessna, one of the single-engine, nearly noncomputerized planes that hobbyists loved. A Cessna is a toy compared to an Airbus, of course, but every plane, at its core, has the same components: a fuel system, flight controls, brakes, landing gear. What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then?
“That moment is really the turning point,” Barbara Burian, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied Qantas Flight 32, told me. “When de Crespigny decided to take control of the mental model he was applying to the situation, rather than react to the computer, it shifted his mindset. Now, he’s deciding where to direct his focus instead of relying on instructions.
“Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,” Burian said. “So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads. That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.”
This shift in mindset—What if I imagine this plane as a Cessna?—is what never occurred, tragically, inside the cockpit of Air France Flight 447. The French pilots never reached for a new mental model to explain what was going on. But when the mental model of the Airbus inside de Crespigny’s head started coming apart under the weight of all the new emergencies, he
decided to replace it with something new. He began imagining the plane as a Cessna, which allowed him to figure out where he should turn his attention and what he could ignore.
De Crespigny asked one of his copilots to calculate how much runway they would need. Inside his head, de Crespigny was envisioning the landing of an oversized Cessna. “Picturing it that way helped me simplify things,” he told me. “I had a picture in my head that contained the basics, and that’s all I needed to land the plane.”
If de Crespigny hit everything just right, the copilot said, the plane would require 3,900 meters of asphalt. The longest runway at Singapore Changi was 4,000 meters. If they overshot, the craft would buckle as its wheels hit the grassy fields and sand dunes.
“Let’s do this,” de Crespigny said.
The plane began descending toward Singapore Changi airport. At two thousand feet, de Crespigny looked up from his panel and saw the runway. At one thousand feet, an alarm inside the cockpit began screaming “SPEED! SPEED! SPEED!” The plane was at risk of stalling. De Crespigny’s eyes flicked between the runway and his speed indicators. He could see the Cessna’s wings in his mind. He delicately nudged the throttle, increasing the speed slightly, and the alarm stopped. He brought the nose up a touch because that’s what the picture in his mind told him to do.
“Confirm the fire services on standby,” a copilot radioed the control tower.
“Affirm, we have the emergency services on standby,” a voice replied.
The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second. The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second. But there were no other options now.
“FIFTY,” a computerized voice said. “FORTY.” De Crespigny pulled back slightly on his stick. “THIRTY…TWENTY.” A metallic voice erupted: “STALL! STALL! STALL!” The Cessna in de Crespigny’s mind was still sailing toward the runway, ready to land as he had hundreds of times before. It wasn’t stalling. He ignored the alarm. The rear wheels of the Airbus touched the ground and de Crespigny pushed his stick forward, forcing the front wheels onto the tarmac. The brakes would work only once, so de Crespigny pushed the pedal as far as it would go and held it down. The first thousand meters of the runway blurred past. At the two-thousand-meter mark, de Crespigny thought they might be slowing. The end of the runway was rushing toward them through the windshield, grass and sand dunes growing bigger the closer they got. As the plane neared the end of the runway, the metal began to groan. The wheels left long skid marks on the asphalt. Then the plane slowed, shuddered, and came to a stop with one hundred meters to spare.
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