Investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Multiple pilots would try to re-create de Crespigny’s recovery in simulators and would fail every time.
When Qantas Flight 32 finally came to a rest, the lead flight attendant activated the plane’s announcement system.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to Singapore. The local time is five minutes to midday on Thursday 4 November, and I think you’ll agree that was one of the nicest landings we have experienced for a while.” De Crespigny returned home a hero. Today, Qantas Flight 32 is taught in flight schools and psychology classrooms as a case study of how to maintain focus during an emergency. It is cited as one of the prime examples of how mental models can put even the most dire situations within our control.
Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react. The Air France pilots didn’t have strong mental models, and so when tragedy struck, they didn’t know where to focus. De Crespigny and his copilots, in contrast, were telling themselves stories—and testing and revising them—even before they stepped onto the plane, and so they were prepared when disaster occurred.
We may not recognize how situations within our own lives are similar to what happens within an airplane cockpit. But think, for a moment, about the pressures you face each day. If you are in a meeting and the CEO suddenly asks you for an opinion, your mind is likely to snap from passive listening to active involvement—and if you’re not careful, a cognitive tunnel might prompt you to say something you regret. If you are juggling multiple conversations and tasks at once and an important email arrives, reactive thinking can cause you to type a reply before you’ve really thought out what you want to say.
So what’s the solution? If you want to do a better job of paying attention to what really matters, of not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the constant flow of emails and conversations and interruptions that are part of every day, of knowing where to focus and what to ignore, get into the habit of telling yourself stories. Narrate your life as it’s occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you have only minutes to reply, the spotlight inside your head will be ready to shine the right way.
To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.
“You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.”
GOAL SETTING
Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War
In October 1972, one of Israel’s brightest generals, the forty-four-year-old Eli Zeira, was promoted to oversee the Directorate of Military Intelligence, the agency responsible for warning the country’s leaders if its enemies were about to attack.
Zeira’s appointment came half a decade after the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel, in a stunning preemptive strike, had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and other territory from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. That war had demonstrated Israel’s military superiority, more than doubled the amount of territory the country controlled, and had humiliated the nation’s enemies. But it also instilled a deep anxiety among Israeli citizens that the country’s antagonists would eventually seek revenge.
Those fears were legitimate. Since the Six-Day War had ended, generals in Egypt and Syria had repeatedly threatened to reclaim their lost territory, and Arab leaders, in fiery speeches, had vowed to push the Jewish state into the sea. As Israel’s enemies became increasingly bellicose, the nation’s lawmakers sought to calm public worries by asking the military to provide regular forecasts on the likelihood of attack.
However, the assessments provided by the Directorate of Military Intelligence were often contradictory and inconclusive, a mishmash of opinions predicting various levels of risk. Analysts sent conflicting memos and flip-flopped week to week. Some weeks, lawmakers were warned to be on alert, and then nothing would happen. Policy makers were called to meetings and told that a risk might be materializing, but no one could say for sure. Army units were ordered to ready their defenses, and then those orders would be countermanded with no explanation why.
As a result, Israeli politicians and the public became increasingly frustrated. Army reservists constituted 80 percent of the Israeli Defense Forces’ ground troops. There was a constant nervousness that hundreds of thousands of citizens would be required, at a moment’s notice, to abandon their families and rush to the borders. People wanted to know if the risk of another war was real and, if so, how much forewarning they would get.
Eli Zeira was appointed to head the Directorate of Military Intelligence, in part, to address those uncertainties. He was a former paratrooper known for his sophistication and political savvy. He had risen quickly through Israel’s military establishment, even spending a few years as an assistant to Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six-Day War. When Zeira took over the Directorate, he told the Israeli parliament that his job was simple: to provide decision makers with an “estimate as clear and as sharp as possible.” His chief goal, he said, was to make sure alarms were raised only when the risks of war were real.
His method for achieving this clarity was ordering his military analysts to use a strict formula in assessing Arab intentions. He had helped develop these criteria, which became known among intelligence officials as “the concept.” Zeira argued that during the Six-Day War, Israel’s superior airpower, arsenal of long-range missiles, and battlefield dominance had so thoroughly embarrassed their enemies that no country would attack again unless they had an air force powerful enough to protect ground troops from Israeli jets, and Scud missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. Without those two conditions being met, Zeira said, the threats of Arab leaders were nothing more than words.
Six months after Zeira assumed his post, the nation had an opportunity to test his concept. In the spring of 1973, large numbers of Egyptian troops began amassing along the Suez Canal, which was the border between Egypt and the Israeli-controlled Sinai Peninsula. Israel’s spies warned that Egypt planned to invade in mid-May.
On April 18, Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, gathered her top advisers in a closed-door meeting. The military chief of staff and the head of the Mossad both said an Egyptian attack was a real possibility and the nation needed to prepare.
Meir turned to Zeira for his assessment. He disagreed with his colleagues, he said. Egypt still didn’t have a powerful air force and possessed no missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. Egypt’s leaders were merely rattling sabers to impress their countrymen. The odds of an invasion, he determined, were “very low.”
Meir ultimately sided with her chief of staff and the Mossad. She ordered the military to make defensive preparations and, over the next month, the army readied itself for war. Soldiers built walls, outposts, and batteries along the hundred-mile-long bank of the Suez Canal. In the Golan Heights, which bordered Syria, platoons launched practice shells and tanks rehearsed battle formations. Millions of dollars were spent and thousands of soldiers were prevented from taking leave. But the attack never materialized. Meir’s government, chagrined at their overreaction, soon reversed their public declarations. In July of that year, Moshe Dayan, then Israel�
��s defense minister, told Time magazine that it was unlikely a war would occur within the next decade. Zeira emerged from the affair, in the words of the historian Abraham Rabinovich, “with his reputation, and his self-confidence, greatly enhanced.
“With alarm bells going off all around him and the nation’s fate at stake, he had coolly maintained throughout the crisis that the probability of war was not only low, but ‘very low,’ ” Rabinovich wrote. “It was [his] task, he would say, to keep the national blood pressure down and not sound alarms unnecessarily. Otherwise, the reserves would be mobilized every couple of months with devastating effect on the economy and on morale.”
By the summer of 1973, Zeira had established himself as one of Israel’s most influential leaders. He had assumed his new job with the goal of reducing needless anxiety, and had demonstrated that a disciplined approach could prevent wasteful second-guessing. The nation had wanted relief from the constant worries of an impending attack, and Zeira had provided it. His ascent to even more powerful positions seemed preordained.
II.
Imagine you have been asked to complete a questionnaire. Your assignment is to rate how strongly you agree or disagree with forty-two statements, including:
I believe orderliness and organization are among the most important characteristics.
I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more.
I like to have friends who are unpredictable.
I prefer interacting with people whose opinions are very different from my own.
My personal space is usually messy and disorganized.
It’s annoying to listen to someone who cannot seem to make up his or her mind.
A team of researchers at the University of Maryland first published this test in 1994, and since then it has become a staple of personality exams. At first glance, the questions seem designed to measure someone’s preference for personal organization and their comfort with alternate viewpoints. And, in fact, researchers have found that this exam helps identify people who are more decisive and self-assured, and that those traits are correlated with general success in life. Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs.
But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality trait known as “the need for cognitive closure,” which psychologists define as “the desire for a confident judgment on an issue, any confident judgment, as compared to confusion and ambiguity.” Most people respond to this exam—which is called “the need for closure scale”—by demonstrating a preference for a mix of order and chaos in their lives. They say they prize orderliness but admit to having messy desks. They say they are annoyed by indecision but also have unreliable friends. However, some people—about 20 percent of test takers, and many of the most accomplished people who have completed the exam—show a higher-than-average preference for personal organization, decisiveness, and predictability. They tend to disdain flighty friends and ambiguous situations. These people have a high emotional need for cognitive closure.
The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. People who have a strong urge for closure are more likely to be self-disciplined and seen as leaders by their peers. An instinct to make a judgment and then stick with it forestalls needless second-guessing and prolonged debate. The best chess players typically display a high need for closure, which helps them focus on a specific problem during stressful moments rather than obsessing over past mistakes. All of us crave closure to some degree, and that’s good, because a basic level of personal organization is a prerequisite for success. What’s more, making a decision and moving on to the next question feels productive. It feels like progress.
But there are risks associated with a high need for closure. When people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision—when they require a sensation of being productive in order to stay calm—they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice. The “need for closure introduces a bias into the judgmental process,” a team of researchers wrote in Political Psychology in 2003. A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation. Individuals with a high need for closure “may display considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity: They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own,” the authors of the need for closure scale, Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster, wrote in 1996.
Put differently, an instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not. When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.
Researchers describe the need for closure as having multiple components. There is the need to “seize” a goal, as well as a separate urge to “freeze” on an objective once it has been selected. Decisive people have an instinct to “seize” on a choice when it meets a minimum threshold of acceptability. This is a useful impulse, because it helps us commit to projects rather than endlessly debating questions or second-guessing ourselves into a state of paralysis.
However, if our urge for closure is too strong, we “freeze” on our goals and yearn to grab that feeling of productivity at the expense of common sense. “Individuals with a high need for cognitive closure may deny, reinterpret or suppress information inconsistent with the preconceptions on which they are ‘frozen,’ ” the Political Psychology researchers wrote. When we’re overly focused on feeling productive, we become blind to details that should give us pause.
It feels good to achieve closure. Sometimes, though, we become unwilling to sacrifice that sensation even when it’s clear we’re making a mistake.
On October 1, 1973, six months after Zeira predicted that the odds of war were “very low”—and five days before Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—a young Israeli intelligence officer named Binyamin Siman-Tov sent his commanders in Tel Aviv a warning: He was receiving reports from the Sinai that large numbers of Egyptian convoys were arriving at night. Egypt’s military was digging up minefields they had installed along the border, making it easier for them to move material across the canal. There were stockpiles of boats and bridge-making supplies on the Egyptian side of the border. It was the largest buildup of equipment that soldiers on the front lines had seen.
Zeira had received a number of reports like this in the preceding week, but they didn’t cause him much concern. Remember the concept, he counseled his lieutenants: Egypt still didn’t have enough planes or missiles to defeat Israel. And besides, Zeira had other things to focus on, most notably the cultural transformation he was pushing through the Directorate of Military Intelligence. In the midst of remaking the military’s approach to threat analysis, Zeira was also ridding his agency of its propensity for endless debate. Henceforth, he had declared, intelligence officers would be evaluated on the clarity of their recommendations. Both Zeira and his chief lieutenant “lacked the patience for long and open discussions and regarded them as ‘bullshit,’ ” the historians Uri Bar-Joseph and Abraham Rabinovich wrote. Zeira would “humiliate officers who, in his opinion, came unprepared for meetings. At least once he was heard to say that those officers who estimated in spring 1973 that a war was likely should not expect promotion.” Though internal debates were tolerated to a point, “once an estimate was formulated everyone was committed to it and no one was allowed to express a different estimate outside the organization.”
The Directorate had to lead by example, Zeira declared. He had been appointed to provide answers, not prolong debates. When one of Zeira’s subordinates, concerned about the latest reports of Egyptian troop movements, asked to mobilize a handful of reservists to help analyze what was going
on, he received a phone call. “Yoel, listen well,” Zeira told the memo writer. “It is intelligence’s job to safeguard the nation’s nerves, not to drive the public crazy.” The request was denied.
On October 2 and 3, 1973, sightings of Egyptian troops increased. Then came word of activity on the border with Syria. Alarmed, the prime minister called another meeting. Zeira’s division, once again, counseled that there was no reason to be concerned: Egypt and Syria had weak air forces; they had no missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. This time, the military experts who had disagreed with Zeira six months earlier followed his lead. “I don’t see a concrete danger in the near future,” one general told the prime minister. Meir was troubled before the meeting, she later recounted in her memoirs, but the intelligence estimate eased her mind. She had chosen the right officials to bring the nation much-needed relief.
Seventy-two hours after Binyamin Siman-Tov submitted his report, Israel’s intelligence analysts learned that the Soviet Union had started an emergency airlift of Soviet advisers and their families out of Syria and Egypt. Intercepted telephone calls among Russian families revealed they had been ordered to hurry to the airport. Aerial photographs showed more tanks, artillery, and air-defense guns massing along the Suez Canal and in the Syrian-controlled portions of the Golan Heights.
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