But now, the computers connected to Sentinel found a link: A confidential informant had mentioned someone who fit the description of Kelvin Melton, who had allegedly planned the kidnapping. That informant had also mentioned an apartment in Austell—an apartment that, Sentinel had just revealed, might have received a phone call from one of the kidnappers’ phones.
Someone needed to visit that apartment.
The problem was, this was just one of dozens of leads investigators were chasing. There were former associates of Melton’s to track down, prison visitors to scrutinize, former girlfriends who might be involved. There were too many potential leads, in fact, for agents to pursue them all. The FBI needed to prioritize, and it wasn’t clear that chasing a clue from a year-old conversation was the best use of time.
In recent years, however, as the success of Sentinel had attracted more notice within the bureau, officials had become increasingly committed to using lean and agile techniques throughout the agency. Commanders and field agents had embraced the philosophy that the person closest to a question should be empowered to answer it. FBI director Robert Mueller had launched a series of initiatives—the Strategy Management System, the Leadership Development Program, Strategic Execution Teams—that were designed to spark, as he told Congress in 2013, “a paradigm shift in the FBI’s cultural mindset.” One particular focus was encouraging junior agents to make independent decisions about which leads they should pursue, rather than waiting for orders from superiors. Any agent could chase a clue if they thought something was being overlooked. It was a law enforcement version of pulling the andon cord. “It’s a critical shift,” said Johnson, the FBI chief technology officer. “The people closest to the investigation have to be empowered to make choices about how they spend their time.” Sentinel wasn’t the only influence behind this change, but it accelerated the adoption of an agile philosophy inside the bureau. “The FBI’s basic mindset is agile now,” Fulgham told me. “Sentinel’s success solidified that.”
The investigators on the Janssen case had dozens of leads to choose from. But junior agents were encouraged to make decisions for themselves. So two young investigators decided to visit the apartment the confidential informant had mentioned over a year ago.
When they arrived at the apartment, they learned it was occupied by a woman named Tianna Brooks. She wasn’t home, but her two young children were there, unsupervised. The agents called child protective services, and once the kids had been collected by social workers, the agents began canvassing neighbors, asking where Brooks had gone. No one knew, but one person said Brooks had been visited by two men staying nearby. The agents found those men and questioned them. They said they didn’t know anything about Brooks or any kidnappings.
At 11:33 P.M., a call came in to one of the many phones the FBI had linked to the kidnappers and, as a result, were under surveillance.
“They got my kids!” a woman’s voice said.
The agents in Austell were told about the call, and began questioning their suspects more forcefully. The agents pointed out that the two suspects had recently visited Tianna Brooks. Now, the FBI had intercepted a telephone call of a panicked woman—possibly Brooks herself—saying the FBI had her children.
In other words, the two suspects had recently visited someone who may be linked to a kidnapping.
Was there anything else they wanted to say?
One of them mentioned an apartment in Atlanta.
The agents radioed their colleagues at the kidnapping command center and a few minutes before midnight, SWAT trucks arrived at the Atlanta apartment complex the suspects had mentioned. Officers jumped out of the vehicles and ran past dilapidated buildings. They paused in front of one home and rammed their way through a wrought-iron door. Inside were two men sitting in chairs with guns next to them, caught completely off guard. The room also contained ropes, a shovel, and bottles of bleach. The men had recently used their phones to send texts about how to dispose of a body. “Get bleach and throw it on the walls,” someone had ordered them. “Maybe do it in the closet.”
An officer in riot gear ran into a bedroom and tore open all the doors. Inside the closet, he found Frank Janssen tied to a chair, unconscious, with blood still on his face from where the assailants had pistol-whipped him. He had been missing for six days by then, and was severely dehydrated. The police cut him free and carried him out of the apartment, past where Janssen’s attackers lay on the floor, hands cuffed behind their backs. Janssen was put into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. When his wife saw him, she began sobbing. For almost a week, no one had known if he was alive or dead. And now here he was, with no serious injuries beyond bruises and cuts. He was released two days later with a clean bill of health.
The breakthrough in the Janssen case didn’t occur simply because the bureau’s computer systems connected the dots between his kidnapping and an old, seemingly unrelated interview with a confidential informant. Rather, Janssen was rescued because hundreds of dedicated people worked nonstop to chase dozens of leads, and because an agile culture empowered junior agents to make independent decisions and follow the clues they thought made sense.
“Agents learn to investigate by listening to their guts and learning they can change direction when new evidence appears,” Fulgham told me. “But for those instincts to be unlocked, management has to empower them. There has to be a system in place that makes you trust that you can choose the solution you think is best and that your bosses are committed to supporting you if you take a chance that might not pay off. That’s why agile has been embraced at the bureau. It talks to who they are.”
This, ultimately, is one of the most important lessons of places such as NUMMI and the lean and agile philosophies: Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.
The decentralization of decision making can make anyone into an expert—but if trust doesn’t exist, if employees at NUMMI don’t believe management is committed to them, if programmers at the FBI aren’t trusted to solve problems, if agents aren’t encouraged to follow a hunch without fear of admonishment, organizations lose access to the vast expertise we all carry within our heads. When people are allowed to stop the assembly line, redirect a huge software project, or follow an instinct, they take responsibility for making sure an enterprise will succeed.
A culture of commitment and trust isn’t a magic bullet. It doesn’t guarantee that a product will sell or an idea will bear fruit. But it’s the best bet for making sure the right conditions are in place when a great idea comes along.
That said, there are good reasons companies don’t decentralize authority. There is a powerful logic behind investing power in only a few hands. At NUMMI, a small group of disgruntled workers could have bankrupted the firm by pulling andon cords needlessly. Inside the FBI, a misguided programmer could have built the wrong computer system. An agent might have followed the wrong hunch. But, in the end, the rewards of autonomy and commitment cultures outweigh the costs. The bigger misstep is when there is never an opportunity for an employee to make a mistake.
A few weeks after his rescue, Frank Janssen sent a thank-you letter to the agents who rescued him. “I have never felt a greater feeling of joy, relief, and freedom than that miraculous moment when I heard a firm American soldier’s voice say, ‘Mr. Janssen, we are here to take you home,’ ” he wrote. “Despite the nightmare that I experienced, the fact that I am writing this letter from the comfort of my home is a testament to the many wonderful things that were done by many wonderful people.” It was a calamity that he was kidnapped, Janssen wrote, and a testament to the commitment of the FBI that he was saved.
* * *
> * The Federal Bureau of Investigation was provided with summaries of this chapter. Please see the chapter’s endnotes for the bureau’s responses. The Janssen family did not reply to repeated attempts to seek their comments by telephone and certified mail. Details regarding this case come from court documents, interviews, and other materials specified in the endnotes. At the time of writing, the allegations of criminal activity contained in this chapter had not been adjudicated by a court of law, and thus remain allegations rather than proven facts. Please see the chapter’s endnotes for further details and the responses provided by the attorneys of those implicated in this alleged crime.
DECISION MAKING
Forecasting the Future (and Winning at Poker) with Bayesian Psychology
The dealer looks at Annie Duke and waits for her to say something. There is a pile of chips worth $450,000 in the middle of the table and nine of the world’s best poker players—all men, except for Annie—impatiently waiting for her to bet. It’s the 2004 Tournament of Champions, a televised competition with $2 million to the winner. There is no prize for second place.
The dealer hasn’t put down any communal cards yet, and Annie is holding a pair of tens. Her hand is strong—strong enough that she has already shoved most of her chips into the pot. Now she has to decide if she wants to bet everything. All the other players have folded except for one—Greg Raymer, aka “the FossilMan,” a rotund gentleman from Connecticut who carries pieces of petrified bark in his pockets and wears sunglasses with holographic lizard eyes.
Annie doesn’t know what cards the FossilMan is holding. Until a few seconds ago, based on how things were proceeding, she figured she was going to win this hand. But then the FossilMan pushed everything onto the pot and threw a wrench in Annie’s plans. Has the FossilMan been playing her this whole time? Luring her into bigger and bigger bets while waiting to pounce? Or is he trying to scare her off with a wager so large he thinks she’ll get spooked and walk away?
Everyone is staring at Annie. She has no idea what to do.
She could fold. But that would mean forfeiting the tens of thousands of dollars she’s spent to get to this table, all the progress she’s made over the past nine hours, everything she’s worked so hard to earn.
Or she could match his wager and bet everything. If she loses, she’ll be knocked out of the tournament. If it pays off, though, and she wins this hand, she’ll instantly become the tournament’s frontrunner, a step closer to paying for her kids’ school bills and her mortgage, not to mention her messy divorce and all the uncertainties that give her stomachaches at night.
She looks again at the mountain of chips on the table and feels a pressure rising in her throat. She’s had panic attacks all her life, breakdowns so severe that she used to lock herself inside her apartment and refuse to leave. Twenty years ago, during her sophomore year at Columbia University, she became so anxious she walked into a hospital, begged them to admit her, and didn’t come out for two weeks.
Forty-five seconds pass while Annie tries to figure out what to do. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know I’m taking too long. This is just a really hard decision.”
Annie focuses on her pair of tens. She thinks about what she knows and doesn’t know. What Annie likes about poker are the certainties. The trick to this game is making predictions, imagining alternative futures and then calculating which ones are most likely to come true. Statistics make Annie feel in control. She might not know exactly what’s coming, but she knows the precise likelihoods of being right or wrong. The poker table feels serene.
And now the FossilMan has blown that peacefulness to hell by making a bet that doesn’t match any of the scenarios inside Annie’s head. She has no idea how to gauge what is most likely to occur. She’s frozen.
“I’m really sorry,” she says. “I just need a second more.”
Many afternoons during Annie’s childhood, her mother would sit at the kitchen table with a pack of cigarettes, a glass of scotch, and a deck of cards, and play hand after hand of solitaire until the alcohol was gone and the ashtray was full. Then she would stagger to the couch and fall asleep.
Annie’s father was an English teacher at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, a boarding school for the scions of senators and CEOs. Her family lived in a house attached to one of the dorms and so whenever her parents fought about her mom’s drinking or her father’s lack of money—which they did frequently—Annie was sure her classmates could overhear. She often felt like an outcast at the school, too poor to vacation with the rich kids, too smart to bond with the popular girls, too anxious to be comfortable among the hippies, too interested in math and science for student government. For Annie, the key to surviving amid the shifting tectonics of teenage popularity was learning to forecast. If she could predict which students’ social capital was rising or falling, it was easier to avoid the infighting. If she could predict when her parents were arguing or her mom was drinking, she would know if it was safe to bring classmates home.
“When you have an alcoholic parent, you spend a lot of time thinking about what’s coming,” Annie told me. “You never take for granted that you’ll get dinner or that someone will tell you when to go to bed. You’re always waiting for everything to fall apart.”
After graduation, Annie left for college at Columbia and soon discovered the psychology department. Here, at last, was what she had been looking for. There were classes that reduced human behavior to understandable rules and social formulas; teachers who gave lectures on the different categories of personality and why anxieties emerge; studies about the impact of having an alcoholic parent. She felt like she was starting to understand why she sometimes had panic attacks, why it occasionally felt impossible for her to leave her bed, why she carried this dread that something bad might happen at any time.
Psychology, at that moment, was undergoing a transformation brought on by discoveries in cognitive sciences that were bringing a scientific rigor to understanding behaviors that had long seemed immune to methodical analysis. Psychologists and economists were working together to understand the codes that explain why people do what they do. Some of the most exciting research—work that would eventually win a Nobel Prize—was focused on studying how people make decisions. Why, researchers wondered, do some people decide to have children when the costs, in terms of money and hard work, are so obvious, and the payoffs, such as love and contentment, are so hard to calculate? How do people decide to send their kids to expensive private schools instead of free public ones? Why does someone decide to get married after playing the field for years?
Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future. When we send a child to private school, it is, in part, a bet that money spent today on schooling will yield happiness and opportunities in the future. When we decide to have a baby, we’re forecasting that the joy of becoming a parent will outweigh the cost of sleepless nights. When we choose to get married—though it may seem completely unromantic—we are, at some level, calculating that the benefits of settling down are greater than the opportunity of seeing who else comes along. Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.
What fascinated psychologists and economists was how frequently people managed, in the course of their everyday lives, to choose among various futures without becoming paralyzed by the complexities of each choice. What’s more, it appeared that some people were more skilled than others at envisioning various futures and choosing the best ones for themselves. Why were some people able to make better decisions?
When Annie graduated from college, she enrolled in a PhD program in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and began collecting grants and publications. After five years of hard work and a successful run of papers and awards, with only months to go to her doctorate, she was invited to give a series of “job talks” at several universities. If she performed well, she was practically guaranteed a prestigious professorship.
The night before her first speech at New York University, she took the train to Manhattan. She had been feeling anxious all week. At dinner she began throwing up. She waited an hour, drank a glass of water, and threw up again. She couldn’t turn off her anxiety. She couldn’t stop thinking that she was making a mistake, that she didn’t want to be a professor, that she was only doing all this because it had seemed like the safest, most predictable path. She called NYU to postpone her talk. Her fiancé flew to Manhattan and took her back to Philadelphia, where she checked into a hospital. She was discharged weeks later, but even then her anxiety was like a hot stone in her stomach. She went straight from the hospital to a classroom at Penn where she was supposed to teach and somehow made it through the lecture, so nauseous and jumpy she almost fainted. She couldn’t teach another class, she decided. She couldn’t give her job talks. She couldn’t become a professor.
She shoved her research into the trunk of her car, sent a note to her professors saying that she would be hard to reach for a while, and drove west. Her fiancé had found a house that cost $11,000 outside Billings, Montana. When Annie arrived, she determined that, even at that price, they had paid too much. But by then, she was too exhausted to do anything about it. She put her dissertation materials into the closet and settled onto the couch. Her only goal was to think as little as possible.
A few weeks later, her brother, Howard Lederer, called to invite her to Las Vegas for a vacation. Howard was a professional poker player, and every spring for the past few years, he had flown Annie out to sit by the swimming pool of the Golden Nugget while he played in a tournament. Whenever she got bored, she would wander inside to watch him compete or play a few hands of poker herself. When he called this year, however, Annie said she was too sick to make the trip.
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business Page 17
