CHAPTER 12
Execute
Task saturation is the silent killer to execution.
Now it’s time to strap the jets on and go turn and burn—it’s time to execute. How do fighter pilots execute complex missions? So far they’ve taken the Future Picture and determined strategies or centers of gravity their tactical teams will target. Through the prism of the six steps they have developed a tactical plan. Then they briefed that plan. How, then, do they execute?
Fighter pilots hate surprises. I’ve said that before but I’ll say it again. Between the time they close the door behind them and head out to the jets, and the time they return from their mission, they want the mission to be the brief. They want the mission to be so precise that they’re simply acting out the script, walking through their lines, hitting their cues just like an actor in a well-rehearsed play. If the plan calls for their jets to be lined up on the runway at 0600, then they expect to be lined up at 0600. The head nods go up and down the line at exactly the time hack specified, they tank with the refuelers exactly when they planned to tank, the jets roll in and come off target on time, and they land almost to the minute.
When pilots execute a mission, the brief is the mission. They’re one and the same. In fact, so literally do they fly their brief that few pilots know what to say after a mission other than to say, “It went as planned.” If you watched the news during Desert Storm, what seemed like a lot of camera-shy pilots with microphones thrust in their faces was in fact this very truth playing out on a real stage. Pilots simply don’t know what to say—even to an inquiring reporter—other than to say, “It went as planned.”
Why is this? I knew a young pilot who was graduating from training at the Navy’s flight school at Pensacola. His father was there, and he asked his son what was so different about flight school. The son said: “Studying at college was a hit-or-miss affair. Here, our lives depend on everything we do.” In the execution phase of a mission, pilots’ lives depend on the brief, and they want things to be as close to the brief as humanly possible. They want the mission to feel like the unfolding of a Broadway play. No glitches. No missed lines. No extra scenes. Timing that works, jokes that work, singers that sing when the orchestra starts to play. They want it to “go as planned,” which to the fighter pilot means it went “as briefed.”
Not that things don’t get in the way. They do. The biggest stumbling block to Flawless Execution, no matter how great your plan or how detailed your briefing, is something we call the silent killer—task saturation. Task saturation is too much to do with not enough time, not enough tools, and not enough resources to get the mission accomplished. It can be real or imagined, but in the end it can do the same thing. It can kill you.
I had two friends who both flew perfectly good jets into the ground. Were they good pilots? You bet. What happened? They succumbed to task saturation. I bet if you had tapped them on the shoulder five seconds before ground impact and asked them how things were going in the cockpit, they would have given you a thumbs up and said things were great—it was a piece of cake— and then, boom, they hit the ground. They were so focused on a climbing workload that they lost track of the ground. They died task saturated. And they never knew it.
Unfortunately, most people, or companies for that matter, wear task saturation like a badge of honor. “I’ve been on the road for five days, made nine presentations, wrote up specifications for a new bid in the hotel room, missed lunch, went into the office Saturday, got caught up on my paperwork, and now I’m heading to New York,” said one salesman as he boarded his flight, the stress etched across his face. Or a software programmer: “We’ve been in the office for three days straight, some of us sleeping on the floor, another guy walking around like a zombie with his hand tied to a coffee pot. We have two million lines of code to untangle.”
The surprising thing is that most people are proud that they’re overworked. Perhaps it makes them feel wanted or it makes them feel valuable; they feel that they are a key employee, but in truth it’s not good for the company. What fighter pilots know about task saturation should worry every CEO. As task saturation increases, performance decreases; as task saturation increases, executional errors increase. Task saturation is a silent killer, and in these days of layoffs and asking people to do more with less, task saturation is truly a killer in corporate America. Rather than wear it like a badge of honor, businesses need to deal with it and deal with it now. The correct action to take is to acknowledge that it exists, acknowledge that it creates problems, identify the symptoms, and then work to eliminate it.
Thankfully, there are ways to do just that. The symptoms of task saturation have been studied and are well known. At some point in flight school I was asked to go into a room and write down three things that happen to me when I become task saturated. I had never stopped to think about it until then, but I collected my thoughts and wrote down three things. The following month, I was asked to do it again and again I wrote down the same three things. I had to do it a third time and, guess what—I wrote down the same three things again.
Each of us responds differently to task saturation but measured over time our individual coping mechanisms tend to be the same. We either quit, compartmentalize, or channelize. In any of these “states,” you’re performance is degrading and trouble is brewing.
Let’s look at these three symptoms in detail.
The first coping mechanism is to shut down. You quit. You stop performing. Some people literally go blank. You open your briefcase and look at all the things that need to be done. It’s just too much, so you close the briefcase, fold your hands on top, and stare at the ceiling. Same at your desk. You look at all the papers; it’s too much, so you spin your chair and start staring out the window. Have you ever just said, “It’s time to go take a gym break or go outside and talk to my coworkers,” or “I’ve just had enough. I’m leaving for the day”? That’s a very obvious way of dealing with task saturation and, in moderation, it’s fine. In the extreme, it brings a company to its knees.
Quitters don’t say much, don’t do much, and often leave the office. “Happy” quitters are always at the water cooler, in the bathroom checking their tie, or stopping by your office for a rather pointless chat.
Shutting down is the most harmless of the coping mechanisms. When you leave your desk or amble around the office, people at least know you’re not executing your mission, you’re not on task. You may get a bad reputation for “leaving early” or not pulling your weight, but at least you’re not masking your mental “collapse.”
Compartmentalizers and channelizers, on the other hand, are risky people because they act busy but do little, and kill you while they’re at it. Have you ever let yourself get compartmentalized? Have you ever wanted to put everything in a nice, neat, linear format and arrange things just so, when all the while things are really backing up and pressures outside your compartmentalized little world are rising? Compartmentalizers start making lists, organizing their projects, and shuffling things around as if the list making and the shuffling are akin to doing the work, which they are not. Then they start going top to bottom, ticking off one item after another. They become obsessively linear, first-things-first, one project at a time.
The compartmentalizer operates in a mode that is extremely dangerous to the company. Think about the swirl of activity in a hospital emergency room. Patients are arriving, others are waiting; some patients are getting restless and irritable, and others are stalking the nurses’ station. There are announcements on the PA and doctors moving from one bed to another.
If someone starts to become overloaded, the system is jeopardized. If someone reaches task saturation and compartmentalizes, the environment starts to get dangerous. Why? Because compartmentalizers look busy. They are hard to ferret out. You can’t tell they’re not getting anything done, and that hurts the system. No one knows a problem is building. No one knows a weak link has entered the chain.
Then there are those wh
o channelize. Eighty percent of people that succumb to task saturation cope with it by channelizing, or becoming intensely focused on just one thing. Some people call this target fixation. “Can’t you see I’m busy!” is a common answer when you interrupt a channelizer. I know you’ve been there before. Most of us arrive at the office with more to do than we can possibly get done in a day—and then unplanned events kick in and start to task saturate us. You get a call: “Honey, the kid is sick at school. Can you pick him up?” Then your biggest client calls: “You need to deliver a document to me by one o’clock today.” Ever been there before? Of course you have; we all have. You’re task saturated; you’re sweating this overload of multiple priorities and you start to channelize. What’s the most important thing to accomplish? Get that report out by one o’clock. What do you do? Cell phone; turn it off. Desk telephone; off the hook. Slam the door and tell everybody “No calls!” and dig into the one o’clock deadline.
You dig and dig and dig and put everything into that report, but guess what? No one picked up your sick child.
Another client called with an urgent question and you missed it.
A simple problem flares up into a major problem.
The error chain begins.
Channelizers are easy to spot. They shun eye contact when they take a bathroom break. They wave people off with a flip of the wrist. Their body language says: “Don’t ask.” But channelizers are almost as dangerous as compartmentalizers. In the military, our safety officer has videotape of a heart-wrenching example of channelized attention. A flight of four ground-attack fighters are working over a target at a bombing range. One after the other they come in, the jets jinking down toward the target for a low-level strafing run. Then comes the third of the four pilots. He descends, comes around the foothills, drops into the valley, pops up in altitude to visually acquire the target, rolls over to line up the target, and starts a rapid descent into his dive-bomb pass, the altimeter spinning down closer and closer to the ground. The pilot squeezes the trigger, his guns fire, and boom… the jet crashes into the ground.
Here’s the chain of events: Task saturation triggered channelized attention. The pilot fixated on the target and he flew into the ground. He shut out everything except the target. He forgot to fly his jet. His coping mechanism cost him his life.
We think channelized attention is such a deadly but preventable obstacle to Flawless Execution that we take great pains to illustrate just how insidious it is. To do that, we tell the story of Flight 401.
On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines flight 401 was inbound to Miami International airport. The normal cockpit crew of three pilots was flying the plane. It was wintertime, a crystal clear night; weather was not a factor. As the first officer rolls the L-1011 out on a ten-mile final approach into Miami International he looks to the left and says to the captain: “Captain, let’s put the landing gear down.”
The captain looks at the copilot and says, “Roger”; he reaches up and grabs the gear handle and puts it in the down position. They look for three lights to illuminate on the forward instrument panel, indicating that the right main, the left main, and the nose wheel gear are down and locked and in a safe position to land.
However, on this ill-fated night, only two out of the three green lights illuminate: the right main, the left main, but not the nose wheel light. So the captain says, “We have an emergency procedure checklist for this. Let’s get it out and read it.” The emergency checklist directs the crew to raise the handle up and down to recycle the gear, but, again, they only get two green lights.
Here’s the actual audio transcript pulled off the flight data recorder:
MIAMI APPROACH: “Eastern 401, heavy. Continue approach to 9-left.”
FLIGHT 401: “Continue approach, Roger.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “I’m going to try down [lower the gear handle] one more time.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “You want me to test the lights or not?”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “Yeah, check it.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Watch [inaudible].”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Doug, it could be the light. Could you jiggle the light? It’s got to come out a little and then snap in.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “I’ll put ’em on. Up to 2,000? You want me to fly, Doug?”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “Yeah. What frequency is approach on?”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Twenty-eight-six.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “I’ll talk to him.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “Alright. Approach control, Eastern 401, we’re right over the airport, here, and climbing to 2,000 feet. In fact, we’ve just reached 2,000 feet, and we’ve got to get a green light on our nose gear.”
MIAMI APPROACH: “Eastern 401. Roger. Turn left, heading 3-6-0. Maintain 2,000 [inaudible] left final.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “Left to 3-6-0.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “I think it’s about the red one.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Yeah, I can’t get it from here. I can’t make it pull out, either. We got pressure?”
COCKPIT, FLIGHT ENGINEER: “Yes, sir, all systems.”
COCKPIT, CAPT: “Put the damn thing on autopilot.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Alright.”
COCKPIT, CAPT: [To copilot] “See if you can put that light out. Well, you’ve got to push the switch just a little bit further forward. Now, turn it to the right a little bit. No, I don’t think it’s going to fit. Hey [to the flight engineer], get down there and see if that damn nose wheel’s down.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Okay. You got a handkerchief or something, so I can get a little better grip on this? Anything I can do it with? This damn thing just won’t come out, Doug. If I had a pair of pliers, I could get to it—”
COCKPIT, CAPT. “To hell with it. To hell with this. Go down and see if that red line is lined up down there. Don’t screw around with that twenty-cent piece of light equipment.
TO MIAMI APPROACH: “Eastern 401. I’ll go out west, just a little further, if we can, here, and see if we can get this light to come on.”
MIAMI APPROACH: “Alright.”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “It’s always something. We could have made schedule.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “We can tell if the damn gear is down by looking down at the indicators.
COCKPIT, COPILOT: It’s got to be a faulty light. Doug, this damn thing just won’t come out.”
COCKPIT, CAPT.: “Alright. Just leave it there.”
MIAMI APPROACH: “Eastern 401, how are things coming along out there?”
COCKPIT: “1-8-0.…”
Well, at this point, our first officer, our flying pilot, decides to come up for air and starts flying again. Have you noticed that no one was talking about actually flying this large, complex jumbo jet? Three pilots, and they are all leaning forward, bent down to work on a light bulb. Well, the plane was in trouble but no one knew it. Someone bumped the control yoke (wheel) and disengaged the autopilot and the jet had been in a slow descent. Not that they knew it. They had a light bulb to worry about. The sky was ink black. The water and everglades below were also black. No reference to a horizon. So what does this pilot see? One hundred feet on the altimeter. What does he expect to see? Two thousand feet. He has twelve-seconds to react—always trust your instruments—but he’s so task saturated (along with his two other crew members) that his pilot instincts are long gone and in twelve seconds he, and ninety-nine people aboard that night, die.
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “Hey, we lost some of the altitude here.”
COCKPIT, CAPT: “What?”
COCKPIT, COPILOT: “We’re still at 2,000, right?”
COCKPIT, CAPT: “Hey, what’s happening here?”
And then the plane slams into the Everglades.
CHAPTER 13
Coping Mechanisms and Task Shedding
Never, never leave your wingman.
Everyone reacts differently to task saturation. One CEO admitted to me that when he gets overloaded he stops checking the messages on his cell phone. S
ounds innocent enough except when one message is about an acquisition, another that your car is in the shop, and the third that the union just went out on strike. Not a good way to handle task saturation.
I know another person who is a compulsive list maker. Have you ever seen a nurse in a hospital throw up her hands and say, “I need to organize these charts!”? Instead of doing anything, one CEO starts writing lists. A list for this and a list for that. He’s task saturated. He’s shutting down and doing nothing but doodling!
So what do you do about task saturation? First, hold meetings and explain the coping mechanisms. Tell people about task saturation and the common symptoms—shutting down, compartmentalizing, and channelizing. Describe these symptoms fully and use illustrations from this chapter or from your own life to make the picture as vivid as possible. Then have everyone list the three things they do to cope. More often than not, properly trained people will then recognize task saturation when it starts to hit them and they will adjust as they see themselves reverting to an inappropriate coping mechanism.
Next, try to eliminate task saturation in your workplace. Kill the weeds before they choke the grass. This doesn’t mean lighten the workload but, rather, build into your company standards three simple processes that fighter pilots use to keep task saturation at bay: checklists, cross-checks, and mutual support. They’re easy, so I’ll go through them quickly.
CHECKLISTS
The first tool fighter pilots have to eliminate task saturation is their checklist. As a matter of fact, a checklist is so important to us that we would never dream of flying without one.
I’m sure you’re familiar with checklists, but let me tell you how pilots configure theirs. For them, a checklist is a condensed portion of the flight manual—the standard operating procedures. It’s a memory jogger. It’s based on training, people’s experience, and the standard operating procedures of our company. It’s designed to get pilots pointed in the right direction very quickly by taking an action that pulls them through task saturation.
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