Collaboration Lessons from Disaster Documentaries and Other “Unexpected” Sources

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

This post is for anyone who has ever asked me for book recommendations on collaboration.

Yesterday, Carmen Medina‘s wrote a wonderful blog post on the television documentary series, Air Disasters. (It’s known as Mayday in Canada.) She shares a number of insights she gathered from the show on human performance, systems design, and leadership in general. For example:

The Importance of Sleep and Good Rest:

Commercial airlines have strict rules about how many hours flight crews can work before they must rest…. These rules reflect hard lessons learned about how poor rest and lack of sleep can degrade the cognitive performance and judgment of pilots…. The aviation industry learned long ago that “people just have to tough it out” is not a useful strategy.

Hierarchy Can Kill You:

Traditionally the captain and the first officer in commercial aviation were in a command and obey-orders relationship. But captains are not infallible and there are several fatal accidents that could have been avoided if the first officer had been listened to. Oftentimes the captain would have had a hard time “hearing” the other view because the first officer actually never verbalized his concern. The respect for hierarchy was so paralyzing that first officers have deferred to wrongheaded captains even when it led to certain death. These types of accidents became so concerning for the aviation industry that airlines instituted mandatory crew resource management procedures that emphasize the importance of collaboration and teamwork in the cockpit.

Who’s Accountable?

As airline crash investigators know, many airplane accidents involve a chain of unlikely events, any one of which would rarely occur. A supervisor decides to pitch in and help his overworked maintenance team by removing a set of screws. The maintenance team isn’t able to finish the job but don’t know to replace the screws. Nevertheless, the plane makes many safe landings and takeoffs until a pilot decides to make an unusually fast descent. The pilot and all the passengers die.

Who exactly is accountable here? Is it the supervisor who tried to be helpful? Or the airline management that under-resourced its maintenance operations? Or the pilot? In many organizations, holding someone “accountable” is the signature move of “strong leaders”. But what often happens is that some unfortunate individual is held to blame for what was a systemic failure of an organization — often driven by complacency, expediency, and/or greed.

These are all really good lessons, all from watching a television show! Of course, it’s a little disingenuous to say that. Carmen was a long-time leader at the CIA with a lifetime of hard-earned experiences. Most of us would not be able to recognize the deeper lessons that Carmen did, much less articulate them so clearly. This is what the best authors do — pull good insights from all kinds of places, some of them unexpected — and package them in a clear and compelling way. Not surprisingly, Carmen is one of those authors.

Still, when it comes to collaboration at least, I find that many people seem to eschew sources like television documentaries or — more dishearteningly — their own experiences for books written by “experts.” You don’t have to have been a CEO at a Fortune 500 company or a business school professor to have had amazing insights and experiences on collaboration. (Honestly, I don’t think many CEOs or business school professors would even make my list of top collaboration practitioners.)

Do you have a family? Friends? Classmates? A partner of any sort, business or life? Are you in a band? Do you play pickup sports or volunteer in your community? If so, I promise you, you already have a lifetime of experiences on which to draw. It’s only a matter of being intentional about sifting through your experiences for insights and trying to practice what you learn. Once you start doing this, you’ll start to recognize deeper lessons from all sorts of places, some of them unexpected. I use television and movie clips all the time to help groups learn how to recognize and navigate power dynamics. For those of you follow this blog, I obviously write a lot about basketball, and athlete podcasts have been a particularly rich source of insights for me for a while now. (My favorites are All the Smoke and The Old Man and the Three.) Over the past few years, I’ve been learning a ton about systems design and collaboration from watching birds and experimenting with bird feeders.

Deeply examining your own experiences and drawing from unexpected sources are much more effective for learning about collaboration than reading a book, and they’re far more fun.

Appreciating What You Have and Aspiring for More

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I keep a list in my notes of fundamental tensions I often experience either professionally, personally, or both. At the top of my list (with a long list of links of examples and other thoughts, including these previous posts.) is the tension between appreciating what you have and aspiring for more.

Today, I added this article about Mac McClung’s ongoing quest to make it in the NBA. McClung has mostly played in the G League (the NBA’s minor league) for the past two years. He’s been a YouTube hit since high school because of his athleticism, and this weekend, he’ll participate in the All-Star Weekend Dunk Contest, which would have been a first for a G-Leaguer, except that he just signed a two-way contract with the Philadelphia 76ers.

He’s played in 30 cities and three countries over the past two years. He’s been called up to the big leagues twice before, both times with the Chicago Bulls, and he’s scored eight total points as an NBA player, including his very first shot attempt. I liked what he said about that experience:

“When it happens, it’s business-like, ‘This is something I expect blah blah blah,’ ” McClung said. “But then you call your mom and she starts crying and you’re like, ‘Oh man, like, this is something I dreamed of my whole life.’ You don’t take it for granted but you got to soak it in. You’re like, ‘Man, I just scored an NBA bucket,’ that’s something the younger me would have been so excited about.”

In my first 15 years in the collaboration field, I spent more time fixating on what I hadn’t achieved than appreciating what I had. I’ve gotten much better about appreciating what I’ve been able to and continue to get to do. I am surrounded by amazing people, whom I love and respect, and who love and respect me back. People continue to pay me to develop and apply my craft, even when I’m not sure I can be helpful. And the experiences! So many great, special experiences. I even appreciate the not-so-great experiences, which feel more like hard-earned wisdom than PTSD.

Getting to this point is partially a result of being intentional and a whole lot of practice. Most of it is probably because I’m middle aged now, and I feel grateful for many things, including just being alive and in relatively good health to boot. I don’t know if I’ve achieved the “perfect” balance between appreciating what I have (professionally) and wanting more, but it feels pretty good overall.

Wes Jackson on Thinking Big

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

From this 2017 interview with Wes Jackson in Modern Farmer:

If you are working on something you can finish in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.

The whole interview is a good read. I started gardening during the pandemic (mostly native plants and some edible annuals), so the concepts Jackson describes (trying to shift our agricultural practices from annuals to perennials) feel more tangible to me than they would have otherwise. I added Jackson’s 1994 book, Becoming Native to This Place, to my reading list.

I first came across this quote while listening to the January episode of Obi Kaufmann and Greg Sarris’s podcast, Place & Purpose, where they had this exchange:

Sarris: And you know, I don’t want to be on my deathbed and have the next generation say to me, “Well, there’s all these problems. What did you do about it?” And be there, and say, “Nothing.” I want to say, “At least I tried.”

Kaufmann: Oh, that’s so inspiring to me, my friend. You know, what was that, what was that thing that, I just read this wonderful thing. Oh! Wes Jackson of The Land Institute says, “If you’re working on something that you plan on finishing in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”

Sarris: And what an ego to think that you’re going to fix something! You know, it’s very freeing, by the way, to realize, “I don’t have to finish this,” or, “I can’t.” It’s very freeing. You’re just kind of like, “Wow, I can give this up!” You know? “Listen Greg, you’re not going to get an A+ on this one, alright? You’re not going to have a million seller. You’re going to have something that will be connected to something else that, if it’s successful and good, it will continue and grow.”

Anchovies Redux

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

A week after things started shutting down because of COVID-19, I learned about the Anchovy Project, Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinki’s project to introduce local anchovies that were only two hours removed from the ocean to the San Francisco food scene. The Anchovy Bar not only survived COVID-19, it’s a hard reservation to get with limited outdoor seating, so I still haven’t been, but I’m looking forward to trying it.

This week, Eater published this fantastic video detailing how the anchovies get from the ocean to the restaurant:

I particularly love how a few people managed to create and improve a supply chain to make all of this possible. It takes a tremendous amount of vision and passion to do this. I doubt the demand for very fresh, local anchovies was very high prior to this project, and so building the supply chain to do this required faith and personal commitment. Now that it exists, demand has gone up and other restaurants are benefiting from their work. The more our attitudes change about seafood, the better it will be for our health and happiness as well as the ocean.

Seaweed Foraging and Kimchi’s American Roots

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim
Chad Campbell records us as we forage for seaweed. Photo by Elissa Rumsey.

I made my NPR debut this morning talking about… seaweed foraging, of all things! Yes, random, I know.

Last year, my partner and I went up to Bodega Bay to visit our friends, Chad and Elissa. On a whim, I decided to see if Forage SF was offering seaweed foraging classes on the Sonoma Coast that weekend. Sure enough, they were! I had long wanted to take this class, but waking up at 4am to make the 90 minute drive from San Francisco deterred me. Since I was going to be there anyway, it felt like the perfect opportunity.

Chad and Elissa, who hail from Virginia, had never heard of seaweed foraging, and asked me lots of questions about it. I realized, to my amusement, that what felt like a perfectly normal thing for me to want to do might feel exotic to others. Going seaweed foraging didn’t feel any different to me than, say, going apple picking. I, like many Koreans, grew up eating seaweed soup and banchan. Furthermore, anyone who eats sushi also eats seaweed, which holds the rolls of rice and fish together, and salted sheets are ubiquitous in the snack aisle of many grocery stores.

I loved the class, which was taught by Heidi Herrmann of Strong Arm Farm. When I saw Chad and Elissa after the class, I gave them some seaweed to taste and gifted them some Turkish Towel, which you can use as an exfoliant for your own personal spa treatment.

Chad and Elissa were back in Bodega Bay this summer, and when my partner and I were making plans to visit them again, they suggested that we go seaweed foraging together! I was thrilled! Even though I’m still a complete novice, I had ventured out with friends a few times since taking the class and felt comfortable guiding others. Plus — as mentioned in the NPR piece — all of the seaweed found on the beach we were visiting was edible (although not necessarily tasty), so I wasn’t worried about killing anybody.

When Chad, who’s a producer at NPR, said he wanted to do a little audio story about our outing, I felt a little less comfortable. I didn’t want to come off as if I knew more than I did, which is very little. Chad assured me that it would be fine, and I trusted his storytelling skills. Coincidentally, when we got to the beach, we discovered that Heidi was there as well teaching another class. That worked out perfectly for the story. Chad hung out with Heidi and her class for a bit, getting good audio clips from someone who knows what she’s talking about, then joined me and Elissa for our own adventures.

I love how the final story turned out. It was amazing to see how Chad was able to transform an hour of raw audio footage into a tight, three minute story, and it’s such a gift to have a pro documenting your fun times together. I’ve heard my recorded voice enough over the years that I’m no longer wigged out by it. Still, I was amused by how excited I sounded about finding Turkish towel. What’s not clear from the story is that it was actually Chad who found it, and the piece he found was a beauty!

At the end of the story, Chad shares a story I tell about kimchi, which was part of a longer, rambling story that didn’t make it into the clip. After I took the class, my friend, Jon, asked me to bring him along the next time I went. Jon and his wife, Linzy, are both nature and food lovers, and it didn’t surprise me that they wanted to go, but it turned out that Jon had other reasons. Jon is part Welsh, and Welsh people eat seaweed! Specifically, Jon wanted to make laverbread, a flat cake made from seaweed paste and oats. A few months later, we managed to find a patch of laver at Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay, which Jon converted into these delicious cakes.

Laverbread (made by Jon Robson) with bacon, eggs, tomatoes, and beans.

I had only eaten seaweed in Asian food, and it never occurred to me that anyone else eats seaweed, which of course is ridiculous. Lots of cultures live by the ocean, and every culture has learned how to take what’s close to them and turn it into something delicious. But in today’s world, everything has gotten homogenized, and so we miss out on wonderful things like laverbread.

Food connects us to place and to each other in beautiful, often surprising ways. Riffing on this got me talking about how global our food systems have always been, and how different cultures have influenced each other in surprising ways. Prior to the 1500s, Korean kimchi was mild, because they had not yet discovered chili peppers, which come from the Americas. Similarly, as Bill Buford explains in his book, Heat, Italian polenta was made of barley and there was no pasta with marinara sauce, because both corn and tomatoes also come from the Americas.

Let me know if you want to go seaweed foraging sometime!