Collaboration Lessons from Disaster Documentaries and Other “Unexpected” Sources

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.

Stripe Is Paying to Remove Carbon from the Sky, Hoping that Others Will Follow

Last year, Stripe shared on their blog their commitment “to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage.”

Their reasoning was straightforward. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions will not be enough to resolve our climate crisis. We almost certainly need to remove carbon dioxide that is already in our atmosphere. The technology to do so is in a classic early stage conundrum. Because it’s so new, it’s both not good enough and too expensive to be viable. However, those who buy early help fund improvements to the technology, which drives the price down, which leads to more customers and investments. Wash, rinse, repeat. All the while, carbon is being removed from the atmosphere.

This is the promise all early stage technology makes. The question is, who’s going to buy early? For carbon removal, Stripe raised its hand, committing to spending at least $1 million a year. Their hope was that other companies would follow suit.

I thought this was awesome, but I wasn’t blown away by the dollar amount. A million dollars isn’t nothing, but Stripe is worth $36 billion.

So I was disappointed to read in this week’s The Atlantic that a million dollars turned out to be a big deal. The article quotes Stripe’s Ryan Orbuch, who said, “We got a positive response from the carbon-removal community, because the field is so starved for capital that a million dollars will raise eyebrows.”

I find this infuriating… and sadly, not surprising. With an estimated $500 billion a year being invested in climate change by companies, governments, and philanthropic foundations, how is it that a million dollars shook up a market that is so clearly necessary right now? My guess is it boils down to two things: Lack of leadership and lack of strategic action. The need to wait for others to make an obvious idea okay before being willing to jump in themselves is very, very strong in most people.

While I find this very sad, Stripe deserves even stronger kudos for recognizing this and doing something about it.

The Uncanny Valley of Leadership

I’m a reasonably responsible voter. I vote pretty much every year, including off-years, and I do my best to educate myself on the issues. I’m lucky to be surrounded by folks who are extremely engaged, and I often “consult” with them on issues or candidates I don’t know well. Sadly, “consult” often means simply voting the way my friends tell me to vote.

Four years ago, disturbed by the direction our country was moving, I took a hard look in the mirror about my own level of civic engagement. Because I was already spending a good amount of my professional time working on national issues, I decided to focus my personal time on local issues. It was an easy decision, because I quickly realized how ignorant I was about what was going on in my own neighborhood, much less the city of San Francisco.

I started attending local meetings (which bear a shocking resemblance to the meetings on Parks and Recreation) and reading up on local issues. I met my Supervisor, whom I had voted for, but whom I had known nothing about. I learned that San Francisco has a $13 billion (!) budget, and that roughly half of this money comes from self-supporting services, such as public transportation (although this has changed dramatically, thanks to the pandemic). It seems like I should have known all this stuff before happily asserting my civic rights, year-after-year, but I was happy to finally start correcting this.

Flash forward to today’s election. About a month ago, I looked at my ballot, and I was troubled to discover that I was no better equipped to make decisions this year than I was in any other year.

For example, there were seven candidates running for Supervisor in my district. I tried to read up on all of them, which helped me narrow the field to three, but didn’t help me beyond that. San Francisco has ranked choice voting, which meant that I could vote for all three (which I did), but it didn’t help me with the order. I ended up voting for the person endorsed by the current Supervisor. I happened to run into her at a neighborhood restaurant (after already voting for her), and she left a good impression, but good impressions — while important — don’t seem like the best criteria for making these kinds of decisions.

In animation, there’s this concept known as the “uncanny valley.” When we see cartoonish versions of people, we are untroubled. We know they are meant to be representative, not realistic depictions of human beings, and we can appreciate them as such. We also react well to perfectly realistic depictions. However, we find depictions that seem almost human-like to be creepy, even revolting. (Think The Polar Express.)

I feel like there’s also an uncanny valley when it comes to assessing leadership. Federal and perhaps even state-level officials are the equivalent to the cartoonish representations of people. There’s no way for us to really know them, so we form opinions based on things that may not actually say much about whether or not they would make competent leaders, such as their opinions on various issues or how likable they seem to be.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are the leaders we actually know — our bosses, for example. We form our opinions of their leadership based on working with them, which seems like an appropriate way to make these kinds of assessments.

How, then, should we judge folks running for Supervisor or our local School Boards? These are folks I might run into at a local coffee shop and could actually have a conversation with if I have concerns or questions. Why is it so hard for me to assess who might be good for these positions? I think it’s because they fall into this uncanny valley of leadership, where they seem accessible, and yet there are aspects of them that seem fundamentally unknowable, and that feels unsettling.

We Don’t All Have to Be Good at Everything, but We Should Value Those Other Things

Last month, Deborah Meehan shared the following reflections on leadership and leadership development:

For example, the assumption of many leadership development programs with a set of leadership competencies is that each participant needs to have all of these competencies. Why? When we lead with others why does each person need to have all of these competencies when they could be distributed within the group that is leading some action?

The weekend before I read Deborah’s post, I had listened to Tim Ferris’s interview with the magician, Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame). The whole interview is really good and worth listening to. But I was particularly struck by Penn’s revelation that he had a terrible visual memory, which you might imagine would be a problem for a magician. How was he able to compensate for this, Ferris asked? Penn’s response:

My compensation is Teller. Teller has a phenomenal visual memory. And if you watch Teller and I work, you can very clearly see that I’m doing a radio show. Every bit that I write, I bring to Teller as me doing voiceover from off stage while stuff happens on stage. And then he moves me onto the stage, moves me as part of the action.

Here’s the re-frame that I would offer for leadership development that I use with my own teams. It’s not important for everyone to be good at everything. But it’s important for everyone to value — truly, deeply value — the different competencies. And it’s hard to truly, deeply value those other competencies unless you’ve had a chance to experience what it’s like with them and what it’s like without them.

When I’m working with new collaboration practitioners in a meeting context, I always make them responsible for logistics and operations. Most collaboration practitioners who come to me are not good at these things, nor do they care to be good at them. They usually want to learn how to be good facilitators, and they think facilitation is all about presence or group dynamics or personal development.

However, when it comes to bringing a group alive, design is much more important than facilitation, and logistics are a critical part of design. When you’re in a poorly lit room with heavy, inadequate quantities of food, your meeting is going to suffer. When your participants have trouble checking into their hotels or are not clear on where the meeting is, your meeting is going to suffer. When you’ve planned a whole module around posters hanging up around the room, only to learn that you’re not allowed to hang things on the wall, your meeting is going to suffer.

Many collaboration practitioners look at this as an opportunity to improvise. Sure, improvisation is an important competency, but why put yourself in this position in the first place when it’s completely unnecessary? The reason most practitioners put themselves in this position is that they don’t like to handle the logistics and they think they can get by without it. And that’s often true. But this logic breaks down as the stakes get higher.

What I try to teach others is to value the things that are in your control so that, in the moment, you can be fully present to the things that you can’t. My end goal isn’t to make every collaboration practitioner good at logistics. My end goal is to have collaboration practitioners value it, so that if they’re not good at it, they recruit people who are, and they learn to work well with them.

Networks and Pickup Basketball

When I read about or listen to others talking about networks, I often find the examples people cite to be too narrow. They’re either Internet-mediated networks (which are interesting) or organizational networks (which are not). I wish that more people would consider things that look like the intersection of the two — networks that look similar to the Internet, but are not primarily mediated by the Internet.

One of my favorite examples of this also happens to be one of my passions: pickup basketball — casual, just-for-fun (but sometimes highly competitive) games that anyone can start or join. Not all games are open, but most of them are. You can find a pickup game pretty much anywhere in the world, and you’ll find that the rules and norms — mostly unwritten — are almost identical, with some common variations. Half court or full? Ones-and-twos or twos-and-threes? Winner takes ball? Win, you’re in?

Still, each game is made up of different people, and as such, has its own culture and practices. Some games are unapologetically meritocratic — as long as you win, you stay on the court. Other games are more inclusive — if you win two games in a row, you sit and let others play. In my game, we stop play when someone falls. There was never any up-front agreement about this. Someone started doing it in the early days, and it was highly appreciated by the older players (i.e. me).

I’ve had many regular pickup games over the years, some of which I’ve started, some of which I’ve joined. In some cases, I accidentally stumbled upon them and just kept showing up. In other cases, people would add me to their mailing lists or online forums.

One of my favorite organizing models was a game a colleague invited me to join in Menlo Park in the early 2000s. We generally played on Tuesdays and Thursdays during lunch. Someone had set up a mailing list, and on the morning of, someone — it could be anyone — would send an email to the list with the number, “1.” That meant they wanted to play. If you were up for joining, you would respond to the list and increment the number. In other words, the next person would respond, “2,” the next would respond, “3,” and so forth. If you hit, “4,” you had enough to play, and the game would officially be on.

I currently play every Sunday morning at Julius Kahn Park in San Francisco, a hidden gem with views of the Bay and the Presidio. We’ve been playing every Sunday for four years. Originally, a few friends and I invited others to come play. After a few sessions, someone started a Facebook group and invited more people that way. Initially, he would set up an event every week. One weekend, he was heading out-of-town. He didn’t tell anyone, but I noticed that he hadn’t set up the event as usual, so I decided to do it. For a while, I kept doing it. Then, I needed to head out-of-town. Sure enough, someone else stepped up and set up the event without anyone asking.

We also have gotten a good number of folks who accidentally came upon the game and kept showing up. Some of them are on the Facebook group, but many are not, not because we’re trying to exclude anyone, but because it’s largely unnecessary at this point. We’re consistent enough that if you show up, we’ll likely be there.

How is pickup basketball like the Internet?

First, there’s some basic infrastructure — a hard surface, a backboard, a basket, and a ball.

Second, there are protocols. Some of them are formal and unshakeable. For example, on the Internet, there’s the Internet Protocol, the base-level protocol that everything on the Internet uses. With pickup basketball, there are the basic rules of basketball — between 1-5 people per team, dribble with one hand only, once you stop, you have to pass or shoot, whichever team scores more wins, etc.

Some of them are informal and loosely enforced, such as the aforementioned pickup basketball variations. Most of the protocols on the Internet began as RFC’s (Request for Comments) — informal technical specs and design documents. Many — such as HTTP, the basis for the World Wide Web — were widely adopted before ever becoming officially standardized.

Third, they’re both decentralized and open, which leaves a lot of room for experimentation and different kinds of leadership (both good and bad). I’ve already mentioned the different cultures and kinds of organizing you’ll find at different pickup games. Another important form of leadership worth noting is the role the NBA plays. It can’t directly dictate what happens on the thousands of basketball courts around the world. However, its athletes and teams have been very intentional in investing in infrastructure — building and maintaining courts, for example — and for acting as ambassadors. The league as a whole has created many channels via media (both old and new) and on-the-ground work to create more exposure for the game all across the world. That ultimately enables the NBA to do what it does best — inspire people all over the world to watch and play the game.

The NBA doesn’t hold meetings for “representatives” of the pickup game network to try to align around a shared vision or to discuss pickup game governance. It doesn’t do social network analysis to try to demonstrate impact. It articulates its own vision of the game by stewarding and showcasing the best players in the world, it invests in infrastructure so that more people can play, and it invests in visibility so that more people are inspired to play.

Folks who are attempting to professionalize networks could learn a whole lot from pickup basketball.