This book really changed my way of looking at the concept of productivity. I must admit that some of my preconceptions got demolished. One of them was about the people’s capacity in a team. I always thought that if you put the best people in a team , that will always guarantee success. I was wrong. In this book I have found out that it is HOW the team works more important than WHO is in the team.
Also Charles tells us how important it is in a team to feel psychological safety ( that you can speak your mind without the fear of reprimand) and for the leader to give the members control. Duhigg is introducing the term of internal locus of control, which basically means that someone believes that he is in the control of the situation, good or bad. An external locus of control means that you think you are powerless, that the environment or other people are in control. When members of a team have internal locus of control they are more motivated. This is why the places where a boss is overcontrolling never work out on the long term.
There are some very interesting case studies brought by the author in the book. I have read them with the intense voraciousness of my curious mind. The first one is the failure of Flight 447 in 2009 , Air France. All people in this flight died because of the bad judgement of the pilots in charge. Basically they took a series of bad decisions when the facts clearly indicated they should have made a different choice. Why people stick with a bad decision in moments of deep pressure?
Well, we get to MENTAL MODELS and COGNITIVE TUNNELING concepts. Mental automation is a danger that makes you take decisions on autopilot, when you have to toggle between focus and automation you can get cognitive tunneling, a glitch that happens when the brain is forced to abruptly switch from automation to panicked attention. This was the failure of the pilot of Flight 447, he lost his ability to focus in a moment when everything did not go as planned and he took wrong decision after wrong decision. In cognitive tunneling we lose the ability to direct our focus , we latch on to the closest stimulus. With reactive thinking we build habits, the downside is that they can overpower our judgement. We can fight back against these glitches of judgement by creating MENTAL MODELS. How do you do that? By visualizing what you expect to see, engaging in constant forecasting, telling yourself a story of how the world works.
Well it was tragic to read about this story , but what was next really intrigued me to the core. Charles presented us a completely different case, showing how put into a similar situation, a different pilot saved his live and the lives of his passengers by thinking differently. The different approach of De Crespigny, another Airbus pilot, one year after the 447 crashed in the ocean. He conducted with his crew mental models of “what if” before every flight! (“visualization sessions”). When he was the pilot of Qantas Flight 32 , in that day he also had 2 extra pilots scrutinizing him for the usual review. All of the sudden there was an oil fire in the left jet caused a turbine disk to detach and shoot outward, shattering the engine. Imagine this is happening minutes after the plane took off. Engine 2 is on fire. Engine 3 is damaged. Hydraulics, pneumatics, electrycal system = inoperative. As stated in the book the damage would be later described as one of the worst midair mechanical disaster in modern aviation. In that moment of complete disaster De Crespigny applied the mental models. “What if I pilot this plane as Cessna?” he told himself. ( Cessna is a very basic , single engine, non computerized plane). This is how you create a mental model in a new unexpected situation: let’s focus on what works. De Crespigny landed safely in Singapore and investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Multiple pilots would try to recreate de Crespigny’s recovery in simulations and fail everytime. Amazing enough, today Qantas 32 is taught in flight schools and psychology classrooms as a case study of how to maintain focus during an emergency. I would summarize this very shortly: ANTICIPATE WHAT’S NEXT. I don’t encourage overthinking as I know how terrible that can be, but an efficient habit of thinking of multiple future possibilities in a rational manner will most likely put you in an advantage in case your current situation suddenly change 360 degrees. This is important when we think of productivity as nobody can function 100% without the right thinking patterns. So productivity is very connected with they way you think , next to what you do when things don’t go your way. I admit that I have read the story of this heroic pilot in complete awe , and I was left with sheer amazement of how well he reacted. I find it amazing to see how some human minds can cope with extreme stress and yet take the best decisions. I am fascinated to understand how and why. So retain the important of visualization sessions and creating mental models.
The next useful new informations I extracted from this book are about setting goals, probabilistic thinking and Bayesian cognition. It sounds like rocket science so I will simplify and try to present it shortly.
Let’s start with setting goals. We all know how it feels the start of the new year: we suddenly want to do those 1000 things we failed to do the last year and we end up setting so many goals and achive almost none. On the opposite side there are some people who manage to set up goals, achieve and sometimes surpass them. There is a whole nerdy science about SMART goals ( see pg. 122 in the book for that) that I will not get into, but let me say that if you only focus on achievable goals you’re not going to dream big, you will just plateau. The case sudy of japanese engineering of Tokaido Shinkansen in 1964, the world’s first bullet train, shows the importance of STRETCH GOALS. What is a stretch goal? It is a very ambitious aim that makes you think outside of the
box and you have no idea how to get to it. That is right. A crazy ambitious goal. If you do not know how to get there –it's not a stretch target. Duhigg has discovered that is is best to pair a SMART goal with a stretch goal so the audaciousness of the stretch goal won’t scare you. A proximal goal is a smaller ambition. So think of achievable goals as the little breadcrumbs you can feed yourself on while you pursue the bigger crazy better. They give you mental and emotional food to keep you going. So the myth about thinking only about what is achievable is busted. We need to dream of something crazily out of our reach in order to push ourselves to better, smarter, faster.
There is a long story about the famous female poker player Annie Duke which was a joy to read. I will not go into details but if you are interested to see what mental strategies a woman used to become a millionaire when in her youth she was just an anxiety ball, read her story. She talks about probabilistic thinking ( pg. 177 and 179 in the book) and the importance of imagining the future in multiple outcomes. Her story is also about Bayesian cognition or psychology, which is the ability to intuit patterns. Annie Duke won the poker championship because the forced Phil, her opponent, to change his assumptions about her ”she is too scared to bluff” so Annie bluffed a lot just to make him think differently about her and theremore make a different decision. We can develop this Bayesian instinct ( see page 202 on the book).
In the last part of the book you can read about :
-the story of Disney’s Frozen and how to become a creative broker (pg. 223)
-divergent thinking (pg.227)
-how to increase productivity in the creative process (pg. 236)
-the advantage of processing data by hand in schools (pg. 243a) : the idea that you learn better when you interact with the data, turning it into something you can use
-how to absorb data better (pg.265)
I really like the Appendix part of this book as the author became vulnerable, sharing his own struggles with finding motivation to deal with life ( being a good father, husband, author and reporter) and I like how he shows his strategy to become more productive.
I learned a lot from this book and I try to apply some of the principles as we all know that knowledge without action is useless. I highly recommend it to anyone trying to figure a way to become a better version of themselves with everyday struggles.
P.S. I am trying to make a little corner for these book reviews, I started with amateur paper stuck to the wall lol. I will make time to level up my little corner to make it a bit more youtube friendly, it ain't perfect yet I am getting there. I did feel awesome to put there a Victor Hugo's quote which is very dear to my heart. I must also remind myself to check the focus as I often tend to forget 😅
Excellent review. Now I'm looking forward to reading it
Thank you🤗
Good day friend, I just made a post about productivity more precisely organizing, I wish I saw your post earlier am sure the quality would have gone higher, you have a nice post here the flight 447, simply is a display of the disadvantage of building a habit without reviewing them, that glitch then occurs due to lack of improvement in such habit gotten from atomic habits by James Clear.
Oh very nice!