The Biggest Mistake You Can Make in Decision-Making
Regarding Mr. X and American Airlines
After catching wind of the controversy from Daring Fireball, I’ve looked at two of the major opinions in this entire American Airlines and Mr. X debacle.
For those who don’t know what happened, a young designer, Dustin Curtis, wrote a sardonic post about the unintuitive nature of American Airlines’ website and created a mock-up for a better version of their site.
Surprisingly, a member of the American Airlines design team (codenamed Mr. X) actually responded, defending AA rather passionately and described the difficulties of trying to implement change when dealing with issues of huge scale and a sprawling bureaucracy.
An hour after Dustin posted the response, Mr. X was fired.
Ever since, there has been two sides to the issue. One side agreeing with Dustin that this is a disgusting lack of regard for both Mr. X and the customer experience, and the other commenting about how, in reality, it isn’t that simple to implement a redesign of a major corporate site. There are metrics, stakeholders, etc. to take into consideration—a similar line of argument taken by Mr. X, though with far more vitriol directed towards the “arrogant 21-year-old.”
Getting to the Heart of the Matter
I’m going to ignore the ad-hominem attacks on both sides, and put aside the issue of whether or not it was right for American Airlines to fire the designer (I think they were, even if it was a public relations disaster—not everything you can do is what you should do).
What I take issue with is the argument that both Mr. X (though less so) and Josh Blankenship on So Serious take in defending the sorry state of AA’s website.
The argument that there are obstacles in the way and that “it isn’t that easy” is more likely than not absolutely right.
However, that should hardly stand as an excuse for the state of affairs at American Airlines. Let me explain.
In arguing this way, defenders of AA’s current website (and by extension, their corporate policy, if all of their decision making follows a similar pattern) are saying that because of what those within AA have to work with (a large corporation with a huge bureaucracy) that they should accept certain realities of what is possible, at least within any sort of reasonable timeframe.
However, it’s one thing to acknowledge difficulties. It’s another to let it define your thinking.
Goal-Oriented Thinking
The Economist had a great profile recently on the late Russ Ackoff, describing mostly his conception of systems-based thinking—what I like to call goal-oriented thinking.
Neatly summed up: “An architect never starts by saying, ‘Here are the parts, what can I build from them?’”
You should not let what you have on hand define what end result you are looking to achieve. To do so inevitably means that you are “accepting” certain “realities” about your situation—compromising on where you want to go.
Thinking about where you are to decide where you should be—that is the absolute wrong way to go about solving problems.
It reminds me of a certain Daoist saying: “To obtain knowledge, you accumulate more every day. To obtain wisdom, you subtract more every day.”
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If you go about with all of this “understanding of the situation” you inevitably limit yourself. You begin thinking not about where you want to be, and what SHOULD happen, and instead what you presume, within your present context, what you CAN do.
Giving an example of a story I heard from the founder of a burgeoning nonprofit that I’ve been working with as a consultant, this NGO was creating designs for low-income housing with shipping containers. A group of engineers from many of the most prestigious schools on the East Coast were trying to figure out how to create a door for these shipping containers.
The problem for these very smart engineering students was trying to figure out, after deciding that the door should open upwards, how to engineer the door so it could be hoisted up easily, how it could be kept from falling, how to minimize the danger of someone getting their fingers sliced off if it does fall…
Then someone walked into the room and asked why didn’t it open sideways instead, like a regular door?
It’s not that their combined engineering knowledge could make one acceptable, or even cost effective. It’s that they added onto their conception, putting more and more complexity on the problem to compensate for the obstacles they KNEW they faced.
They didn’t step back and ask what exactly the goal was for this door, nor did they simply subtract from their understanding. They didn’t step all the way back to 0, and rethink the decision about the orientation of the door to begin with.
Getting to Where You Need to Go
Back to the American Airlines case, Mr. X and Blankenship were both thinking more about what existed and what they “knew.” They could see where they ARE. Dustin, however arrogant or unintentionally, started from zero and saw where AA had to GO.
Mr. X said that he had many redesigns in his own archives. He said that change was on the way, gradually. From experience and from business history, much “gradual change” ends up becoming “indefinitely postponed change.” Most great realignments are radical shifts, even if they happen in multiple smaller bursts.
It’s too easy to put things off when you’re looking at what you have. You can see how much better it was from yesterday, after all.
It feels much more urgent when you are looking at how far from where you should be. And how much worse today is from where you want to go.
Putting Aside What You “Know”
My old rowing coach always demanded of our team when we began to lose our energy, and when we felt we couldn’t push any further, to “find a way.” He didn’t care what we knew about ourselves or how hard we FELT we could go. We just had to reach the goal—go harder, go faster.
We had to put aside what we felt we “knew” about ourselves. We had to go to zero, subtract from what we knew, to buy into his assertion that we could “go much harder than you think you can.”
It would have never worked had we simply kept thinking of ourselves in the way we always did, in terms of where we were.
In crew, in business, and in life, if you accept the predefined boundaries and “realities” of where you are, you’ll never reach the destination you want to go—you’ve already put aside where you truly should go to go somewhere you “can” go.
It’s one thing see and know the hurdles you must overcome to reach the goal. It’s another to let them, instead of the finish line, define your path.
If you always live in the present and see only what is, you’ll never “find a way.” You’ve already allowed one to assigned to you.
