Pilots & Passengers: Adaptive Leadership in Turbulence
Turbulence is the ghost in the attic of air travel.
Burkhard Bilger, “Buckle Up”
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
The future of air travel is uncertain. I am not talking about the technical ability to fly, increasing fuel costs, or even the closure of geographic airspace due to conflict. The uncertainty literally surrounding aviation has a complexity level emerging that harkens much closer to the invention of flight itself. However, this is not an article about the present or history of aviation, but rather how it can serve as an expansive metaphor for what is happening inside organizations and institutions. Specifically, pilots and passengers can inform how leadership may navigate growing uncertainty and complexity.
In previous decades of the 20th century, much like the dominant western worldview, it was easier to deny that a plane was interconnected with the very atmosphere that it was flying through. Prior to 1979, turbulence was a whole lot less frequent and severe. The turbulence ghosts were in the attic and mostly remained there. Burkhard Bilger reported that since 1979 what is known as “clear-air turbulence” (that which is not caused by a storm) has risen by 55% over the North Atlantic and 41% over the U.S. Incidentally, 1979 was also the year The Charney Report results were shared at the White House concluding that climatic changes were a result of man-made releases of CO₂ into the atmosphere.
Aviation is reconciling with the same acceleration of planetary changes as society at large. The question this article addresses is what happens when the turbulence of the environment exceeds the plane’s resilience to fly comfortably within it? As it turns out, most organizational strategies were not designed like a plane to navigate turbulence. The risk is that organizational strategies, unlike aviation plans, continue to rely on stable conditions, and all too seldom are resilient enough to keep from breaking.
I often hear about the turbulence facing people across all levels and from myriad directions. Some are collapsing mid-flight due to limited oxygen, or taking long layovers because they are too burnt-out to go back inside. Leadership often refuses to acknowledge the turbulence. It is as if people are being shaken in their seats while the pilot continues to insist that the air is smooth.
This article draws parallels between the mindsets of flight passengers and pilots and their organizational corollaries. Through this comparison I seek to demonstrate what it looks like to strategically plan for times of turbulence rather than stability, and adaptive rather than technical leadership.
I am hoping this will be a smooth ride. The seatbelt sign is off so feel free to move about the cabin.
PRODUCTIVE DISTURBANCE
Last summer, the Solvable team took to the turbulent skies with a group of senior higher education administrators by hosting an adaptive leadership workshop. We combined a new diagnostic tool for understanding turbulence along with coaching by the esteemed Harvard scholar, Marty Linsky. We took design inspiration from Linsky's quote, “leadership requires disturbing people - but at a rate they can absorb.” Disturbance as a productive tension set the foundation for the workshop.
Turbulence is what the atmosphere does that neither the airplane engineers nor its pilots can administer away, but rather regulate around. Said another way, the ghost of turbulence is a system condition rather than its exception. The ghost resists the perfection of a stable flight. Aeronautical engineers and pilots understand their function is to navigate six types of technical bumps: roll (lateral balance), pitch (vertical balance), yaw (rotation), surge (speed), sway (drift), and heave (vertical drop). Describing turbulence to Bilger, the atmospheric scientist Bob Sharman said: “it’s not just one thing that’s going on. It’s not just atmospheric convection. It’s not just wind flowing over mountains. It’s everything going on all the time and interacting.”
Pilots navigate through complexity with complexity. Linsky’s quote suggests that organizational leadership is less about eliminating disturbances than managing them, much like the pilot regulating around turbulence. Yet, the prevalent form of organizational leadership tries to manage disturbances by treating complexity as if it was predictable. Before we get into what a different form of leadership looks like, it helps to understand the dynamics of turbulence and what it is doing to everyone on board.
In our diagnostic tool, we identified the following attributes that differentiate turbulence from other kinds of uncertainty:
Irregularity: it can shift extremely rapidly
Variability: it has a wide band of different intensities
Embodied: it registers in the body before the mind
These qualities are the same whether a pilot or a passenger. It doesn’t make a difference how well prepared you are, how much data you have access to, or what you previously experienced. These three qualities define everyone’s experience with turbulence and are the system's condition.
Taking inspiration from the actual training diagrams used by pilots, we created the following illustration that shows how degrees of turbulence are differently perceived by pilots and passengers based on their roles:
Illustration by Anna Denardin
Pilots share the same physiological experiences as passengers and rarely have one-hundred percent visibility into what is ahead and around. Their water glasses are subjected to the same physical forces as the passengers’ glasses in the cabin. However, pilots by and large experience turbulence psychologically differently than passengers (who often experience it differently than each other).
At their core, pilots anticipate turbulence, while passengers deny it. Pilots understand flying as unstable, while passengers assume stability. Fear is a good demonstration of the difference between the two groups. Pilots fear through what they know. Passengers largely fear the unknown. If a pilot has the inclination to land the plane, it is because all the data is telling them the situation is unmanageable. If a passenger desires for the plane to land, it is because they are confronting fear that they neither anticipated nor can anticipate what is ahead given their training and access.
The cockpit and the cabin share the same plane, but often not the same mindset. Closing that gap in organizational leadership is what the rest of the article addresses.
Passenger vs Pilot Mindset
Comparing the way a pilot envisions a flight versus an average airline passenger reveals dramatic differences. The pilot recognizes they cannot administer away turbulence, and generally the passenger chooses to ignore turbulence altogether until their water glass is rattling or they are flying out of their seat. The pilot and the passenger are often operating with entirely different cognitive frameworks.
Passenger Cognitive Framework
Flying is a binary (okay or catastrophic)
The anticipation is smooth air
The plan will be followed through from point A to B
The flight will arrive on time with a small margin of error
Turbulence is a threat
Endurance is potentially endless
Pilot Cognitive Framework
Flying is on a spectrum (within flight envelope to approaching limits)
The anticipation is variable air
The plan will be adapted in real time as needed
The flight will arrive when it can
Turbulence is managed risk (pushing the envelope)
Endurance is bounded with a forecasted end
Until now, you might assume that I am going to suggest that pilots = organizational leaders/education administrators and passengers = employees/faculty. I am loath to offer that loudspeaker announcement. First off, I don’t subscribe to the notion that those with leadership titles are the ones solely responsible for leadership. However, in most organizations, named leaders seem to navigate turbulence with the mindset of airline passengers: they create a linear strategy, implement through binaries, and refuse to acknowledge and adapt to rapidly changing conditions despite having the instruments.
The questions I am holding are:
Whether organizational leaders are performing as a passenger in ways they think will appease superiors, team members, and stakeholders while actually thinking and navigating like a pilot?
Are organizational leaders now beyond performance and actually have become the very passengers they were supposed to be managing?
The irony is that those often acting as pilots in their organization are more often those without leadership titles who acutely feel the somatic effects of the turbulence. They are often not riding in the same air cabin as their titled leaders: as if the main cabin was subjected to extreme turbulence while the front cabin only experienced light turbulence. These employees, faculty, and staff are looking out the small window and are able to forecast more turbulence ahead.
Photo by Felipe Vidal Soto on Unsplash
The reality is that many organizations are currently flying with navigational intelligence in the wrong seats. Recognizing which seat you are actually in is where the adaptive leadership journey begins.
Tolerance-Interval Thinking
Turbulence is what haunts the passenger mindset of strategic planning. Perhaps the difference between pilots and most organizational leaders is that the former have trained for and anticipate the arrival of the turbulence ghosts, whereas the latter seem to await smooth air to make bold strategic moves. The ghost in the machine of corporate strategy is variance.
Turbulence is inversely correlated with adaptation in many organizations. Needless to say, it is not 1979 anymore. New ways of working with the complexities and uncertainties of the world are needed. We’re calling one of these ways tolerance-interval thinking. This way of thinking would shift questions like what will happen and how do we plan for it, to what range of conditions must our strategy remain viable across. Or are we presently within those intervals and how will we know when we have fallen out of them?
It is not only wishful but also irresponsible thinking to operate as if the air is clear and more of it is ahead. As Linsky’s work exposes, the challenge of adaptive leadership is not how to function within stability but rather how to productively function during times of disequilibrium. What were once mostly simple, complicated technical problems have become adaptive, complex cultural ones. What we are wrestling with in today’s organizations is what emerges from the system’s own complexity. The cybernetic concept of requisite variety suggests that a system needs as much internal complexity as the environment it lives within. No matter how sophisticated the machine, it is never separate from the complexity of the world in which it functions. Strategic planning has largely proceeded as if it could.
It would be a mistake to confuse a plan with the future, and to assume managing the ghosts is a task to be undertaken only by those in positions of so-called leadership. Part of working with the complexity of the system is to bring forward the layers of complexity from within. So rather than view this as a binary of pilots who lead and passengers who fly, tolerance-interval thinking depends on the people closest to the turbulence navigating with the complexity of the world they are experiencing. The viewing window for many is often kept devastatingly small, and could be considerably widened. Doing so is less a structural change than a cultural one. Organizations that travel with the variability of air currents end up developing adaptive capacities much deeper than what traditional hierarchy privileges.
Adaptive leadership offers that the future is not something that can be fully understood or planned. Rather, the future will be filled with complexity and uncertainty. The future is a distribution to be navigated in real time. The pilot doesn't need to exorcise the turbulence ghost; they've learned to fly with it. The same could be said for organizational leadership. The opportunity is to learn to plan with and adapt to the complexity of the actual world rather than continuing to reduce it.
Are we within our envelope, and do we know how close we are to its limits?
Now that’s a pilot question.
In addition to the authors cited above, I am indebted to the thinking and writing of many that I have been in conversation with, and also many that I haven’t such as W. Ross Ashby (requisite variety), Herbert Marcuse (administered society), Gilbert Ryle (ghost in the machine), Herbert Simon (satisficing), and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (uncertainty).
Claude.ai was used as a copy editor. Any faults in this article are my own.
An Invitation
If this is the kind of question you are keen to learn more about, we'd like you to attend one of our April webinars. They are invitation-only sessions designed to build adaptive leadership skills and strategies you can bring back to your team and faculty. April 1st is designed specifically for higher education senior administrators. April 16th is open to organizational leadership of any sector.
