The danger of the high-pressure approach

On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing more than 100 passengers and crew members. That, of course, would be tragic under any circumstances. However, what makes this incident doubly tragic is that the accident was completely preventable. In fact, if the story had a happy ending, the cause of the accident would have been almost laughable.

So why did Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crash?
Because the two pilots were too busy trying to change a burnt-out light bulb to notice that the autopilot had disengaged and the plane was flying toward the ground.

There is a condition known as cognitive tunneling, which is defined as “a phenomenon of inattentional blindness in which one becomes hyperfocused on some variable other than the current environment.” Have you ever seen someone at a downtown intersection (or been that someone) who is so focused on texting a friend that they literally walk into moving traffic? That’s cognitive tunneling.

Cognitive tunneling is particularly prevalent in high-pressure situations. When the pressure is low, most of us have enough brain power to notice things that are unrelated to our current task. We hear the phone ringing, we smell food cooking in the microwave, we notice the cat walking on top of a fence right outside the window (that literally happened while I was writing this, by the way, it was an orange cat). In other words, we are aware of our surroundings.

However, in a high pressure situation, our bandwidth decreases. We can become hyper-focused on a particular task to the exclusion of everything else. This can be fine when the task we are focused on is the most important task at the moment. However, it can be dangerous, perhaps even fatal, when the task you’re focusing on is actually less important than the tasks you’re neglecting.

Like when your attention is focused on changing a light bulb instead of blowing up the plane.

So how do you prevent this from happening?
Two words will be your best friends in this situation: awareness and delegation.

By awareness, I mean awareness of what is the most important task at hand. The most important task for the pilot of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was to fly the plane. Instead, he was distracted by the shiny shiny object (or, in this case, the lack of a shiny shiny object). When you find yourself in a high-pressure situation, ask yourself, “What’s the most important thing I need to focus on right now?” And… empower at least one person from his team to control him. If they see you walking cognitively down the rabbit hole, they need to be able to slap you in the face (figuratively, of course) and ask you the same question: “What’s the most important thing to focus on right now?”

Yes, there will be other things that need attention. But they don’t necessarily need your attention! This is where delegation comes in. Your job, as a leader, is to recognize what is primary and what is secondary, and then delegate secondary to other people. Remember: you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) change all the light bulbs!

In a high pressure situation, focus is good. But focusing on the wrong thing can bring you down.