You heard me right. You didn't have to be right. It's worse to not know how to make it right.

This struck me as I was playing Overcooked at Livia and Enoch's party over the weekend. For those who don't know about Overcooked, it's a game where two people coordinate on various tasks in a kitchen to fulfill customer orders. The game designers designed the levels so that one person can't hit target score by her/himself.

As we started setting the kitchen on fire (literally as we burnt the rice), I realized three things:

1. Do NOT talk about the kitchen being on fire;
2. Say what you need and when you need it. In this case, fire hydrant to kitchen stove, press square key. Period, don't care why it's on fire, and;
3. Help the other player on other stuff while we deal with fire.

Enoch says I'm good at this because I'm a pilot... I honestly think this should common sense, but in hindsight being a pilot definitely helps. It's about applying CRM(Crew Resource Management) and decision making.

CRM and Aviation Decision Making - Desensitizing Human Nature to Face and Beat the Danger

It's easy to say one has CRM training, it's hard to say one has it, because it's against human nature. Our ancestors survived mostly on fear not considerations.

A common saying in aviation - "The three most useless things during an emergency are the runway behind you, the altitude above you, and the fuel left in the fuel truck."

Without a doubt, the best scenario is the mechanics have performed the correct maintenance procedures, the crew took enough runway length, the route has been planned with plenty of altitude to spare, and there is more than enough fuel to reach the alternate airport.

But now we have an emergency, so what would we do? "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate." Keep the airplane flying; find the nearest airport to land and if not possible, find the best landing spot; call the ATC and simply state nature of emergency and assistance needed. It's worse than futile to lament about the airworthiness of the aircraft or those "three most useless things", because now we're wasting the very precious time.

These mnemonics allows us to stick to first principles:

• Aviate: Focus on the stuff at hand, not aggravate the situation
• Navigate: Remain calm and focus on the future, and how to get there from current situation
• Communicate: Be vulnerable and ask for help from ATC and the other pilot, and keep personal emotions under the check.

To illustrate these, here's a Cessna 172 engine failure ATC recording I listened to recently. Student pilot on solo flight reported engine trouble before crashing at campground #N78445. REAL ATC Student pilot on solo flight reported engine trouble before crashing at campground #N78445. REAL ATC Note how the Soloing student told the ATC negative for landing site suggestion. You don't sense a bit of panic in the conversation besides the student pilot saying "I'm a student pilot on solo and panicking." The ATC also continued on handling other traffics after learning the crash. For those worried the pilot, she survived.

Here's another pilot that's panicking, entering a deadly situation (spin) as a result and giving ATC zero information on how to help. Pilot's PANICKED Mayday Call into Spin (Real Audio)

Applying to Business Activities

A lot of famous people and influencers have discussed similar rationale in startup pivoting or project goals. It seems like a common thing for the untrained to get triggered into the "fight-or-flight" response. Then the influence spreads to others. Everyone starts panicking rather than searching for a solution asap.

Fix the code, change the design, pivot the business model. It doesn't matter why we're here. It matters how we can find the way out of it. It doesn't help when shit hit the fan, and we start wondering why there's shit and there's fan running in the first place. Stop the fan, take a mop and clean up the mess. Whatever works! This is first principle in action.

When Brex pivoted from a VR startup into a corporate-spending unicorn, or when Unity pivoted from a failed game into THE engine behind many games, nobody cared why they got into the initial dead end. It's how they assessed the situation and lifted themselves out that cemented the history. Try to live for the future.

Believe in Better Process, not in Being Better or More Responsible

Every elementary school teacher's favorite line - "Be more careful or better". Take this as a grain of salt.

If you go on the street and ask random people, almost everyone would say they're good or responsible people. And as a matter of fact you should believe them. In elementary school, our teacher loved the word "be more careful", which really misguided most students. I bet $100 that by "being more careful" next time will not prevent anything in the long run. That process is inherently error-prone.

This is also why there are so many unit tests out there. Because human coders will fail.

The whole post-incident process is to believe that human actions, decisions and designs are error prone, so how can we better engineer a system so that even a reckless person won't make those mistakes. It's with these prinicples that fail-safe systems and anti-misplug connectors are designed. NASA has an Aviation Safety Reporting System for pilots to report, and airlines have similar processes.

I also noticed people who don't fully understand the principle behind those reporting proesses have misconstrued those as taking shame and blame, which is totally counterproductive. Read on!

P.S. We Want It to be Right, not Captain is Right

There's also a touch of management art involved in the post-incident reflection. We want people to be willing to report incidents and learnings. If it is in the form of a reprimand, then people will stop raising minor issues and sweep the dust under the rug. And kaboom! Unfortunately in countries like China, administrators and management still attribute everything to the crew "not being careful" even when the management system or operating procedures are clearly wrong.

Korean Air Flight 801, KLM Flight 4805 and Air Florida Flight 90 are all good examples of how rocking the "80s" management culture failed. Maybe it's also time to make "flat management structure" less of a preach then.

God writing this makes me miss flying. Hit me up if you need a flight instructor or any advices on training.