Range, page 26
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As Captain Tony Lesmes described it, his team at Bagram Air Base in northeast Afghanistan only went to work when someone got really unlucky. Lesmes commanded a team of Air Force pararescue jumpers, PJs for short, a division of Special Operations designed for harrowing rescue missions, like parachuting into enemy territory at night to save downed pilots. Cross a soldier, a paramedic, a rescue diver, a firefighter, a mountain rescue specialist, and a parachutist, and you get a PJ. Their emblem depicts an angel with arms wrapped around the world, and the words “That others may live.”
There was no typical day for the PJs at Bagram. One day they were rappelling down a mountain to rescue a soldier who fell into an unmarked well. Another day they were rushing to treat Marines injured in a firefight. PJs could accompany units out on missions, but mostly they stayed on twenty-four-hour alert, waiting for a “9-line,” a form (with nine lines) that provided basic information about an active emergency. Like one that came in on an autumn day in 2009. It was a category alpha, traumatic injuries. Within minutes, the team would be airborne.
Intel was sparse. A roadside bomb had exploded in the middle of an Army convoy of armored vehicles. The site was approximately a half hour away by helicopter. There were serious injuries, but it was unclear how many or how serious, and whether the bomb was part of a search and rescue trap, where enemies lie in ambush awaiting the rescue team.
The PJs were used to working with cloudy information, but this was ambiguous even for them. Lesmes knew they would have to bring heavy equipment, like the Jaws of Life and a diamond-tipped saw, because “you can’t just cut through an armored vehicle like a car door,” he told me. Weight was an obstacle, especially at altitude in the mountains. If the choppers were too heavy, they wouldn’t grab enough air to stay aloft. Fuel limitations were a challenge. Space was a bigger one. Each PJ came with gear, and each of the two helicopters only had interior space on the order of a large van. They didn’t know how many soldiers were injured badly enough to need evacuation, and how much space they would need for them.
Lesmes was certain of just one thing: he wanted to make sure they saved enough room for potential patients so that they would only have to visit the explosion site once. It would take extra time to treat and load severely wounded soldiers. The more time on site, the more likely the operation would draw enemy attention. The rescue team could end up needing a rescue team.
He was twenty-seven, and the previous year had led a stateside hurricane rescue team. Afghanistan was his first extended deployment, and he was directing a team with older members who had had numerous overseas deployments. As usual, Lesmes brought two team members to the operations center to get information and help him make sense of the situation. “Sometimes other guys are able to get really good questions out that I wouldn’t normally think of,” he told me. “And you want to share as much information as possible, and there isn’t a lot of time.” But there was little additional intel. “In Hollywood, a drone flies over the site and you get all the information,” Lesmes told me. “But that’s Hollywood.”
He walked out to the helicopters, where PJs were donning their full battle rattle, as he put it. The situation didn’t fit the usual decision trees; he laid out the challenges, and asked the men: How do we solve this?
Just move equipment around to cram more stuff into the helicopters, one team member suggested. Another said they could leave a few PJs with the Army convoy if they needed extra helicopter room for patients. One recommended they evacuate the most serious patients, and if a second trip was needed, move the convoy from the explosion site and meet them somewhere less conspicuous. But the bomb had exploded in the middle of a procession of vehicles, in rugged terrain. Lesmes didn’t even know how mobile the convoy would be.
“We weren’t coming up with any real solution that would give us an advantage. I wanted a speed advantage, and the ability to leverage the weight and space for wounded soldiers,” he told me. “The distance and the timeline and the constraints and the unknown of the enemy all started to add up. I just started feeling like we didn’t have the setup to be successful in a worst-case scenario. There wasn’t that pattern recognition, it was outside of the normal pattern.” In others words, he didn’t have the definitive intel he would have liked. Based on the information he had, Lesmes guessed there would be more than three serious injuries but fewer than fifteen. An idea started to form, one that could preserve more space for potential patients. He could put aside a tool he had never dropped in this situation: himself.
Lesmes had never not accompanied his team on a mass-casualty category alpha. He was the site conductor. His role was to keep a broad view of the situation while PJs were “heads down” working furiously to save patients, or their limbs. He helped secure the site; communicated with his guys, the base, and helicopter pilots who were circling waiting to pick up patients and go; he radioed planes for backup if a firefight erupted; he coordinated with officers in the area, frequently from other military branches. Emotional chaos was an explosion site certainty. Soldiers watching their shell-shocked teammates suck on fentanyl lollipops, in danger of bleeding out, are desperate to help, but they must be moved. The site had to be managed. This time, as long as there were not many more injuries than Lesmes guessed, he knew his senior enlisted team member could manage leadership on the ground while administering medical aid. Lesmes could help ready the field hospital for returning patients, and coordinate helicopter pickups from the operations center, adjusting as he listened via radio to his guys on the ground. It was a trade-off, but every option was.
Lesmes went to the team with his “hypothesis,” as he called it—his hunch held lightly. “I wanted them to disprove it,” he told me. He told them he planned to stay at the base to save room for equipment and patients. The helicopter blades were spinning up, moments ticking away in the so-called golden hour, the critical window for saving a severely injured soldier. He told them to talk quickly, and he would consider everything they had to say. A few were quiet. Several objected. Togetherness was their most basic tool, the one they didn’t know could be dropped until someone said to drop it. One of the men said flatly that it was the commanding officer’s job to come along, and he should do his job. Another got angry. A third reflexively suggested that Lesmes was afraid. He told Lesmes that when it was his time, it was his time, so they should just do what they always did. Lesmes was afraid, but not for his life. “If something bad happens, and the officer is not there,” he told me, “think about explaining that to ten families.”
I was sitting with him at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., when he said that. He had been stoic, and then he started crying. “The whole construct is built on that training and that familiarity and that cohesion,” he said. “I totally understand why some guys were upset. It was breaking our standard operating procedure. I mean, my judgment was questioned. But if I go, we might have to go to the rescue site twice.” The objections he got were emotional and philosophical, not tactical. They had changed his mind about a plan before, but not this time. He would stay, and it was time for them to go. The helicopters strained into the air as Lesmes returned to the operations center. “I struggled immensely,” he said. “I could see what was going on, and if something bad were to happen, I could literally watch the rescue helicopter go down.”
The rescue mission, thankfully, was an unqualified success. PJs treated injuries at the explosion site, and seven wounded soldiers had to be loaded into the helicopters. They were packed in like sardines. Several required amputations at the field hospital, but all survived.
When it was over, the senior enlisted man acknowledged it was the right call. Another PJ did not address it for months, and then only to say that he was taken aback that Lesmes had that much trust in them. The soldier who had gotten angry initially remained angry, for a while. Another Bagram PJ I spoke with said, “If I was in that position, I definitely would have said, ‘Yeah, we’re all going.’ It must have been really hard.”
“I don’t know, man,” Lesmes told me. “Sometimes, I still struggle with that decision. Something could’ve gone wrong and then it would be a bad decision. Maybe it was luck. None of the options at the time looked very optimal.”
As we finished talking, I mentioned Weick’s work about wilderness firefighters clinging to their tools. Under pressure, Weick explained, experienced pros regress to what they know best. I suggested to Lesmes that maybe his PJs were just reacting emotionally, with a reflex for the familiar. There must be times when even the sacrosanct tool of togetherness should be dropped, right? “Yeah, mmm-hmm.” He nodded in agreement. It was, of course, easy for me to say. He paused for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, “but everything is built on that.”
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The Challenger managers made mistakes of conformity. They stuck to the usual tools in the face of an unusual challenge. Captain Lesmes dropped a sacred tool, and it worked. Once emotions cooled, several members of his team acknowledged it was the right call. Others never did. Going back over it brought Lesmes to tears. It isn’t exactly the fairy-tale ending to a good decision. Had NASA canceled the launch, Allan McDonald told me that engineers who pushed to abort might have been cast as “Chicken Littles.” Chicken Little doesn’t fare well in the space business. As NASA engineer Mary Shafer once articulated, “Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.” It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them. But there is an organizational strategy that can help. The strategy, strange as it sounds, is to send a mixed message.
“Congruence” is a social science term for cultural “fit” among an institution’s components—values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles. Since the 1980s, congruence has been a pillar of organizational theory. An effective culture is both consistent and strong. When all signals point clearly in the same direction, it promotes self-reinforcing consistency, and people like consistency.
Plenty of profiles of individual businesses were written in support of congruence. But in the first study that systematically examined a broad swath of organizations across an industry, researchers who studied cultural congruence at 334 institutions of higher education found that it had no influence on any measure of organizational success whatsoever. Administrators, department heads, and trustees in strongly congruent institutions did have an easier time classifying the culture when asked, but there was no impact at all on performance, from the academic and career development of students to the satisfaction of faculty and the financial health of the college. The researcher who led that work went on to study thousands of businesses. She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
In one experiment, subjects played the role of corporate human resources managers who had to predict the performance of job applicants. The managers were presented with a standard evaluation process that showed them how a candidate’s skills were typically weighted, and then told that they would be evaluated (and paid) based on how they made decisions. In a sped-up simulation of real life, after each prediction they could see how the candidate actually performed according to company records. In some batches of applications, the candidates performed as the standard evaluation process predicted; in others, they weren’t even close. Yet, over and over, the individual managers conformed to standard procedure no matter what the results told them, even when it clearly was not working, and even when a better system was easily discoverable. They failed to learn with experience. Until a wrinkle was added. Conformist managers were given fake Harvard Business Review research proclaiming that successful groups prioritize independence and dissent. Miraculously, their minds were opened and they started learning. They began to see when the standard evaluation process clearly needed to be modified or discarded. They were learning with experience, and their predictions became more accurate. The managers were benefitting from incongruence. The formal, conformist company process rules were balanced out by an informal culture of individual autonomy in decision making and dissent from the typical way of doing things.
Incongruence worked in the other direction as well. HR managers who were given a standard evaluation process but told that only the accuracy of their predictions mattered began by ditching the process and making up their own rules. They never learned when the standard process did indeed work. In that case, the cure was fake Harvard Business Review research indicating that successful groups prioritize cohesion, loyalty, and finding common ground. Again, the HR managers became learning machines; they suddenly hewed closer to the traditional process when it had value, but continued to deviate readily when it didn’t, as NASA should have.
Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me.
The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction. If managers were used to process conformity, encouraging individualism helped them to employ “ambidextrous thought,” and learn what worked in each situation. If they were used to improvising, encouraging a sense of loyalty and cohesion did the job. The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.
By the time of the Challenger launch, NASA’s “can do” culture manifested as extreme process accountability combined with collectivist social norms. Everything was congruent for conformity to the standard procedures. The process was so rigid it spurned evidence that didn’t conform to the usual rules, and so sacred that Larry Mulloy felt protected by a signed piece of paper testifying that he had followed the usual process. Dissent was valued at flight readiness reviews, but at the most important moment, the most important engineering group asked for an offline caucus where they found a way, in private, to conform. Like the one engineer said, without data, “the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”
The more I spoke with Captain Lesmes, the more it seemed to me that he had felt strongly outcome accountable—searching for a solution even if it deviated from standard procedure—within an extraordinarily potent collective culture that ensured he would not make the decision to deviate easily. He had, as Patil, Tetlock, and Mellers wrote, harnessed “the power of cross-pressures in promoting flexible, ambidextrous thought.” The subtitle of that paper: “Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation.”
Superforecasting teams harnessed the same cultural cross-pressure. A team was judged purely by the accuracy of its members’ forecasts. But internally the Good Judgment Project incentivized collective culture. Commenting was an expectation; teammates were encouraged to vote for useful comments and recognized for process milestones, like a certain number of lifetime comments.
Prior to Challenger, there was a long span when NASA culture harnessed incongruence. Gene Kranz, the flight director when Apollo 11 first landed on the moon, lived by that same mantra, the valorized process—“In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data”—but he also made a habit of seeking out opinions of technicians and engineers at every level of the hierarchy. If he heard the same hunch twice, it didn’t take data for him to interrupt the usual process and investigate.
Wernher von Braun, who led the Marshall Space Flight Center’s development of the rocket that propelled the moon mission, balanced NASA’s rigid process with an informal, individualistic culture that encouraged constant dissent and cross-boundary communication. Von Braun started “Monday Notes”: every week engineers submitted a single page of notes on their salient issues. Von Braun handwrote comments in the margins, and then circulated the entire compilation. Everyone saw what other divisions were up to, and how easily problems could be raised. Monday Notes were rigorous, but informal.
On a typed page of notes from two days after the moon landing in 1969, von Braun homed in on a short section in which an engineer guessed why a liquid oxygen tank unexpectedly lost pressure. The issue was already irrelevant for the moon mission, but could come up again in future flights. “Let’s pin this down as precisely as possible,” von Braun wrote. “We must know whether there’s more behind this, that calls for checks or remedies.” Like Kranz, von Braun went looking for problems, hunches, and bad news. He even rewarded those who exposed problems. After Kranz and von Braun’s time, the “All Others Bring Data” process culture remained, but the informal culture and power of individual hunches shriveled.
In 1974, William Lucas took over the Marshall Space Flight Center. A NASA chief historian wrote that Lucas was a brilliant engineer but “often grew angry when he learned of problems.” Allan McDonald described him to me as a “shoot-the-messenger type guy.” Lucas transformed von Braun’s Monday Notes into a system purely for upward communication. He did not write feedback and the notes did not circulate. At one point they morphed into standardized forms that had to be filled out. Monday Notes became one more rigid formality in a process culture. “Immediately, the quality of the notes fell,” wrote another official NASA historian.
