If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.
Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.”
III.
One year after Air France Flight 447 disappeared into the ocean, another Airbus—this one part of Qantas Airways—taxied onto a runway in Singapore, requested permission to begin the eight-hour flight to Sydney, and lifted into the bright morning sky.
The Qantas plane flying that day had the same auto-flight systems as the Air France airplane that had crashed into the sea. But the pilots were very different. Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use.
“I want us to envision the first thing we’ll do if there’s a problem,” he told his copilots as they rode in a van from the Fairmont hotel to Singapore Changi Airport. “Imagine there’s an engine failure. Where’s the first place you’ll look?” The pilots took turns describing where they would turn their eyes. De Crespigny conducted this same conversation prior to every flight. His copilots knew to expect it. He quizzed them on what screens they would stare at during an emergency, where their hands would go if an alarm sounded, whether they would turn their heads to the left or stare straight ahead. “The reality of a modern aircraft is that it’s a quarter million sensors and computers that sometimes can’t tell the difference between garbage and good sense,” de Crespigny later told me. He’s a brusque Australian, a cross between Crocodile Dundee and General Patton. “That’s why we have human pilots. It’s our job to think about what might happen, instead of what is.”
After the crew’s visualization session, de Crespigny laid down some rules. “Everyone has a responsibility to tell me if you disagree with my decisions or think I’m missing anything.”
“Mark,” he said, gesturing to a copilot, “if you see everyone looking down, I want you to look up. If we’re all looking up, you look down. We’ll all probably make at least one mistake this flight. You’re each responsible for catching them.”
Four hundred and forty passengers were preparing to board the plane when the pilots entered the cockpit. De Crespigny, like all Qantas aviators, was required to undergo a yearly review of his flying skills, and so, on that day, there were two extra pilots in the cockpit, observers drawn from the airline’s most experienced ranks. The review wasn’t perfunctory. If de Crespigny stumbled, it could trigger his early retirement.
As the pilots took their seats, one of the observers sat near the center of the cockpit, where standard operating procedure usually positioned the second officer. De Crespigny frowned. He had expected the observer to sit off to the side, out of the way. He had a picture in his mind of how his cockpit ought to be arranged.
De Crespigny faced the evaluator. “Where do you intend to sit?” he asked.
“In this seat between you and Matt,” the observer said.
“I’ve got a problem with that,” de Crespigny said. “You’re inhibiting my crew.”
The cockpit went silent. This kind of confrontation was not supposed to happen between a captain and the observers.
“Rich, I can’t see you if I sit in Mark’s seat,” the observer said. “How can I check you?”
“That’s your problem,” de Crespigny replied. “I want my crew together and I want Mark in your seat.”
“Richard, you’re being unreasonable,” the second observer said.
“I have a flight to command and I want my crew operating properly,” said de Crespigny.
“Look, Richard,” replied the evaluator, “if it helps, I promise I’ll be the second officer if I have to be.”
De Crespigny paused. He wanted to show his crew they could question his decisions. He wanted them to know he was paying close attention to what they had to say and was sensitive to what they thought. Just as teams at Google and Saturday Night Live need to be able to critique one another without fear of punishment, de Crespigny wanted his crew to see that he encouraged them to disagree.
“Fantastic,” de Crespigny said to the evaluator. (“Once he said he would be the second officer, it fit into the plan I had in my mind,” de Crespigny later told me.) Inside the cockpit, de Crespigny turned back to the controls and began moving Qantas Flight 32 away from the gate.
The plane sped down the runway and lifted into the air. At 2,000 feet, de Crespigny activated the plane’s autopilot. The sky was cloudless, the conditions perfect.
At 7,400 feet, as de Crespigny was about to order the first officer to switch off the cabin’s seatbelt sign, he heard a boom. It was probably just a surge of high-pressure air moving through the engine, he thought. Then there was another, even louder crash, followed by what sounded like thousands of marbles being thrown against the hull.
A red alarm flashed on de Crespigny’s instrument panel and a siren blared in the cockpit. Investigators would later determine that an oil fire inside one of the left jets had caused a massive turbine disk to detach from the drive shaft, shear into three pieces, and shoot outward, shattering the engine. Two of the larger fragments from that explosion punched holes in the left wing, one of them large enough for a man to fit through. Hundreds of smaller shards, exploding like a cluster bomb, cut through electrical wires, fuel hoses, a fuel tank, and hydraulic pumps. The underside of the wing looked as though it had been machine-gunned.
Long strips of metal were bending off the left wing and whipping in the air. The plane began to shake. De Crespigny reached over to decrease the aircraft’s speed, the standard reaction for an emergency of this kind, but when he pushed a button, the auto-thrust didn’t respond. Alarms started popping up on his computer display. Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four. The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan. The damage would later be described as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation.
De Crespigny radioed Singapore air traffic control. “QF32, engine two appears failed,” he said. “Heading 150, maintaining 7,400 feet, we’ll keep you informed and will get back to you in five minutes.”
Less than ten seconds had passed since the first boom. De Crespigny cut power to the left wing and began anti-fire protocols. The plane stopped vibrating for a moment. Inside the cockpit, alarms were blaring. The pilots were quiet.
In the cabin, panicked passengers rushed to their windows and pointed at the screens embedded in their seats, which, unfortunately, were broadcasting the view of the damaged wing from a camera mounted in the tail.
The men in the cockpit began responding to prompts from the plane’s computers, speaking to one another in short, efficient sentences. De Crespigny looked at his display and saw that twenty-one of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled. The functioning engines were rapidly deteriorating and the left wing was losing the hydraulics that made steering possible. Within minutes, the plane had become capable of only the smallest changes in thrust and the tiniest navigational adjustments. No one was certain how long it would stay in the air.