“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to Singapore. The local time is five minutes to midday on Thursday 4 November, and I think you’ll agree that was one of the nicest landings we have experienced for a while.” De Crespigny returned home a hero. Today, Qantas Flight 32 is taught in flight schools and psychology classrooms as a case study of how to maintain focus during an emergency. It is cited as one of the prime examples of how mental models can put even the most dire situations within our control.
Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react. The Air France pilots didn’t have strong mental models, and so when tragedy struck, they didn’t know where to focus. De Crespigny and his copilots, in contrast, were telling themselves stories—and testing and revising them—even before they stepped onto the plane, and so they were prepared when disaster occurred.
We may not recognize how situations within our own lives are similar to what happens within an airplane cockpit. But think, for a moment, about the pressures you face each day. If you are in a meeting and the CEO suddenly asks you for an opinion, your mind is likely to snap from passive listening to active involvement—and if you’re not careful, a cognitive tunnel might prompt you to say something you regret. If you are juggling multiple conversations and tasks at once and an important email arrives, reactive thinking can cause you to type a reply before you’ve really thought out what you want to say.
So what’s the solution? If you want to do a better job of paying attention to what really matters, of not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the constant flow of emails and conversations and interruptions that are part of every day, of knowing where to focus and what to ignore, get into the habit of telling yourself stories. Narrate your life as it’s occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you have only minutes to reply, the spotlight inside your head will be ready to shine the right way.
To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.
“You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.”
GOAL SETTING
Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War
In October 1972, one of Israel’s brightest generals, the forty-four-year-old Eli Zeira, was promoted to oversee the Directorate of Military Intelligence, the agency responsible for warning the country’s leaders if its enemies were about to attack.
Zeira’s appointment came half a decade after the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel, in a stunning preemptive strike, had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and other territory from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. That war had demonstrated Israel’s military superiority, more than doubled the amount of territory the country controlled, and had humiliated the nation’s enemies. But it also instilled a deep anxiety among Israeli citizens that the country’s antagonists would eventually seek revenge.
Those fears were legitimate. Since the Six-Day War had ended, generals in Egypt and Syria had repeatedly threatened to reclaim their lost territory, and Arab leaders, in fiery speeches, had vowed to push the Jewish state into the sea. As Israel’s enemies became increasingly bellicose, the nation’s lawmakers sought to calm public worries by asking the military to provide regular forecasts on the likelihood of attack.
However, the assessments provided by the Directorate of Military Intelligence were often contradictory and inconclusive, a mishmash of opinions predicting various levels of risk. Analysts sent conflicting memos and flip-flopped week to week. Some weeks, lawmakers were warned to be on alert, and then nothing would happen. Policy makers were called to meetings and told that a risk might be materializing, but no one could say for sure. Army units were ordered to ready their defenses, and then those orders would be countermanded with no explanation why.
As a result, Israeli politicians and the public became increasingly frustrated. Army reservists constituted 80 percent of the Israeli Defense Forces’ ground troops. There was a constant nervousness that hundreds of thousands of citizens would be required, at a moment’s notice, to abandon their families and rush to the borders. People wanted to know if the risk of another war was real and, if so, how much forewarning they would get.
Eli Zeira was appointed to head the Directorate of Military Intelligence, in part, to address those uncertainties. He was a former paratrooper known for his sophistication and political savvy. He had risen quickly through Israel’s military establishment, even spending a few years as an assistant to Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six-Day War. When Zeira took over the Directorate, he told the Israeli parliament that his job was simple: to provide decision makers with an “estimate as clear and as sharp as possible.” His chief goal, he said, was to make sure alarms were raised only when the risks of war were real.
His method for achieving this clarity was ordering his military analysts to use a strict formula in assessing Arab intentions. He had helped develop these criteria, which became known among intelligence officials as “the concept.” Zeira argued that during the Six-Day War, Israel’s superior airpower, arsenal of long-range missiles, and battlefield dominance had so thoroughly embarrassed their enemies that no country would attack again unless they had an air force powerful enough to protect ground troops from Israeli jets, and Scud missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. Without those two conditions being met, Zeira said, the threats of Arab leaders were nothing more than words.
Six months after Zeira assumed his post, the nation had an opportunity to test his concept. In the spring of 1973, large numbers of Egyptian troops began amassing along the Suez Canal, which was the border between Egypt and the Israeli-controlled Sinai Peninsula. Israel’s spies warned that Egypt planned to invade in mid-May.
On April 18, Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, gathered her top advisers in a closed-door meeting. The military chief of staff and the head of the Mossad both said an Egyptian attack was a real possibility and the nation needed to prepare.
Meir turned to Zeira for his assessment. He disagreed with his colleagues, he said. Egypt still didn’t have a powerful air force and possessed no missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. Egypt’s leaders were merely rattling sabers to impress their countrymen. The odds of an invasion, he determined, were “very low.”