Let's start Module 2. In Module 1, we talked a lot about emotional tagging and one planet at a time in diversity and empathy. In module 2, we shift a little bit towards experience and expertise and the various ways in which they can help you or hurt you. In this video, I want to talk about how to think about learning the right lessons from your experience and I have this famous story that I want to share. I'm sure you know the story. Take a look at this photo. Do you know who that is? Of course you do. I wrote it down. His name is Captain Sullenberger, also known as Sally. Maybe you recall also the movie that was called, I think Sully starring Tom Hanks because I think he always stars in movies like that. Let me remind you of the story. Captain Sullenberger was the Captain of an aircraft, US Airways that was flying from New York's LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte, North Carolina. As it's just beginning to gain altitude, what happens is a flock of geese get ingested into both engines and incapacitate both engines, which is a pretty serious thing and Captain Sullenberger, is got to figure out what to do. I don't know whether you recall this story from watching on TV or reading about that. But there's something stuck in my head about these details and that is, when this flock of geese got ingested into both engines, all these newspaper reports and TV reports reference these geese as Canadian geese. Did any of you noticed that? I mean, the fact that I'm Canadian has nothing to do with me pointing this out. But, is it the case that American geese never would have done such a thing? Maybe, it was Canadian geese, fine. I'm going to get over it. We're going to move forward. Captain Sullenberger has to make a decision and what is his decision? He decides to turn the aircraft around and get back to LaGuardia Airport as fast as possible and land that craft. We're talking in this entire course about decision-making and how our brains process information, and in this module about experience and expertise. How do you think Captain Sullenberger went about trying to make that decision? I mean, do you think you had a long debate with a co-pilot? Maybe not. Do you think he commissioned a white paper to analyze the situation or maybe formed a committee to think about it, or called his boss the CEO of US Airways. Hey, boss, we have a bit of a situation here. He may, of course not right. He didn't do any of that stuff. He knew and he knew instantly exactly what the right answer was and the right answer was to turn the aircraft around, and get back to LaGuardia Airport. That's of course not how it ended. If you look at this next photo, it shows you the aircraft which I have circled. It's now going South over the Hudson River back to LaGuardia Airport. In the foreground is Manhattan, and in the background is New Jersey and somebody took that photo probably from a skyscraper in Manhattan, which is unbelievable to see that and so maybe a minute and a half after he makes that first decision that I just described, he makes a second decision, a different one and that different one is to land the aircraft at Teterboro Airport, which is a small airport on the New Jersey side that is mostly for corporate jets and the reason why he wanted to land the aircraft there, is because he didn't think he retained the loft of the aircraft out all the way back to LaGuardia. He needed an airport that was closer to be able to land the craft. Once again, the decision-making process was the same as before. There were no long debates and discussions, there were no team retreats and discussions, and no white papers commission. He knew instantly what the answer was. Land the aircraft at Teterboro Airport, by the way, a minute and a half earlier, following an identical decision-making process, he came up with a completely different solution to the problem. Pretty interesting. He's getting close to Teterboro I mean there's this interesting transcript. Air traffic control says to Captain Sullenberger, well, you're clear to land at runway one at Teterboro and Captain Sullenberger says, we can't do it and air traffic control then ask him this an interesting question, if you think about it. The question, which runway would you like a Teterboro? I mean, what question is that? I could just see Sullenberger saying, I will not accept runway one. It's out of the question, I'll take three, maybe seven, but don't try to dump one on me. I mean, funny question. Instead, Sullenberger says, we're going to be in the Hudson, I'm sorry, say again and the aircraft lands in the Hudson River, which you could see in this beautiful magical photo and it not only lands on the river. But, nobody was really hurt. Nobody died and nobody was badly hurt at all. It was an incredible landing and so Captain Sullenberger's 3rd decision is to land the aircraft on the Hudson River, not at LaGuardia, not a Teterboro, but the Hudson River and same decision-making process, needless to say. No long debate, no discussion, no white papers. He knows exactly what he needs to do, he's experienced a good thing. It sure is. But before I elaborate on that, take a look at this photo one more time. What do you see? It does show you the difference between economy and first-class, if you look really closely. They're probably going to come out with the little cocktail drinks any minute now in the raft in first-class. Enough of that. Is experience a good thing? Well Sully was one of the most experienced pilots in the US Airways fleet. He was an experienced accident and incident investigator. In fact, in the movie, he had a little side gig where he would help airlines analyze incidence, and to top it all up, Captain Sullenberger was a certified glider pilot. Glider pilots operate without any engines, which is what he ended up doing. I don't know about you, but if I was stuck in this airplane he's the guy I like to have flying it, because it's hard to imagine much better experience than that. His experience was absolutely tightly coupled perfect, to the scenario, to the situation that he was facing. The question I want you to think about now is this, how often is it the case that your experience is so perfectly tied in to the challenge that you're facing? Whatever work you happen to do. When that experience is not exactly the right experience, because it's a bit of a new situation or a little bit different. How often do you still rely on that same experience? These are rhetorical questions, of course, because we all know the answer. Of course, we rely on our experience, that's all we got. We can't make up experience. But it is possible that by relying on experience that is actually not valid or not useful, we may end up making a mistake. We may end up applying an experience base that can lead us potentially astray. That's the two sides of experience and how experience can cut both ways. We always think about the first, which is how great our experience is, we seldom think about the second, which is that experience will lead us in one particular direction. In fact, it might be the wrong direction because the situation is really different. This comes from human nature. We have a natural tendency to over-generalize from small sample sizes. For example, if you've done something, think about a problem or a issue, or a project you were working on a task, and you've done it and it worked out, you did okay. Then seemingly the exact same problem lands on your desk again, how do you feel about it? Do you feel confident about it? Of course you do because you did it already. But what are you really doing? What's your brain telling you? Actually what you're really doing is you're saying because I did something once, I now can generalize that experience to this new situation. You don't have to be a statistician to know that the law of large numbers doesn't kick in at one, it kicks in closer to 30. That first time that you did whatever it is you did could have had certain idiosyncrasies. You better hope that the second time this problem comes up it is 100 percent identical to the past situation, and usually it's not. In fact, the higher up you go in a company the more the problems that land on your desk are original, are different. Because other people couldn't solve them, they couldn't figure it out and they need your help. It's really one of the most enduring human biases that we have. That we generalize from very small sample size and we gain this tremendous confidence. I mean, think about internet, businesses, and startups, and venture capital. There's Bill Gates, there's Google guys, there's Jack Ma of Alibaba, of course, there's Zuckerberg. There's a bunch of these famous people, very successful entrepreneurs who made it really big in their 20s. Does that mean that everybody does? What about the tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of other 20-somethings that have actually failed as business builders or not nearly done as well. I mean, you don't believe me? The crowdsourcing site, the fundraiser Kickstarter, helped raise money for more than 19,000 business ideas in 2013. The majority of which were set up by people in their 20s and 30s. How many actually became going concerns? Let alone became profitable? It certainly wasn't that number. Venture capitals have built an entire industry on the premise that they only need to win big in one out of 10 investments. Even talk shows, TV shows like Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, they demonstrate how few entrepreneurs as smart and capable as they may be, can really make it. But yet we generalize and we think all these companies are started. The only way to start an Internet company, or e-commerce company, or a startup, you got to be 20 years old who dropped out of college. These are exceptions to the rule. But because they're so famous, we generalize. These examples, starting with Sully, going to the Internet and startup companies really highlight that generalizing from small sample sizes is a dangerous thing. I want to elaborate on that in the next video a little bit more, with a more detailed real business case, business example for you. But at this point I think you have a pretty good sense about what Sully did amazingly right. Despite how good he was, applying that mindset of your own experience to solve every problem and believing that, that past experience is exactly right. That, that actually could create a problem because not every situation is the same.
