Constant Course Correction
Hello, and welcome to this week’s Mission Ignition Success Blog. I hope to warm you up with more insight into principles of effectiveness and success, so pull up a chair and put another blog on the fire (sorry, couldn’t resist). I hope this week’s thought will shed a little light on your path to success.
This week’s blog is just a little longer than usual, but will be well worth the extra two minutes you spend reading it. I thought I would share one of my favorite stories. It is based on actual facts and statistics provided by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and it has significant relevance to our journey to success. I help my clients all the time with their missions, values and visions. These documents are not only very touching and inspirational, but they typically paint a pretty lofty picture, as they should. In fact, many clients will describe the mission they discover and the vision they create as a description of their “ideal” or “perfect”. There is just one problem - they are not perfect. I am not perfect. You are not perfect. So how does an imperfect person live a perfect (or near perfect) mission? The answer is “Constant Course Correction.” Enjoy the story; it illustrates this principle beautifully.
TO ERR IS HUMAN
by Raymond JonesIf you were to take a long trip, say from San Francisco to Hawaii, aboard a 747 with several other people, you might be appalled if you knew who was flying the airplane. It is not the pilots; it is a couple of guys named Fred and George.
Fred and George are two black boxes, and they really are referred to as Fred and George. Fred is a gizmo called an Inertial Navigation System. Fred knows at every moment exactly where the airplane is and where it is supposed to be. In the old days a human navigator took a look at his instruments and did some figuring, and by the time he had the position worked out the plane was long from that spot. Fred knows now where the plane is.
George is the autopilot. He moves the controls to guide the airplane this way and that, speed it up or slow it down. He and Fred talk to each other constantly. If their conversation were in English, it would sound something like this: Fred will say, “George, we’re off course two degrees to starboard. And George will say, O.K. Fred, I’ll fix it.”
“George, we’re off course three degrees to port.”
“O.K. Fred, I’ll fix it.”
“George, we’re forty knots below our airspeed.”
“O.K. Fred, I’ll fix it.”
“George, we’re three hundred feet too low.”
“O.K. Fred, I’ll fix it.”
This conversation continues all the way to Hawaii, and George and Fred bring the giant plane within a thousand yards of the runway in Honolulu within five minutes of the scheduled time of arrival.
The incredible thing is not so much the accuracy of Fred and George, but the fact that the airplane has been in error 90% of the time of its flight. In error 90% of the time and still it lands on target and on schedule!
The secret is that George made thousands of errors in driving the airplane, but for each error Fred called out a correction and George corrected. The flight line was made up of thousands of small jogs that criss-crossed the ideal straight flight line and still put the airplane at its destination when it was suppose to be there. A rocket to the moon travels in exactly the same way.
If we human beings could see that we can get a 747 to Honolulu or a rocket to the moon even having been in error 90% of the time, we might be a little less uptight about being in error ourselves.
There’s nothing that kills performance like fear of failure, fear of being foolish, fear of being caught in error. We are particularly prone to this fear.
The secret to the success of Fred and George is correction. They work as a perfect team. Fred spots an error. George corrects it immediately. Some human beings work that way. Most don’t.
To be in life means we are constantly off course. What is important is not that we are off course, but whether or not we make the corrections that need to be made. Human beings differ from Fred and George in one important and often fatal respect - the desire to protect one’s position.
Suppose Fred and George were human and Fred had just pointed out for the fiftieth time that George was wrong. George, the human George, would likely reply, “Will you leave me alone! I’m doing the best that I can. If you think you can do any better, come and fly this thing yourself.”
Fred and George, the machines, don’t do that. They work together and get the job done. Human beings don’t like correction. They prefer to protect the position they have taken. But, in reality, any response that takes offense to correction is inappropriate. If the person who gives you correction is a fool, to be upset by a fool is to make yourself an even greater fool. If the input is of value, then to not consider it places you once again in the position of a fool.
Most people don’t make the necessary corrections because they are too busy being concerned with protection. Most people’s failures in life are a product of protecting themselves when they should have been correcting themselves.
It is almost as if people drive down the highway of life and suddenly notice that the gas gauge is nearly empty. Instead of correcting, pulling into a gas station, they cover up the gauge and pretend it isn’t there, hoping that when they wake up in the morning, an elf, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny will have filled up the gas tank.
The unwillingness to be in error and correct it is the source of most failures. Somehow the notion persists that you can get away from failure, that we can succeed enough to never fail again. That possibility just doesn’t exist. It is like trying to eat once and for all.
Successful people, like the 747 airplane, are willing to live in error and are willing to correct. They are people who are busily doing what they don’t know for sure how to do. They recognize that life is not a riskless process.
“George, you aren’t going in the right direction!”
“O.K. Fred, I”ll fix it.”
To your Success!
Kip Kint
Success Coach & President
Mission Ignition