Business managers love football. They love football analogies, they love the tough language, the locker room speeches and the simplicity of the win-lose measurement system.
What they don’t love, apparently, is practice. Most winning football teams get that way because they get the most out of their practice sessions. And players get the most out of themselves by hard, focused effort in practice; doing the same thing the right way over and over until both your mind and your body ache;.
Business managers are different. They don’t practice, and generally do little, if anything, to refresh their skills. This is especially true in smaller businesses, but the behavior pattern isn’t much different in large corporations.
For some reason, business managers believe that the lessons of practice and preparedness don’t apply to them. They believe, instead, that you can “learn by doing.” That is like saying that you get to be an outstanding professional football player by playing a lot of football, or become a concert pianist not by slogging through daily exercises but by just playing the piano a lot.
Some managers rely on the belief that football is physical and needs practice but management, being mental, does not. But neither life nor football work that way.
Piloting a passenger jet aircraft, for example, takes a combination of physical and mental skills. And these skills are practiced and tested regularly. Advances made in computer controls and the increasingly sophisticated use of algorithms, though, have raised questions about the effects of cockpit automation on pilot proficiency.
Those questions have been given an additional sense of urgency because of a series of recent accidents that pointed to pilot error as a cause or a contributing factor. A most interesting research report was published last May in the journal, “Human Factors” entitled, “The Retention of Manual Flying Skills in the Automated Cockpit.”
The researchers “tested the manual flying skills of a sample of airline pilots who have spent the majority of their flying careers operating highly automated airplanes.” Their findings supported earlier research on the subject, but provided a surprise, too — one that has implications that go far beyond airplane cockpits.
The test results indicated that automation did not significantly reduce pilots’ manual flying proficiency, the so-called “stick-and-rudder” skills involved in controlling an airplane in three-dimensional space. Overall, test results showed that “Pilots’ instrument scanning and manual control skills…were found to be largely intact.”
Those results were unexpected, but even more surprising were the scores on the thinking side of aircraft piloting — what psychologists call “the cognitive skills.” The researchers report that, “when we tested the cognitive skills that accompany manual flight, we observed more frequent and serious problems. Pilots sometimes struggled to maintain an awareness of where the airplane was with respect to the planned route…and to recognize and deal with instrument systems failures when they arose.”
Workplace management is different from piloting a passenger jet, and yet there are similarities. Managers who learn their initial lessons well — their “stick and rudder skills” — do not tend to forget them, despite the increasing levels of information and process automation in the workplace.
What often deteriorate are the thinking skills in the areas of “situational awareness,” as well as in recognizing and dealing with the systems failures that arise. Managers tend to become masters of the mini-world that workplace automation creates for them and lose sight of how that mini-world fits into the larger picture — the “flight plan” of the organization.
Managers’ situational awareness skills usually deteriorate from disuse. They are not needed every day, and, instead, a manager’s typical day is filled with tasks that require mental effort, but not independent thought. This is not a dumbing-down but a numbing-down of work.
The numbing-down produces inadequate, late or warped responses when confronted with system failures or emergency situations of any sort. It could explain how a passenger aircraft fully manned with experienced professionals can land disastrously short of the runway. And it also could explain how a dangerous automobile quality issue can remain unaddressed for years.
There is considerable uncertainty about how to deal with the numbing-down effects of automated systems. While we’re waiting, managers need to keep their cognitive skills proficiency up through training and, most important, practice, practice, practice.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
