In the modern era, all aircraft are equipped with Ground Proximity Warning Systems (GPWS), which warn pilots when they’re flying dangerously close to terrain.
To resolve any ambiguity, touching the ground when you didn’t intend to is always bad, and usually fatal.
GPWS uses a radio signal to measure distance from terrain and then does a bunch of math, taking into account airspeed, vertical velocity, and other stuff based on the phase of flight.
If it senses a collision risk, it alerts the crew and illuminates a warning.
“Pull up, pull up.”
You will have seen this in any number of movies, flight sims, or in your own experience. There’s a guy on YouTube who has basically made a song out of it.
The problem with any automated warning system is that while it provides an additional safety margin, it also provides false warnings. When false warnings are too numerous, pilots begin silencing them without consciously processing their validity.
Eventually, ignoring warnings and getting away with it results in ignoring a warning and not getting away with it.
In just about any endeavor imaginable, catastrophic loss follows from becoming desensitized to valid but repetitive cues.
This can happen in the practice of leadership.
In 2008, Gen. Norton Schwartz took over as Chief of Staff of the US Air Force. His predecessor had been sacked amid perceptions that the service wasn’t committed to the war in Iraq, padlocked instead on modernizing for future conflicts.
Schwartz saw it as his duty to shore up political support and preserve the institution’s long-term interests. To do this, he directed an “all-in” approach to Iraq.
Modernization and training were throttled force-wide. Airmen were pressed into direct combat roles on the ground to ameliorate Army personnel shortages. Basically everything that wasn’t connected to the active fight stopped.
And what also stopped was any and all meaningful conversation, debate, discussion, or disagreement. Schwartz and his team felt the survival of the Air Force as an independent institution was at stake. A muscular autocracy was invoked to preserve it.
Over the course of the next few years, morale, readiness, and retention slipped badly. Service mentality, esprit de corps, heritage, and traditions were diluted by mass participation in ground warfighting roles. The Air Force championed and heralded achievements reinforcing an identity different from its own, which really pissed a lot of people off.
And amid all this change, there was a lot of complaining by those who noticed what was happening. Those complaints were silenced without being consciously processed, like nuisance GPWS warnings.
This is part of the story of how the Air Force got into an institutional tailspin. Values and culture fell aside, strong leaders voted with their feet, and the rank and file lost trust and confidence in their senior leaders. It was the beginning of a long season of pain.
The Air Force of today is still trying to recover. Modernization is behind schedule. There aren’t enough pilots to execute the mission. Recruiting goals are not being met, and support infrastructure is noticeably decayed in many places.
This all adds up to elevated risk in a fighting force keeping watch over a powder keg of interstate tension.
This is kinda how it goes when moral courage is required too often in an organization. People who care about what matters keep sounding the alarm on things executives can’t or won’t confront. The alarm keeps getting silenced.
Eventually it becomes impossible to distinguish run-of-the-mill complaining from a serious callout. This is pretty much the definition of being desensitized to feedback from your own people.
How to avoid this seemingly unavoidable and grim situation?
Well, first of all it’s important accept that there will always be a residual level of sport-bitching in any organization. When people stop complaining, that’s when you know something is really wrong. Either they have stopped caring altogether or completely lost confidence that anyone will listen or care. When cynicism slips into defeatism, the hourglass on strategic death is overturned.
But as a leader, you need to be able to spot a genuine complaint when it’s raised, and this becomes too difficult if too many complaints are flooding the zone. So there are two things you must do to avoid desensitization.
First, reduce policies and decisions that create moral dilemmas. If you’re getting numb to complaints, this is a signal in itself. When everything is unpopular with everyone, this usually means the overall direction is wrong.
Second, make sure people feel free to challenge. Avoid muscular autocracy that favors compliance over character. Invite challenge. Make sure you hear warnings.
When people are free to challenge and things are going well enough that genuine challenges are appropriately rare, spotting strategically valid issues in feedback become easier. The stakes of disagreement become more obvious.
And this is how you prevent missing a valid cue that could save the organization.
Because eventually, ignoring warnings and getting away with it results in ignoring a warning and not getting away with it.
Because in just about any endeavor imaginable, catastrophic loss follows from becoming desensitized to valid but repetitive cues.
Leadership is tricky, especially at strategic level. Understand the risk of building this particular numbness trap … and as a consequence flying into the ground.
Once that’s happened, recovery might be impossible.
TC is a senior leader, organizational scientist, and former combat pilot who understands team dynamics in aviation terms.