Adapt Or Die: A Lesson From Sully's Three-Minute Flight

You know the rules for surviving in business: Streamline your process, maximize efficient work, encourage productivity in your employees. But what happens when you get thrown a curveball? Invariably, there will be something that threatens to upend your work: a crisis, unexpected competition, a new technology, shifting demands. When that happens, it can be tempting to double-down on your established way of doing things. This feels safe.

An effective leader, however, knows that these are the very moments to defy the status quo. Take Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who on a cold January day in 2009 discovered that, just after taking off from LaGuardia airport in New York, his airplane had no thrust. The plane had struck a flock of geese and lost its engine function. There were 155 people on board, and a crash seemed certain. Sully had about 3 minutes to decide what to do. Most pilots would have taken the most reliable and obvious course: They would have tried to land at the nearest airport. But Sully knew this could be catastrophic: He didn’t have time to get there, and the airplane could smash into bits. After working through the standard emergency procedures—what he should do—Sully decided to look beyond the obvious. He asked what he could do. That’s how, in an unprecedented move, he chose to land the plane in the waters of the Hudson River. Everyone was saved.

In the face of pressure, it can be tempting to rely on experience, especially if you’re a leader with many skills and deep knowledge. But this very experience can limit us. It can cause us to reach for what we already know, and fall back on obvious answers—sometimes even with disastrous consequences. It can make us default to what we should do.

Like Sully, we can rebel against our instincts. We can leverage our experience to find new answers—and ask what we could do. Sully had a lot of hard-won experience: More than 30,000 hours of flying, and a vast knowledge of airplanes and accident scenarios. Yet he had trained himself to ask, every time he walked into the cockpit: What can I learn on this flight? How might today’s flight be different?

When you approach your work with an open mindset—ready to learn, ready to adapt—you will reach better decisions in the face of a challenge. Resist the instinct to play it safe. Don’t just ask what you should do. Ask what you could do.