A Window for the Pilots

Something we’ve been thinking about

In Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the seven Mercury astronauts spent much of their early training arguing with the engineers. The capsule they had been given to fly had no window, no manual controls, and no override. Their job, as the engineers had designed it, was to sit still while the rocket flew them. Chuck Yeager, looking on from the test-pilot world, dismissed them as cargo. The astronauts pushed back until they got a window, an attitude controller, and the ability to take over from the automatic systems if those systems failed.

How we see it through leadership economics

Pride was part of it, but the deeper issue was ownership and trust. The pilots had spent years earning a seat on those flights, demonstrating they could handle the unexpected. The engineers had built modern marvels, and they saw safety as a system to design rather than a skill to deploy.

Manual overrides and a window would not have made the mission meaningfully riskier. While the engineers had carefully thought through possible failures and redundancies, the pilots understood that there are some failures you can’t see coming. They wanted ownership over how those failures would be handled, and they wanted the engineers to trust their expertise to find an edge.

Ownership is where Execution lives. To give it is to communicate trust and offer some control over the future. Without it, the pilots were passengers in a tin can, denied a real share in something monumental. Find the level of ownership that suits a person’s preparation, but don’t send your people to space as passengers.

A line we’re sitting with

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.”

Wendell Berry, “The Real Work”