Malcolm Gladwell has a highly fascinating discussion of plane crashes in his book Outliers.

It is not what you would expect! The reasons behind most plane crashes provide an excellent (and sobering) lesson in the role of communication and teamwork, and the accumulated significance of independently irrelevant, small things. Plus, it’s just plain interesting if you fly a lot (and, like me, every time you do, you think about crashing — even though you know that only 1 in 4 million commercial airliners are lost to an accident).

From Gladwell’s Outliers (pp. 183-185):

Plane crashes rarely happen in real life the same way they happen in the movies. Some engine part does not explode in a fiery bang. The rudder doesn’t suddenly snap under the force of takeoff. The captain doesn’t gasp as he’s thrown back against his seat.

The typical commercial jetliner — at this point in its stage of development — is about as dependable as a toaster. Plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions [emphasis mine].

In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor — not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other.

Then the errors start — and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another , and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster.

These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication [emphasis added]. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps — and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them.

“The whole flight-deck design is intended to be operated by two people, and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying the plane and another person who is simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated.”

Gladwell goes on to analyze several specific crashes and draw out the significance for communication patterns, team coordination and, more importantly to his point, the role of culturally absorbed mindsets in how we go about those things. As with the whole book, it is a very, very enjoyable and fruitful read.

If “this is NOT a public phone,” then why are there instructions on how to make outgoing calls (with a request to keep all calls under 3 minutes)?

I get what they mean. But, sending clear messages is a good idea…

From Seth Godin’s post yesterday, “It doesn’t hurt to ask“:

Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.

If you run into Elton John at the diner and say, “Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?” it hurts any chance you have to get on Elton John’s radar. You’ve just trained him to say no, you’ve taught him you’re both selfish and unrealistic.

If a prospect walks into your dealership and you walk up and say, “Please pay me $200,000 right now for this Porsche,” you might close the sale. But I doubt it. More likely than not you’ve just pushed this prospect away, turned the sliver of permission you had into a wall of self-protection.

Every once in a while, of course, asking out of the blue pays off. So what? That is dwarfed by the extraordinary odds of failing. Instead, invest some time and earn the right to ask. Do your homework. Build connections. Make a reasonable request, something easy and mutually beneficial. Yes leads to yes which just maybe leads to the engagement you were actually seeking.

The talks given at the TED conferences are some of the best you will ever see. While the actual conference is open to only about 1,000 attendees by invitation only, most of the presentations are available free online.

I highly recommend checking out some of the TED talks. Two sentences on their website sum up what you are in for. The first is their site tagline: “Ideas worth spreading.” That’s what TED is about. The second is “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” Fantastic.

One of the reasons the talks are so good is that the TED organizers provide the presenters with ten speaking guidelines (the “TED Commandments”). I admit that the concept of “TED Commandments” is a bit hokey, but they are nonetheless very helpful. Here they are:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

(HT: Garr Reynolds; SA)

After you’ve given a presentation and want to make your slides available to people without having to email it as an attachment to lots of people, how do you do that? Slideshare.

Slideshare is an great place to upload and share the slides from your presentations. You can share them publicly or privately.

For example, I was recently at the Web 2.0 Expo, and a lot of the presenters put their slides up on Slideshare after their presentations. This was pretty handy.

You can also browse thousands of other presentations on the site. For more details, here is a helpful (slide) tour of the site. The most interesting 6 things it tells you about the site are that you can:

1. Share your presentations with the world
2. Find thousands of interesting presentations
3. Create slidecasts (slides plus audio)
4. Make professional contacts
5. Join groups about interesting topics
6. Check out slides from events you missed

Since we’re on the subject of PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations, it’s worth giving a few words on quality.

First, here’s a helpful visual summary of how to present information in a way that is interesting and does not overwhelm the user.

Second, when creating a presentation, it’s worth checking out powerpointing.com for some useful designs.

Third, it’s worth checking out Edward Tufte’s essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. He talks about the problem with PowerPoint, how to use PowerPoint right, how to avoid the boring use of bullet points, and basically blames the Challenger disaster on the incorrect use of PowerPoint.

BNET has a good 7-minute video on giving better presentations called Present Like Steve Jobs. “While most speakers merely convey information, Jobs inspires.”

Here are the main points:

1. Unveil a single headline that sets the theme. For example, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”
2. Provide the outline. For example, “I’ve got four things I’d like to talk to you about today. They are …”
3. Open and close each section with a transition in between. Make it easy for listeners to follow your story, letting your outline serve as guideposts along the way.
4. Don’t be stiff and formal. Have fun and be excited about your company, product, service.
5. If you offer numbers and statistics, make them meaningful. For example, don’t just say “we’ve sold 4 million iPhones to date.” Say, “that’s 20,000 each day since it was released.”
6. Make it visual. Don’t fill your slides with mind-numbing text and charts. Paint a picture for your audience without overwhelming them. Use video clips, demonstrations, and guests.
7. Identify your memorable moment and build up to it.
8. Rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more.
9. Give your audience an added bonus to walk away with. “One more thing …”

It’s not uncommon for people to say “I don’t like that word — it’s overused.” For example, I think the word “synergy” may have gotten burned out back in the 90s or so. Words like “strategy” and others are today’s victims.

It is important to be original. We should continually be coming up with new ways of saying important things. That not only keeps things interesting, but also advances thinking and stimulates new ideas.

Let’s just not forget that the concepts behind the words that we feel are over-used usually remain valid and significant. Don’t let the concepts be devalued in your mind because you don’t like hearing the words again and again.

And if the bulk of things in your life need to be new in order to be meaningful, you are going to get exhausted. Because even the concept of “newness” can become old. Avoiding cliches can become cliche.

And in the meantime, you’ll also be left with a reduced vocabulary for communication. Buzzwords came to exist for a reason: they do communicate something. Every field has its jargon — the medical field, sports, the business world, the world of work. Without buzzwords, there are certain things that are going to be more complicated to explain, wasting time.

Come up with new, un-buzzword-like ways of saying things continually. But you can’t reinvent the whole field of buzzwords at once. You will always have to use them in some way or another.

The problem is when people use buzzwords without really understanding what they mean, as an attempt to appear credible simply because they’ve used a certain word. That’s ugly, and to be avoided. But the intelligent, thoughtful use of a buzzword sometimes is what keeps the ideas clear and facilitates effective conversation. Maybe, when used in that way, they aren’t even buzzwords after all.

This is probably a bit of risky post — it sounds like I’m devaluing the concept of newness and originality. But I’m saying the opposite: namely, let’s make sure we don’t become unoriginal in our opposition to lack of originality.