1: It was a bright, sunny November morning in 2010.
“Qantas Airways Flight 32 took off from Singapore en route to Sydney,” Fred Kofman writes in his book The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
As pilot Richard de Crespigny flew the plane to eight thousand feet, he heard a loud boom. Then, a crashing sound.
“One of the engines had caught fire,” Fred writes. “The ensuing explosion tore fragments through the underside of the plane.”
A red alarm flashed on the control panel. “A siren shrieked in the cockpit,” Fred notes. “The plane started shaking. Suddenly everything started to fail—fuel pumps, electrical systems, hydraulics. Twenty-one of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled.”
Richard steered the plane back to Singapore. “On the emergency descent, the computer system sounded, ‘Stall! Stall! Stall!’; [he] ignored the automated voice and stayed focused on his task.”
The runway was just long enough for the airplane to make its landing. If Richard overshot it, the plane would crash into dunes.
Just one hundred meters short of the dunes, the plane stopped.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Richard said over the intercom. “Welcome to Singapore. The local time is five minutes to midday on Thursday, November 4, and I think you’ll agree that was one of the nicest landings we have experienced for a while.”
Afterward, the crash investigators said Qantas Flight 32 was the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Richard was declared a hero.
2: When Fred leads workshops, he asks the participants to imagine being a passenger on the plane that day.
“Suddenly we hear the explosion and see pieces of the engine fall away. A minute later we see the pilot coming out of the cockpit and taking a seat in the cabin,” he writes. “Freaking out, we ask him what’s going on.”
He tells us that one of the engines has failed.
“Then what the hell are you doing here?” we ask. “Why aren’t you in the cockpit?”
“Because fixing this problem is not my job; this is a maintenance problem,” he responds.
Fred then asks the workshop participants, “What would you tell him?”
“After some discussion,” he observes, “the group always concludes that it doesn’t matter who or what caused the problem. What matters is the captain’s absolute responsibility for the safety of the passengers and crew. Anything that happens on the captain’s watch is his or her responsibility.”
2: Fred reflects: “I’ve had to apply this hard lesson many times as the captain of my fifty-foot sailboat, Satori. Everything that happens during the sail is my responsibility. If a storm surprises me, I didn’t look at the weather carefully enough. If something breaks, I didn’t inspect it carefully enough. If one of my crew does something unsafe, I didn’t train them well enough. If one of my passengers hurts himself, I didn’t brief him thoroughly enough or check that he understood and was able to execute my instructions.
“Everything that happens on my boat is on me.”
It’s the same for us. If we want to be the captain of our business or of our lives, we must accept total responsibility for everything that happens. We own it. We’re accountable.
“Rather than being a victim of external circumstances,” he writes, we “must be the master of our actions—the one who makes choices and produces consequences with ultimate response-ability.”
Indeed.
“In the play called ‘Your Business and Your Life,’ we are onstage as the central character,” he observes. We “are not a spectator; we are the writer-director-actor. We contribute to bring events about, and we contribute to shape the future—always.
“As a player, we are in the game; we affect the result.
“As a victim, we are out of the game; we are at the mercy of those to whom we have surrendered the field.
“What kind of leader do we want to be?” he asks. “More important, what kind of leader will we choose to be?”
This is what response-ability looks like in action. No matter what happens, we can choose our response.
“It’s about focusing on the aspects of reality that we can influence,” he writes, “instead of feeling victimized by circumstances that we cannot. It’s about being the main character of our own lives.”
We don’t ask, “Why is this happening to me?” We say, “What can I do when this happens?”
“Response-ability means we don’t take anything personally. It doesn’t rain on us; it just rains, period,” Fred writes. “Instead of blaming the rain, we carry an umbrella to stay dry when it rains. And if we get wet, we know it’s because we didn’t bring an umbrella, because we were not prepared.”
3: This lesson is also true of our organizations.
We and our colleagues can choose our response to every situation. We can choose to focus on what we can do. Instead of focusing on what is out of our control. We can ask: “How are we going to accomplish our mission in spite of this challenge?”
People misunderstand the difference between choosing our response and choosing the outcome.
“Response-ability does not mean success-ability,” Fred observes. “There is no guarantee that the actions we and our teams take will yield the results that we want. The only guarantee is that we can respond to our circumstances in pursuit of our goals and in alignment with our values.
“That’s the best we can do as human beings,” he observes,”—and it’s not a small thing. Our response-ability is a direct expression of our consciousness and free will. To be an effective leader, in fact, to become fully human, we need to become fully response-able.”
Imagine we are playing cards. We don’t control the cards we are dealt.
If we “spend all our time complaining and making excuses for our cards, we will feel disempowered and most likely lose the game,” he notes.
“But if we see ourselves as having a choice in playing our cards, our feelings will change,” Fred predicts. “We’ll have a sense of possibility. Even if we don’t win a given hand, we can always do our best with the cards we’ve been dealt, play fair, and improve our odds of winning the overall game.”
Response-ability is also not the same as assuming guilt.
We “are not responsible for our circumstances; we are response-able in the face of your circumstances.”
One extreme example: Poverty. We “are not responsible for poverty,” he writes. We “didn’t create it; it’s not our fault; we’re not to blame. Poverty exists independent of us. It was there before we were born and will be there after we die. In a reasonable sense, poverty is not a problem of our doing.
“We are, however, able to respond to poverty,” Fred notes. “If we are born into poverty, we can work hard and look for avenues that will lead us out of poverty. If we care about the poverty we see around us in society, we can make it our problem. Poverty is a brutal fact—we can learn about it, study how to ameliorate it, donate time and money to the right causes and organizations, we can start our own organization or volunteer for the Peace Corps. We can, if we wish, devote our lives to helping the poor.”
The bottom line, according to Fred: “External facts are information, not stimuli. We don’t answer the phone because it rings. Rather, we choose to answer the phone when it rings, because we decide it is better to answer the call than not to. External circumstances and internal impulses influence our behavior but they don’t determine it. They may tempt us, but they don’t ‘make us do it.’ We are human; we are conscious; we are free.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Think of a recent situation where things went wrong. How did I respond? Was I the victim or the player?
Action: Journal about the situation and our response. Is there anything I would have done differently?
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