TL:DR: Cognitive Offloading is the behavior that makes strartups tick - or not

The Farm Not Bought

13 years ago to the day, an Airbus 320 flying under the call-sign Cactus 1549 and carrying 150 passengers and 5 crew experienced an abrupt loss of thrust on both engines soon after take-off.

The Pilot Flying at that time was the First Officer, which made the Captain the Pilot Not Flying at that instant; within the next few minutes, the crew made a number of crucial decisions; the first two of these decisions must have been drilled extensively and automatic, but beyond that they had to “play by ear” using several fundamental techniques they were trained on.

The playbook moves were: turning on the Auxiliary Power Unit to regain electrical power supply and the Captain, being the more senior pilot on the Airbus, assuming controls and becoming the Pilot Flying; in addition to that he assumed comms, which meant that the First Officer could focus on the engine restart checklist.

The “happy flow” for instantaneous loss of thrust, one that happens literally 99.99% of the time is “restarting” the engines to “squeeze out” enough thrust to reach a nearby airport. Engine restarts require several critical steps. By taking over controls and comms, the Captain actually freed the mental space for the First Officer to retry the checklist as many times as possible in the short time they had had.

When you’re this low and out of thrust, things develop quickly. The Captain chose a nearby airport to divert to, communicated that choice to the ATC, but soon had the presense of mind to realize that no thrust was being regained. Overcoming the standard bias of sticking with a choice that was no longer possible (“get-there-itis”), the Captain put himself to play the worst-case hand and accordingly reversed his landing decision in favor of the agonizing alternative of ditching in a nearby water body. For that he configured (“lined up”) the aircraft and informed the cabin crew.

It was at that point that the Captain asked the First Officer if he had any ideas. That was the last and probably the only available moment to apply “high-level cognition” to the question of whether ditching had remained inevitable and to get another “mental scan” on the aircraft’s configuration. The First Officer said he did not have any ideas, so the Captain told him to brace.

20 seconds later and a grand total of 208 seconds since the loss of thrust, the aircraft touched down on water. An almost textbook-perfect ditching ensued, which means that the aircraft decelerated smoothly and remained afloat for even longer than the minimal 90 seconds it takes to evacuate. The accident became known as the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilots - Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles - were rightfully recognized as heros.

What does the above have to do with startups?

So just to begin with the obvious: startups are way less dramatic than that; typically nobody’s life is immediately at stake.

Yet I would not be the first to propose the analogy of startup life to an aircraft that does not (yet) have enough engine power to soar.

Cognitive load management is the skill that made the difference between the default outcome of everybody perishing and the unlikely outcome that allowed everybody to survive. Alongside the successes of pilots doing a fantastic job of managing their own and each other’s mental spaces during the Cactus 1549 accident and other times, there were also multiple cases of lives lost as a direct consequence of pilots failing in that specific skill. In a similar vein, I’d personally heard of more than one startup in which the leadership went into a loop on doing the wrong things, causing an otherwise salvageable business to fail.

There are several important lessons that the Cactus 1549 story carries directly and unequivocally for startups:

The life-saving cognitive workload management skills are learnable! The Cactus 1549 pilots underwent their basic training and started their careers in the 1970 and 80s, when cognitive workload management was still not a part of training or selection for pilot jobs. They must have undergone follow-up training after it became available at some time in the 1990s. The described accident is only one of many in the recent years in which that training transformed outcomes. What it means for start-ups is obvious.
Although in hindsight the Captain was responsible for the most dramatic part of the action, had the engines been recoverable, the success would have been attributable to the First Officer’s actions. One of them had a success path that involved a lot of dramatic decisions, whereas the other - a pre-designed checklist. A priori, both were equally valuable in managing the different facets of the crisis. The moral here is that heroism is just one approach, not necessarily the best one, even in hindsight, and that success originates in group dynamics rather than individual actions.
A leader’s job is to prepare for the worst. However it is often the case that someone else in the organization actually holds the key for some kind of a better outcome, without the leader being aware of it (being rightfully busy planning for the worst). The lesson: teams should be biased to allow for a diversity of team-driven and team-owned approaches – not just to tolerate them, but rather to empower and provide the necessary decision space, resources and encouragement.
Conversely, as an employee, your greatest contribution in a lot of cases is recognizing tracks of work that are both transformative for the greater mission and that you can own (as opposed to relying on leadership’s mental presence over time - which simply is too much to ask).
No point is too late to ask the team around for ideas appropriate for the situation, and to attempt acting if something comes up.