Outliers, The Story of Success

A TC: You have, ah, you have enough fuel to make it to...

The transcript ends.

“The thing you have to understand about that crash,” Ratwatte said, "is that New York air traffic controllers are famous for being rude, aggressive, and bullying. They are also very good. They handle a phenomenal amount of traffic in a very constrained environment. There is a famous story about a pilot who got lost trafficking around JFK. You have no idea how easy that is to do at JFK once you're on the ground. It's a maze. Anyway, a female con-

* We know this because the flight attendant survived the crash and testified at the inquest.

troller got mad at him, and said, 'Stop. Don't do anything. Do not talk to me until I talk to you.' And she just left him there. Finally the pilot picks up the microphone and says, 'Madam. Was I married to you in a former life?'

“They are unbelievable. The way they look at it, it's 'I'm in control. Shut up and do what I say.' They will snap at you. And if you don't like what they tell you to do, you have to snap back. And then they'll say, 'All right, then.' But if you don't, they'll railroad you. I remember a British Airways flight was going into New York. They were being stuffed around by New York Air Traffic Control. The British pilots said, 'You people should go to Heathrow and learn how to control an airplane.' It's all in the spirit. If you are not used to that sort of give-and-take, New York A TC can be very, very intimidating. And those Avianca guys were just intimidated by the rapid fire.”

It is impossible to imagine Ratwatte not making his case to Kennedy A TCnot because he is obnoxious or pushy or has an enormous ego, but because he sees the world differently. If he needed help in the cockpit, he would wake up the second crew. If he thought Moscow was wrong, well, he would just go to Helsinki, and if Helsinki was going to bring him in with the wind, well, he was going to talk them into bringing him in against the wind. That morning, when they were leaving Helsinki, he had lined up the plane on the wrong runwayand his first officer had quickly pointed out the error. The memory made Ratwatte laugh. “Masa is Swiss. He was very happy to correct me. He was giving me shit the whole way back.”

Ratwatte continued: “All the guys had to do was tell the controller, 'W e don't have the fuel to comply with what 2OI you are trying to do/ Allthey had to do was say,'Wecan't do that. We have to land in the next ten minutes.' They weren't able to put that across to the controller.”

It was at this point that Ratwatte began to speak carefully, because he was about to make the kind of cultural generalization that often leaves us uncomfortable. But what happened with Avianca was just so strangeso seemingly inexplicablethat it demanded a more complete explanation than simply that Klotz was incompetent and the captain was tired. There was something more profoundmore structuralgoing on in that cockpit. What if there was something about the pilots' being Colombian that led to that crash“Look, no American pilot would put up with that. That's the thing,” Ratwatte said. “They would say, 'Listen, buddy. I have to land.' ”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede was working for the human resources department of IBM's European headquarters. Hofstede's job was to travel the globe and interview employees, asking about such things as how people solved problems and how they worked together and what their attitudes were to authority. The questionnaires were long and involved, and over time Hofstede was able to develop an enormous database for analyzing the ways in which cultures differ from one another. Today “Hofstede's Dimensions” are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology.

Hofstede argued, for example, that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. He called that measurement the “individualism-collectivism scale.” The country that scores highest on the individualism end of that scale is the United States. Not surprisingly, the United States is also the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide its citizens with universal health care. At the opposite end of the scale is Guatemala.

A nother of Hofstede's dimensions is “uncertainty avoidance.” How well does a culture tolerate ambiguityHere are the top five “uncertainty avoidance” countries, according to Hofstede's databasethat is, the countries most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstances:

1. Greece 2. Portugal 3. Guatemala 4. Uruguay 5. Belgium The bottom fivethat is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguityare:

It is important to note that Hofstede wasn't suggesting that there was a right place or a wrong place to be on any one of these scales. Nor was he saying that a culture's position on one of his dimensions was an ironclad predictor of how someone from that country behaves: it's not impossible, for example, for someone from Guatemala to be highly individualistic.

What he was saying, instead, was something very similar to what Nisbett and Cohen argued after their hallway studies at the University of Michigan. Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.

Belgium and Denmark are only an hour or so apart by airplane, for example. Danes look a lot like Belgians, and if you were dropped on a street corner in Copenhagen, you wouldn't find it all that different from a street corner in Brussels. But when it comes to uncertainty avoidance, the two nations could not be further apart. In fact, Danes have more in common with Jamaicans when it comes to tolerating ambiguity than they do with some of their European peers. Denmark and Belgium may share in a kind of broad European liberal-democratic tradition, but they have different histories, different political structures, different religious traditions, and different languages and food and architecture and literaturegoing back hundreds and hundreds of years. And the sum total of all those differences is that in certain kinds of situations that require dealing with risk and uncertainty, Danes tend to react in a very different way from Belgians.

Of all of Hofstede's Dimensions, though, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the “Power Distance Index” (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?” To what extent do the “less powerful members of orga nizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?” How much are older people respected and fearedAre power holders entitled to special privileges?

“In low-power distance index countries,” Hofstede wrote in his classic text Culture's Consequences:

power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay. I once heard a Swedish (low PDI) university official state that in order to exercise power he tried not to look powerful. Leaders may enhance their informal status by renouncing formal symbols. In (low PDI) Austria, Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky was known to sometimes take the streetcar to work. In 1974,1 actually saw the Dutch (low PDI) prime minister, Joop den Uyl, on vacation with his motor home at a camping site in Portugal. Such behavior of the powerful would be very unlikely in high-PDI Belgium or France.“”

* Hofstede, similarly, references a study done a few years ago that compared German and French manufacturing plants that were in the same industry and were roughly the same size. The French plants had, on average, 26 percent of their employees in management and specialist positions; the Germans, 16 percent. The French, furthermore, paid their top management substantially more than the Germans did. What You can imagine the effect that Hofstede's findings had on people in the aviation industry. What was their great battle over mitigated speech and teamwork all about, after allIt was an attempt to reduce power distance in the cockpit. Hofstede's question about power distance“How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?”was the very question aviation experts were asking first officers in their dealings with captains. And Hofstede's work suggested something that had not occurred to anyone in the aviation world: that the task of convincing first officers to assert themselves was going to depend an awful lot on their culture's power distance rating.

That's what Ratwatte meant when he said that no American would have been so fatally intimidated by the controllers at Kennedy Airport. America is a classic low-power distance culture. When push comes to shove, Americans fall back on their American-ness, and that American-ness means that the air traffic controller is thought of as an equal. But what country is at the other end of the power distance scaleColombia.

In the wake of the Avianca crash, the psychologist Robert Helmreich, who has done more than anyone to argue for the role of culture in explaining pilot behavior, wrote a brilliant analysis of the accident in which he argued that we are seeing in that comparison, Hofstede argued, is a difference in cultural attitudes toward hierarchy. The French have a power distance index twice that of the Germans. They require and support hierarchy in a way the Germans simply don't.

you couldn't understand Klotz's behavior without taking into account his nationality, that his predicament that day was uniquely the predicament of someone who had a deep and abiding respect for authority. Helmreich wrote:

The high-power distance of Colombians could have created frustration on the part of the first officer because the captain failed to show the kind of clear (if not autocratic) decision making expected in high-power distance cultures. The first and second officers may have been waiting for the captain to make decisions, but still may have been unwilling to pose alternatives.

Klotz sees himself as a subordinate. It's not his job to solve the crisis. It's the captain'sand the captain is exhausted and isn't saying anything. Then there's the domineering Kennedy A irport air traffic controllers ordering the planes around. Klotz is trying to tell them he's in trouble. But he's using his own cultural language, speaking as a subordinate would to a superior. The controllers, though, aren't Colombian. They're low-power distance New Yorkers. They don't see any hierarchical gap between themselves and the pilots in the air, and to them, mitigated speech from a pilot doesn't mean the speaker is being appropriately deferential to a superior. It means the pilot doesn't have a problem.

There is a point in the transcript where the cultural miscommunication between the controllers and Klotz becomes so evident that it is almost painful to read. It's the last exchange between Avianca and the control tower, just minutes before the crash. Klotz has just said, “I guess so. Thank you very much” in response to the controller's question about their fuel state. Captain Caviedes then turns to Klotz.