Error culture and decision-making offer powerful lessons from aviation for entrepreneurs facing high-stakes decisions under pressure.

After a series of fatal accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, airlines introduced the Crew Resource Management (CRM) concept. It focuses on reducing human errors by improving interpersonal communication, leadership, and decision-making.

When CRM was established, the hierarchy between the captain and the co-pilot was still significant. One of the key elements in CRM is to value all team members’ inputs equally — irrespective of rank, age, and race.

Although never having been a pilot myself, I spent the larger part of my career in the aviation industry. I have accomplished CRM training during my time at a major airline — at the request of one of my then team members, who was a pilot.

Today, I am the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company serving customers in aviation as well as in other industries. In this article, I am using my entrepreneurial perspective to carve out the two key lessons I think the world can learn from aviators.

Error Culture

Errors happen wherever humans are at work. Fatal errors typically occur due to a chain of smaller errors. So, therefore, breaking that chain of smaller errors is the key to reducing the probability of fatal errors.

Aviation has come up with a “speak up” culture to achieve this. Speaking up about errors is mandatory in airlines, and it aims in two directions:

• Pilots speaking up about something that doesn’t seem to be right actively help avoid errors before they happen
• Pilots speaking up after having made an error contribute to other pilots’ learning from their error, and in this way preventing the error from being repeated

Speaking up is actively instructed during pilot training, for it to pass into their DNA. Pilots speaking up about errors are never punished, but sometimes even get extra training to avoid the same error happening again. However, pilots who don’t speak up or try to hide an error can get punished for doing so.

In a software company, speaking up about something that doesn’t seem to be right can and should be practiced in code reviews and pair programming. In this way, security loopholes, bugs, and other problems with the code can be discovered and rectified before the code reaches production. However, code reviews should help discover errors in the actual code, not spark style or architecture discussions — these belong to the coding conventions and the architecture board, respectively. 
Here is an analogy in plain aviation language: Speaking up is about wrong procedure execution, erroneous data entry, and the like — but never for discussions about whether the procedure to perform turns with a maximum bank angle of 30 degrees is purposeful or not, or whether it makes sense to fly at all.

As an entrepreneur, I also follow the concept of not punishing people for errors. Nevertheless, when an error happens, I often want to know who made the error. This is not to blame a particular person but to initiate a discussion with that person to avoid this error from happening again. As in an airline, fatal errors in a software company are typically chains of smaller errors, and reducing those smaller errors reduces the probability of getting into big trouble.

In contrast to aviation, speaking up is not actively instructed in those professions we typically hire, so it typically takes a little more convincing until people can see the benefits of speaking up.

Decision Making

Imagine you are flying a two-engine aircraft from Zurich to Boston together with your co-pilot, and against all assumptions, you are experiencing an engine failure over the Atlantic. Modern aircraft can handle one-engine flight for a certain period, even over open water. Nevertheless, you need to make a decision right now on how to proceed with your flight, because you won’t reach Boston today for sure.

Here are some of the questions that will rush through the pilots’ heads in the troubled aircraft:

Are we close enough to the European continent for a safe return?

Shall we divert to Iceland or Greenland?

Are we close enough to the American continent to continue our flight and land at the first suitable airport?

What could go wrong between now and our landing, and what implications might this have for our diversion decision?

What emergency services are available at the diversion point in case something goes wrong during landing?

What maintenance services are available at the diversion point to get our plane repaired in due time?

There are many more questions to be answered in such a situation, but one thing is sure:

You can only decide with the information you and your co-pilot have available right now.

You can’t ask for more information, wait to see how key information such as the weather develops, or look into the future. Furthermore, you can’t under any circumstances start an argument with your co-pilot now. You need to bring that plane safely to the ground. Everything else will have to wait for the debriefing after a safe landing.

The analogy to entrepreneurship is blatant. When making a decision about market entry, product development, commercial strategy or even hiring a colleague, you can only use the information you have available right now. Your decision might prove erroneous or non-ideal at a later point in time, but it might be the best decision you can make right now. As goes the saying,

The perfect solution is the enemy of the good solution.

Never hesitate to make a decision in due time — your airplane might crash or your company might go bankrupt if you wait too long to make a decision. Make a decision, execute that decision, analyze the decision in a debriefing, learn from what went well and what didn’t, and share your learnings with your team. Then move on to the next decision.

That’s basically what entrepreneurs do all day. Entrepreneurs cannot be shy about making decisions, even if they prove erroneous or non-ideal at a later time.

And this closes the loop between decision-making and error culture.

Conclusion

Both aviators and entrepreneurs are routinely making difficult decisions with potentially life-threatening consequences. They do so in limited time and with limited information, so they always find themselves at risk of making errors.

Whilst this might sound scary, at least pilots get thorough training in decision-making and learning from erroneous decisions.

Maybe it would pay off to send entrepreneurs to CRM courses — other industries such as health care have already started doing so.