history Archives - understand-culture

Crew Resource Management

After the 1977 Tenerife collision, in which a captain began his takeoff roll despite warnings from his first officer and flight engineer, NASA psychologist John Lauber coined the term at a 1979 workshop. United Airlines ran the first airline programme in 1981, and the FAA later made it mandatory.

CRM keeps the command hierarchy and changes what may cross it. Junior crew are trained to question the captain, and — in the phrase used in the training — to advocate for critical information until it is acted upon.

An American industry concluded that its aircraft were failing because information was not moving, and rebuilt its training around the flow rather than around the flying.

The Incident Command System

Developed after the California wildfires of the 1970s, when agencies arriving at the same fire could not talk to each other, and now the national standard for every kind of US emergency response. Its core is a defined communications structure: who reports to whom, on what channel, in what format, before anyone arrives.

The Challenger launch

Engineers at Morton Thiokol argued against launching in the cold the night before, and recommended against it. The objection did not survive the chain of meetings between them and the launch decision.

The Rogers Commission found the technical cause in the O-ring, and the organizational cause in a communication structure that filtered the warning out on its way up.

The shot clock

Basketball teams that were ahead used to stall, holding the ball and refusing to shoot. The NBA’s answer was a clock forcing a shot attempt within twenty-four seconds. The sport changed its own rules because not acting was ruining it to watch.

The American Dream

The phrase was coined by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, published in 1931.

Nineteen thirty-one. Unemployment near a quarter of the workforce, banks failing, the Dust Bowl beginning. That is when the country produced the phrase for its own optimism, and the phrase stuck.

We choose to go to the moon

Kennedy at Rice University in 1962: we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

The difficulty is offered as the reason rather than the obstacle. Nobody had been to the moon, no vehicle existed that could go there, and the deadline was set anyway.

Horatio Alger

A nineteenth-century American novelist who wrote the same book more than a hundred times: a poor boy, honest and hardworking, rises through his own effort. The plots were formulaic and the books sold enormously. His name became a common noun for the story itself.

Land-grant universities

The Morrill Act of 1862 gave states federal land to fund colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts. Later legislation added agricultural experiment stations and the Cooperative Extension Service — agents placed in counties across the country to carry research findings directly to working farmers.

American higher education built a delivery system into its founding statute. The knowledge was required to reach the field.

David Hilbert

In lectures given in 1922 at Göttingen, Hilbert launched his Beweistheorie — proof theory. The aim was to take the proofs of mathematics and make them themselves the object of investigation, to establish that no contradiction could ever be derived within the system.

As he put it, we move to a higher level of contemplation, from which the axioms, formulae and proofs of the mathematical theory are themselves the objects of investigation.

Not: are these results correct. But: is this way of reaching results sound at all.

Pragmatism as a national philosophy

Peirce, James and Dewey between them built the only philosophical school America originated, and its founding move was to test ideas by their consequences rather than their coherence. It shaped Progressive-era reform, the New Deal, and American legal thinking. The country’s one native philosophy is a philosophy of what works.