Name: Lessons from a former Air Force pilot on counterintuitive thinking | Jeff Kozak | TED Institute
Uploaded: 2020-03-20T18:51:07.000Z
Duration: 7 min
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Abraham Wald was a remaining mathematician that was asked, during World War Two, where to put additional armor to prevent more aircraft from being shot down.

The conventional wisdom at the time was to put the additional armor on the returning airplanes, where they had the most bullet holes, the wing and fuselage.

This type of thinking was based on the returning aircraft, not the aircraft that were lost.

Walt had some counter intuitive, controversial ideas.

You put the additional armor where there were the least bullet holes, the engines.

This was opposite of the recommendation of many of the engineering minds of the day, but Walter reasoned that the returning aircraft clearly proved that multiple hits to the wings and fuselage could be survived, but numerous hits of the engines could not.

World small insight resulted in both less fatalities and more aircraft saved to be able to return to the fight.

His counter intuitive thinking resulted in Maur Allied victories in the air.

Unless Airman Lives Lost, World's contribution didn't stop there.

Air Force of the Navy continued to use his methodologies in the Korean and Vietnam wars, where more countless lives were saved.

Innovation isn't always about inventing something new or a new way of doing things.

Sometimes it's looking at a problem from a slightly different angle and often considering the opposite of the typical solution.

I'd like to read that to you again because it took me more than once to really understood what that means.

I'm a colonel in Air Force Reserve in an MD 11 captain for a Fortune 100 logistics company.

My role at the airline is to optimize fuel efficiency.

It's an important objective because fuel is our largest expense over $1.3 billion a year.

When I joined the fuel efficiency team, I learned that we air tanker fuel into our busiest hub during our busiest time of year.

So what is there to anchoring Air tanker is when you put enough extra fuel on an aircraft that flies into that busiest tub, doesn't require fuel on the ground, and then it can continue on to its next destination.

The conventional thinking when air tanker ring is that more fuel is better.

But I had a hunch that this was an inefficient plan.

There was both costly to the airline and produce excessive co two emissions.

My team and I crunched the numbers, and we knew if we wanna optimize fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emission that we need to stop the focus and really understand what the exact fuel was by stopping adding extra fuel.

If we could determine the exact amount of fuel to get that aircraft to its next destination, that would be perfect.

And we found that it required much less fuel than had been previously planned.

So instead of the mentality of more fuel is better.

We looked at the requirements and determine what the exact fuel requirements were.

This was a counterintuitive recommendation to the organization that met met resistance every step of the way because it went against the conventional thinking of how we had always air tanker fuel.

If we could get the company to focus on the exact fuel versus more fuel, we knew we could save the airlines money.

It turns out we were able to save the company over 1/2 a $1,000,000 and reduce CO two emissions by over 1300 tons in 10 days.

Although Chan, challenging innovation through counterintuitive thinking, can have a profound impact by creating tremendous efficiencies, increasing the company's bottom line and positively impacting the environment, it can also that counterintuitive thinking save lives Once on a five and 1/2 hour mission flying from Southern California toe Hawaii, we were fueling six F 18 aircraft.

The F eighteens are very fast aircraft, but they cannot fly over the ocean without aerial refueling on this particular mission halfway across the Pacific, one of those aircraft suffered an engine failure, and I could tell you the nearest piece of land was about 1250 miles away.

So I want you to take a moment and imagine how that pilot was feeling when that happened.

He's leaving his lifeline of that tanker above.

He doesn't know if he has enough fuel to make it why, and I'm confident that he was questioning his ultimate fate.

At that point, my team and I I had to come up with a plan quickly on how we're gonna refuel that disabled aircraft.

I can tell you there aren't any procedures for that type of.

Um, there isn't a procedure in this particular situation.

If we did not figure out a plan, that mission was gonna end catastrophically.

We caught up to him as he in the descent.

We tried all the typical procedures on how you would refuel him.

But with each of those option, it threatened to make his aircraft more unstable.

If we did not consider the most out of the box counterintuitive and solution better.

So we tried to think of something different.

We allowed both airplanes to descend together in what is a slow aircraft refueling technique called the control decent.

This is not a procedure that we use normally used on an F 18.

However, in this case, a slow aircraft refueling procedure on a fast air airplane worked in this case, a fast airplane problem required a slow airplane solution.

And I can tell you, when I saw him later that night, I hadn't I hadn't seen a happier pilot and I couldn't be happier than sharing him sharing my ties with him.

So I'd like to leave you with these final thoughts.

Continue to strive to see things differently.

And despite the resistance that thinking's can often bring, embracing the counter intuitive can make all the difference.

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Lessons from a former Air Force pilot on counterintuitive thinking | Jeff Kozak | TED Institute

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