Sometimes You Gotta go with the Flow
I’m on vacation with my family this week and getting to our destination certainly gave me plenty of time to think about this week’s message. As we landed in Houston on our flight from Denver, we were informed that our second of three flights of the day had been cancelled. Now full disclosure, I typically avoid connecting flights like the plague for this exact reason, but in this case, our destination was a little more off the beaten path than normal (Puerto Escondido, Mexico). The cancellation caused us to miss our third flight which was on a different airline, adding even more complexity to the situation. After being rebooked on a new flight that was five hours later then our original, we purchased a different flight for the third leg of the trip so that we would still arrive on the same day. Then that plan went out the window as lightning shut down the airport in Houston, causing our rebooked flight to be delayed an additional 2.5 hours. We ended up arriving in Mexico City at 11pm, having to find a hotel room for the night so that we could be back the next morning to catch another new flight to our final destination.
Spending almost an entire day in an airport with your wife and two kids is far from an ideal start to vacation. There were certainly some tears, moments when we got short with one another, and feelings of despair, but for the most part we kept our composure and made the best of it. April and I did find ourselves questioning our decisions and beating ourselves up as if we were in control over the events of the day. It was fitting when my six-year-old daughter, said; “Daddy - sometimes it’s ok to have a bad day. You just have to take a deep breath and then you can try to make it better.”
The “illusion of control” is a term coined by psychologist Ellen Langer and refers to a tendency for people to believe they have more control over outcomes than they actually do. On the extremes, this shows up in gambling - people believing they will have a positive outcome if they play a slot machine a certain way, or fans wearing that “lucky jersey” to help their team win a big game. Daniel Kahneman also talks about this tendency in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow and the systems that contribute to our desire to try to explain why things happen despite having little to no factual evidence.
It’s been proven that stressful environments actually encourage the illusion of control and leaders today face no shortage of stressful situations. Great leadership requires us to differentiate between things we can change and those which are out of our control. There is pressure to steer our people and organizations in the right direction, but assuming we can manipulate every result in our favor is a mistake. There are outside factors that impact us (COVID, anyone?) and circumstances that we simply must deal with. And in these moments, sometimes the best course of action is actually, inaction. Instead of struggling and fighting against what we can’t control, it’s better to let things play out and direct our energy to somewhere that will be more productive. For me and my family this week it was taking a few deep breaths, playing games, adventuring through the airport, and trying to make the best of an otherwise crappy situation.