Patrick Mosher uses the Titanic's Marconi operators ignoring iceberg warnings to show how teams dismiss disruptions outside their job description. Leaders must make organizational values explicit and train teams with realistic scenarios to distinguish distractions from true crises.
Chapters
Guests on this world-class cruise were either taking a moonlight stroll on the deck or soundly asleep in their cabin. Marconi telegraph operators worked busily into the night planning tomorrow night's extravagant party. Over the telegraph lines, they gathered details from friends and family from New York to Boston so they could make the party extra special. Imagine their excitement as as their plans started coming together. Are you getting excited about an upcoming party? How do you feel the night before? A little nervous? Your excitement builds as you see the pieces fit together. You see the end in sight. And then— disruption. Something totally unrelated crashes into your party planning. Have you ever experienced that kind of disruption? How do you handle it? Do you ignore the disruption altogether? Do you minimize your attention on the disruption so you can stay focused on your main job—planning the perfect party? The night is April 11, 1912. Marconi operators are aboard the Titanic. As they work the telegraph lines to plan the perfect party, they are interrupted. The annoying disruption? Weather reports of icebergs. Annoyed by the disruption, they quickly rebuke the inbound radio operators for their interference and keep the main task at the forefront: party planning. Look, you can't blame them for staying focused on their primary job responsibilities. After all, the Marconi operators weren't even employed by White Star Cruise Lines. They weren't members of the crew. Their specific job responsibility was guest services. Key metric? Customer satisfaction. Reporting weather conditions to the crew wasn't even in their job description. If you are a high-performance leader, you've seen this a million times. You give your team a specific set of responsibilities. They execute smoothly, efficiently, and responsibly. Everything is working great. Then something out of the ordinary disrupts the, that perfect flow. There's an innate human instinct to return to normal as fast as possible, not giving the disruption priority. What does your team do when disruption is the priority? How many times as a high-performance leader have you encouraged your team to stay the course, ignore the disruption, and crash forward? Yeah, me too. We teach our teams to ignore and minimize disruptions. We think of them as distractions. It's difficult to train a team to handle the unexpected, especially to train them to pivot away from their primary job responsibilities and pivot towards disruption, making it the new highest priority. High-performing teams are fluid. They are built on trust. They execute their primary job responsibilities efficiently and smoothly. And they keep the primary values of humanity and organization at the forefront as they either disregard distractions or pivot towards disruptions. That's tricky. As a high-performance leader, it is of the urgent and utmost importance that your team operates with organization values that guide behavior in both normal flow and disruptive flow. Make your organization values explicit. Conduct training which proposes hypothetical situations that challenge those values, pushing moral and ethical boundaries. Help them discern between distractions to avoid and disruptions to prioritize. Believe me, these hypotheticals are better navigated in training rather than in real life. Is your team focused on the right things? Will they apply your organization values as they navigate the unexpected? Let's avoid the icebergs and cruise to success.
