She instinctively shifted from being a problem solver to being a tool builder— don’t just solve the problem, use the problem to build a tool!

Of course, Glenn and Cooper trained and practiced and honed their capabilities for thousands upon thousands of hours. But it is not the thousands of hours per se that made them such exquisitely designed creatures for flying. It was thousands of hours expended directly in line with a preexisting set of encodings. John Glenn would have trained and practiced just as intently for thousands of hours in chemistry, in pursuit of medical school, or in football, in hopes of an athletic career, but all that energy would have been spent out of frame. John Glenn would maybe have worked just as hard, trained just as much, but he wouldn’t have become John Glenn.

Third, to be fully in frame requires a suitable hedgehog home.

Both Glenn and Cooper flourished in the culture of elite military pilots and NASA astronauts, wherein they could count on the people around them to be reliable, trustworthy, and highly capable. And while their work came with extreme danger, they operated within a system of competence, chock-full of checks and counterchecks, with scientists and specialist engineers and support crews all working together to accomplish a clear mission and decrease risk to the pilot or astronaut in the cockpit.

After a multi-decade career focused on doing surgery, Albright extended out and chose a big new responsibility. She founded the MIT Collaborative Initiatives, tapping her natural encodings for creative collaboration, reveling in bringing together people across disparate arenas to stimulate breakthroughs in thinking. She’d mix architects with military officers with business CEOs with leaders of national health systems to work together on problems like childhood obesity, stroke, and PTSD. She sparkled with enthusiasm when talking about her efforts.

My attempts to mold him failed, and I felt increasingly frustrated. He thought I’d fire him. Fortunately, for him and me, I began to grasp that he had not failed me; rather, I had failed him by putting him in a role out of frame with his encodings. Furthermore, I felt somewhat responsible for his future; I did not want to see this wonderful young man start his professional life getting fired. So, I began making a series of iterative steps, testing him with different tasks that drew upon what I sensed to be his intellectual gifts, and he showed signs of flourishing.