Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasn’t that experience wasn’t important, but they “bet on brains,” as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.

He’s also wise enough to call attention to the context variability that lies ahead in any air

journey. To do that in the commercial flights he led, Captain Berman would routinely tell the cockpit crew members with whom he was newly paired, “I’ve never done a perfect flight.” What this tells us is that Berman understands that even the best and most experienced pilot may face unexpected challenges and cannot be counted on to respond perfectly. In my research, I’ve called this a framing statement. Framing is something experienced leaders do naturally because they recognize that people need help to diagnose and recode the context to be most effective. Berman recalled, when I spoke with him in early May 2022, how he thought about those early moments with each new team:

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.

Second, even highly accomplished people can languish when they operate contrary to their encodings, when they fall out of frame.

Here we have two of the most accomplished people of a generation, two of the greatest pilots of all time who became national heroes. Yet even these two remarkable individuals had episodes when they fell out of frame, such as Glenn’s ill-fated run for president and some of Cooper’s business ventures where he trusted the wrong people. The main point here is not that they “failed” or “made mistakes.” The point is that anyone can fall out of frame, and when they do, they’re likely to struggle relative to when they’re in frame.

One view of the world argues for a two-phase approach to life: success to significance. First achieve success, then do something significant and meaningful. This study leads me to a very different approach: First discover a set of encodings, then trust that full commitment to a hedgehog built around those encodings is in itself a meaning-filled answer to the question of what to make of a life. It might lead to curing cancer or protecting freedom or reducing human suffering or advancing social justice, or it might not.