‘Above My Pay Grade’ (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I finally read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” a few weeks ago, and now everything reminds me of some topic that he touched on in that 2008 bestseller about the unrecognized factors that contribute to success.

For instance, a friend from Nashville, Tennessee, told me about taking her daughter’s birthday sleepover guests to the famous Pancake Pantry for breakfast. For one girl, from a less affluent family, the trip was a revelation: She could order something that wasn’t exactly as described on the menu.

Too much entitlement mentality is a bad thing, but not even realizing that there are reasonable exceptions to the rules — like a paying customer can ask for a menu substitution — is a lifelong handicap.

In “Outliers” Gladwell compares the case of a bona fide genius you never heard of, Christopher Langan, who lost his college scholarship because his impoverished mother failed to sign a form, with Robert Oppenheimer, who became the “father of the atom bomb” because his affluent family was able to keep him from being kicked out of Cambridge for attempting to poison his tutor.

Affluent families effortlessly teach their children such assertiveness; it’s part of the culture of success. Parents who don’t understand that rules are not always hard and fast can’t model that for their children. Powerlessness is part of the culture of poverty. And not understanding how to advocate for one’s interests can be the difference between, say, losing one’s chance at a college education because an arbitrary deadline was missed or being able to move forward despite being guilty of attempted murder.

Another example in “Outliers” concerns some of the most preventable airliner crashes. This reminded me of another example from recent headlines, but not the one that might first come to mind. The crash of GermanWings 9525 was, by all accounts, a mass murder; the cause of crashes that Gladwell described was, essentially, good manners.

In the chapter called “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,” Gladwell describes several infamous crashes by airliners owned by Korean Air, Colombian airline Avianca and Air Florida. Although the details are all unique, ultimately investigators determined that the first officers tried to warn the captains and/or air traffic controllers of problems but were so polite, so deferential to authority, that their messages were not received as urgent action items.

In the 1982 Air Florida case, for instance, the first officer kept trying to get the captain to take note of a dangerous ice buildup on the wings. But instead of saying there was a dangerous ice buildup on the wings, he gave hints like, “Boy, this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things.”

Enough of those kind of crashes finally taught the airline industry that pilots, especially those from highly deferential cultures, must be specifically trained on how to communicate directly even with superiors.

The recent article that reminded me of the cockpit communications problem was the cringe-inducing post-mortem report on that Rolling Stone article about a college gang rape that apparently didn’t happen. Or it certainly didn’t happen as reported by Rolling Stone, which, it turned out, trusted the supposed victim implicitly and even allowed her to insist that the reporter forgo basic reporting techniques. (I have witnesses to my skepticism about the story from the get-go, but I have the advantage of knowing a lot more about how holes in news stories are airbrushed than most people.)

Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, was enlisted to figure out how a team of experienced news professionals could have gotten it so wrong. His team determined that, among other things, the primary fact-checker noted nagging problems with attribution — or lack thereof, which was an underlying problem with the story.

But the low-level fact-checker was overruled by the reporter and editor, and she never took her concerns to her direct supervisor. Even that might not have helped: “These decisions not to reach out to these people were made by editors above my pay grade,” said the head of the fact-checking department.

Coll’s report suggested the same solution that has helped reduce pilot-error plane crashes: “The checking department should have been more assertive about questioning editorial decisions that the story’s checker justifiably doubted.”

After a disaster — whether deadly or merely fatal to an organization’s reputation — everyone wishes that the people who suspected the problem had spoken up loud enough to be heard. This would be a good time to ask yourself whether your organization empowers the kind of assertiveness needed to avoid disaster.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.