Nedgroup's commercial about Sullenberger's landing on the Hudson is about expert heuristics, but is the analogy apt?

Nedgroup Investments (South Africa) is currently airing a striking commercial in which Captain Chesley Sullenberger narrates his landing Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after losing both engines to bird strikes. In the commercial. Sullenberger ascribes his feat to being "... just a pilot who used thirty years of experience to do my job." This is a good description of expert heuristics that developed over may years of experience in the form of associative memory. Herbert Simon, one of the founders of what is now known as behavioural economics, described this intuitive expertise here as "... nothing more and nothing less than recognition" (see also Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 237). Alessandro Cerboni regularly blogs on expert heuristics and is worth following. 

The Nedbank commercial is an good one and will probably (speaking as layman on advertising) be effective. The question, however, is whether the implied analogy between the expert heuristics in an individual based on 30 years experience and the accumulated corporate memory of an investment bank, is an apt one? Therefore, can an organization acquire heuristic decision making skills, or are such skills lodged in individual human beings? A Google search brought up a number of studies on simple group heuristics (i.e. here), but I personally doubt that that would apply to a complex organisation operating in a complex environment. The answer may be found in the concept of corporate memory, about which I blogged some time ago in "Therapy for corporate Alzheimers".

Failed heuristics due to pilot's lack of Boeing 777 experience in Asiana crash landing?

Aircraft accidents make for useful case studies in researching heuristics (rules of thumb) based decision making. This is because multiple high-stakes decisions are made, compressed in time, space and complexity. According to Scott Shappell and Douglas Wiegman between 70 and 80% of air crashes are commonly ascribed, at least partly, to human error. They distinguish between errors of decision making, skill and perception.

Consider the recent crash landing of the Boeing 777 of Asiana Airlines at the San Francisco airport. The air crash investigation is obviously ongoing and the causes will eventually be established. It is, however, even at this stage clear that pilot error may have played a role.

In this post I would like to focus on the relative inexperience of the pilot on the specific aircraft and its possible role in poor heuristics based decision making. Expert heuristics based decision making typically occurs in what Kahneman refers to as intuitive (System 1) thinking and depends heavily on associative memory that comes from experience, lots of it (10 000 hours, if you accept Gladwell's popular account). Gary Klein is considered one of the experts in experts' intuitive decision making (pun unintended).

It was reported that the pilot in the Asiana incident had only 43 hours experience on the Boeing 777 and was making his first landing at the San Francisco airport. While he did have almost 10 000 hours total flying experience, consider the complexity of an airliner cockpit relative to a motor vehicle's controls. Then consider the difficulty the typical driver experiences when driving an unfamiliar vehicle. That should demonstrate the importance of expert experience based intuitive decision making when landing a relatively unfamiliar aircraft at a relatively unfamiliar airport. For another opinion on this issue, see this by Scully Levin (former SAA training captain) in Beeld, only in Afrikaans.

There's still life in the old nag!

Right, time to get the show on the road again. There will be a change in emphasis, as I'll be spending more time on a developing interest, the role of conscious and unconscious heuristics in judgement and decision making. Long time readers (if there are any still around), don't despair, I still be taking on the odd myth that quacks live by.