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There were no alarms they could hear. The buffeting likely felt like normal turbulence. Neither pilot ever made an announcement of any kind. The captain finally entered the cockpit. The captain, standing behind the pilots and perhaps overwhelmed by what he saw, uttered a curse word and then remained silent for forty-one seconds.

But Bonin was too overwhelmed to focus. The plane, in fact, at this point was moving far too slowly. The instruments in front of him could have easily answered that question. The plane was now less than ten thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean. To me! Pull up! If the pilots had craned their necks, they could have made out individual waves.

Two seconds later, the plane plunged into the sea. In the late s, a group of psychologists at a consulting firm named Klein Associates began exploring why some people seem to stay calm and focused amid chaotic environments while others become overwhelmed. A variety of clients wanted to know why some employees made such good choices amid stress and time pressures, while other workers became distracted. More important, they wanted to know if they could train people to get better at paying attention to the right things.

The Klein Associates team began by interviewing professionals who worked in extreme settings, such as firefighters, military commanders, and emergency rescue personnel.

Many of those conversations, however, proved frustrating. Firefighters could look at a burning staircase and sense if it would hold their weight, they knew which parts of a building needed constant attention and how to stay attuned to warning signs, but they struggled to explain how they did it.

Soldiers could tell you which parts of a battlefield were more likely to be harboring enemies and where to focus for signs of ambush. But when asked to explain their decisions, they chalked it up to intuition. So the team moved on to other settings. Many of the babies inside a NICU are on their way to full health; they might have arrived prematurely or suffered minor injuries during birth, but they are not seriously ill.

Others, though, are unwell and need constant monitoring. What makes things particularly hard for NICU nurses, however, is that it is not always clear which babies are sick and which are healthy.

Seemingly okay preemies can become unwell quickly; sick infants can recover unexpectedly. So nurses are constantly making choices about where to focus their attention: the squalling baby or the quiet one? The new lab results or the worried parents who say something seems wrong?

But they have also made NICUs more complex. Crandall wanted to understand how nurses made decisions about which babies needed their attention, and why some of them were better at focusing on what mattered most. Crandall interviewed nurses who were calm in the face of emergencies and others who seemed on the brink of collapse. Most interesting were the handful of nurses who seemed particularly gifted at noticing when a baby was in trouble.

Often, the clues these nurses relied upon to spot problems were so subtle that they themselves had trouble later recalling what had prompted them to act. Darlene had been walking past an incubator when she happened to glance at the baby inside. All of the machines hooked up to the child showed that her vitals were within normal ranges.

There was another RN keeping watch over the baby, and she was observing the infant attentively, unconcerned by what she saw. But to Darlene, something seemed wrong. Blood had recently been drawn from a pinprick in her heel and the Band-Aid showed a blot of crimson, rather than a small dot.

None of that was particularly unusual or troubling. The nurse tending to the child said she was eating and sleeping well. Her heartbeat was strong. She opened the incubator and examined the infant. The newborn was conscious and awake. Darlene found the attending physician and said they needed to start the child on intravenous antibiotics.

When the labs came back, they showed that the baby was in the early stages of sepsis, a potentially fatal whole-body inflammation caused by a severe infection. Instead, she recovered fully. But Darlene put everything together. She saw a whole picture. As Crandall asked more questions, however, another explanation emerged. The other nurse was distracted by the information that was easiest to grasp.

People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. They narrate their own experiences within their heads.

They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. All people rely on mental models to some degree. But some of us build more robust models than others. The secret of people like Darlene is that they are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time.

They engage in constant forecasting. They daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with their imagination, their attention gets snagged.

That helps explain why Darlene noticed the sick baby. She was in the habit of imagining what the babies in her unit ought to look like. Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second.

But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. The more they learned, the more confused they became.

This explains why Bonin was so prone to cognitive tunneling. So we let the dumb computer fly and the novel-writing, scientific-theorizing, jet-flying humans sit in front of the computer like potted plants watching for blinking lights. There were other employees who handled ten or twelve projects at a time. But those employees had a lower profit rate than the superstars, who were more careful about how they invested their time.

The economists figured the superstars were pickier because they were seeking out assignments that were similar to previous work they had done. Conventional wisdom holds that productivity rises when people do the same kind of tasks over and over. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. Something else the superstars had in common is they were disproportionately drawn to assignments that were in their early stages.

This was surprising, because joining a project in its infancy is risky. New ideas often fail, no matter how smart or well executed. The safest bet is signing on to a project that is well under way. However, the beginning of a project is also more information rich. They learned which junior executives were smart and picked up new ideas from their younger colleagues. They were exposed to emerging markets and the lessons of the digital economy earlier than other executives.

The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go.

They came up with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them. They told anecdotes about past conversations and dreamed up far-fetched expansion plans. They were building mental models at a near constant rate. Researchers have found similar results in dozens of other studies. People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades. Moreover, experiments show that anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models.

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night.

If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants.

The Qantas plane flying that day had the same auto-flight systems as the Air France airplane that had crashed into the sea. But the pilots were very different. Even before Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny stepped on board Qantas Flight 32, he was drilling his crew in the mental models he expected them to use. De Crespigny conducted this same conversation prior to every flight. His copilots knew to expect it. He quizzed them on what screens they would stare at during an emergency, where their hands would go if an alarm sounded, whether they would turn their heads to the left or stare straight ahead.

If de Crespigny stumbled, it could trigger his early retirement. As the pilots took their seats, one of the observers sat near the center of the cockpit, where standard operating procedure usually positioned the second officer.

De Crespigny frowned. He had expected the observer to sit off to the side, out of the way. He had a picture in his mind of how his cockpit ought to be arranged. De Crespigny faced the evaluator. This kind of confrontation was not supposed to happen between a captain and the observers. He wanted to show his crew they could question his decisions. He wanted them to know he was paying close attention to what they had to say and was sensitive to what they thought.

Just as teams at Google and Saturday Night Live need to be able to critique one another without fear of punishment, de Crespigny wanted his crew to see that he encouraged them to disagree. Inside the cockpit, de Crespigny turned back to the controls and began moving Qantas Flight 32 away from the gate.

The plane sped down the runway and lifted into the air. The sky was cloudless, the conditions perfect. It was probably just a surge of high-pressure air moving through the engine, he thought. Then there was another, even louder crash, followed by what sounded like thousands of marbles being thrown against the hull.

Two of the larger fragments from that explosion punched holes in the left wing, one of them large enough for a man to fit through.

Hundreds of smaller shards, exploding like a cluster bomb, cut through electrical wires, fuel hoses, a fuel tank, and hydraulic pumps. The underside of the wing looked as though it had been machine-gunned. Long strips of metal were bending off the left wing and whipping in the air. The plane began to shake. Alarms started popping up on his computer display. Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four.

The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan. The damage would later be described as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation. De Crespigny radioed Singapore air traffic control.

De Crespigny cut power to the left wing and began anti-fire protocols. The plane stopped vibrating for a moment. Inside the cockpit, alarms were blaring. The pilots were quiet. The functioning engines were rapidly deteriorating and the left wing was losing the hydraulics that made steering possible.

Within minutes, the plane had become capable of only the smallest changes in thrust and the tiniest navigational adjustments. No one was certain how long it would stay in the air. One of the copilots looked up from his controls.

Turning the airplane around in order to head back to the airport was risky. But at their current heading, they were getting farther away from the runway with each second. De Crespigny told the control tower they would return. He began turning the plane in a long, slow arc. They quickly explained their concerns: Climbing higher might strain the engines.

The change in altitude could cause fuel to leak faster. They wanted to stay low and keep the plane flat. De Crespigny had flown more than fifteen thousand hours as a pilot and had practiced disaster scenarios like this in dozens of simulators.

He had envisioned moments like this hundreds of times. He had a picture in his mind of how to react, and it involved getting higher so he would have more options. Every instinct told him to gain altitude. But each mental model has gaps. We will maintain 7, feet. De Crespigny felt himself getting drawn into a cognitive tunnel. The pilots agreed to ignore the order. De Crespigny slumped in his chair. He was trying to visualize the damage, trying to keep track of his dwindling options, trying to construct a mental picture of the plane as he learned more and more about what was wrong.

Throughout this crisis, de Crespigny and the other pilots had been building mental models of the Airbus inside their heads. Everywhere they looked, however, they saw a new alarm, another system failing, more blinking lights. De Crespigny took a breath, removed his hand from the controls, and placed them in his lap. The trim tank fuel is stuck in the tail and the transfer tanks are useless.

The left wing had no electricity, but the right wing had some power. The wheels were intact and the copilots believed de Crespigny could pump the brakes at least once before they failed. The first airplane de Crespigny had ever flown was a Cessna, one of the single-engine, nearly noncomputerized planes that hobbyists loved. A Cessna is a toy compared to an Airbus, of course, but every plane, at its core, has the same components: a fuel system, flight controls, brakes, landing gear.

What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then? That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use. He began imagining the plane as a Cessna, which allowed him to figure out where he should turn his attention and what he could ignore. De Crespigny asked one of his copilots to calculate how much runway they would need. Inside his head, de Crespigny was envisioning the landing of an oversized Cessna.

The longest runway at Singapore Changi was 4, meters. If they overshot, the craft would buckle as its wheels hit the grassy fields and sand dunes. The plane began descending toward Singapore Changi airport. At two thousand feet, de Crespigny looked up from his panel and saw the runway. He delicately nudged the throttle, increasing the speed slightly, and the alarm stopped. The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second. The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second.

But there were no other options now. He ignored the alarm. The rear wheels of the Airbus touched the ground and de Crespigny pushed his stick forward, forcing the front wheels onto the tarmac. The brakes would work only once, so de Crespigny pushed the pedal as far as it would go and held it down. The first thousand meters of the runway blurred past.

At the two-thousand-meter mark, de Crespigny thought they might be slowing. The end of the runway was rushing toward them through the windshield, grass and sand dunes growing bigger the closer they got. As the plane neared the end of the runway, the metal began to groan. The wheels left long skid marks on the asphalt.

Then the plane slowed, shuddered, and came to a stop with one hundred meters to spare. Investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A ever to land safely. Today, Qantas Flight 32 is taught in flight schools and psychology classrooms as a case study of how to maintain focus during an emergency. It is cited as one of the prime examples of how mental models can put even the most dire situations within our control. Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us.

Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react. We may not recognize how situations within our own lives are similar to what happens within an airplane cockpit. But think, for a moment, about the pressures you face each day. To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table.

We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. Those fears were legitimate. Since the Six-Day War had ended, generals in Egypt and Syria had repeatedly threatened to reclaim their lost territory, and Arab leaders, in fiery speeches, had vowed to push the Jewish state into the sea.

However, the assessments provided by the Directorate of Military Intelligence were often contradictory and inconclusive, a mishmash of opinions predicting various levels of risk. Analysts sent conflicting memos and flip-flopped week to week. Some weeks, lawmakers were warned to be on alert, and then nothing would happen. Policy makers were called to meetings and told that a risk might be materializing, but no one could say for sure.

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Those goals should be meaningful and should not distract from the need for new goals when circumstances change, as in a crisis This is a summary that is not intended to be used without reference to the original book.

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