Why Assumptions Matter:Escape from a Submarine

I put this post up awhile back on www.bobsutton.com, but I think it is worth reprinting here because it is a good example of why Jeff Pfeffer and I constantly press people to think and talk about the assumptions that drive their behavior. Too often, they aren’t even aware of such beliefs, and when they start thinking about whether their assumptions and ideologies make any sense, they start questioning their practices and actions – and are motivated to get better evidence too.

The importance of identifying and testing the assumptions that determine how organizations and technologies are designed sounds so obvious – yet we’ve learned that, when we don’t press managers, consultants, and researchers (including ourselves) to take a hard look at their deeply held beliefs about what they are doing and why, they will unwittingly do horrible – or at least very expensive – things over and over. In the management arena, the assumptions held by people who design organizations are often dangerous half-truths. So, for example, assuming that human beings are always selfish and can’t be trusted is dangerous because, if you operate on that assumption, you will design a fear-driven organization that will encourage people to act that way – and never give people a chance to earn trust.

Another area is teacher incentives and student test scores. Politicians and school administrators often argue that teacher’s pay should be linked to student test scores. That all sounds wonderful, until you start examining the basic assumption: If teachers work harder, their students will do better on standardized tests. Unfortunately, if you dig into this assumption, you will start realizing that teachers have little or no control over which students they teach, how many students are in their classes, what levels of resources they have, and what materials they use. So, even if financial incentives do actually encourage teachers to work harder (another suspect assumption), increasing motivation doesn’t increase student performance much, if at all, because teachers don’t have enough control over the work. And, at least in the short-term, incentives don’t affect teacher’s knowledge and skill.

That is why studies going back nearly 100 years show that teacher incentive pay has little if any impact on student achievement scores; it does have other predictable effects – teachers and school administrators will try to change things that they can control: Like cheating on the tests to get their students higher scores, either by changing the forms themselves or telling students the right answers. And, as I’ve heard from researchers and parents in the Chicago school system, teachers respond to these incentives by moving their weakest students into special education classes (which are overflowing with kids who really aren’t well-suited to those classes) and when they have a gifted child who should probably skip a grade or move to a classroom or school of gifted kids, they squelch efforts to take those kids out of their classes. In other words, the incentive pay does affect teacher effort: They focus on ways to get their test scores up that they can control, even though those changes have nothing to do with student learning, and in fact, may actually undermine learning. Yes, incentives do drive behavior, but sometimes the wrong kind (See Chapter 5 of Hard Facts for an in-depth discussion of incentives).

What does this have to do with escape from submarines? Perhaps the clearest, and most troubling, case I know of a deadly assumption (that was held for over 50 years) has to do with the problem of escaping from a sunken submarine. C.B. “Swede” Momsen was a colorful and charismatic U.S. Naval officer who unwittingly perpetuated false and deadly beliefs about the best way to ascend to the surface. Check out The Terrible Hours to read about this maverick. Momsen was deeply disturbed by several incidents where submariners were trapped at depths of 100 to 200 feet beneath the surface, with no apparent means for escape. They all died waiting for a rescue that never came. “Swede” dedicated years of his life to developing the Momsen lung in the 1930’s, a complicated apparatus that –- by the time development was completed — included a mouth piece, a breathing bag, a canister of soda lime, goggles, a nose clip, and a marker buoy attached to 500 feet of rope that had a knot every ten feet. The idea was “Escaping submariners were to pause every ten feet, where they found a knot, so as to ascend no faster than fifty feet per minute.” The Germans had used a similar device called the Dräger breathing set, going back to World War I.

The perceived need for these cumbersome devices – and the actions of people on submarines –were based on the assumption that simply exiting the submarine and swimming to the surface meant certain death. But research done after World War II showed that this assumption was false: at depths of less than 300 feet, a trapped submariner’s best chance of survival was a “free ascent.” As Ann Jensen’s 1986 article Why the Best Technology for Escaping from a Submarine is No Technology reports:

The solution was a British suggestion. Inflate a life jacket while in the submarine. The jacket would be designed with a flapper valve to release the expanding air as it carried its wearer upward. “Once you’re out, you start blowing as hard as you can blow,” said Schlech. “The jacket takes you up and out of the water like a shot. We called the system ‘Blow and Go.’ There was a lot of opposition at first, but eventually it got rid of the Momsen Lungs and all the other equipment, and it’s still in use in depths of up to three hundred feet.”

Moreover, Jensen reports that German experience going back to World War I showed that –-even without a life jacket — simply exhaling while making the ascent is effective as well, although such experience was not known or was ignored as research focused on developing better devices for escaping submarines, even though none were needed. To quote Jensen’s article:

The case of the German U-57, which hit a mine north of Scotland in 1915, is typical. The U-boat went down in 128 feet of water with twenty men alive inside. The air in the submarine quickly filled with chlorine gas as seawater flooded the boat’s electric batteries. The fumes burned the men’s eyes and made breathing nearly impossible. Their ears ached as pressure increased. They found only four Dräger units aboard; believing their situation hopeless, two of the men shot themselves. Then the captain decided to make one last, desperate effort to save the remainder of his crew by opening a hatch.

To his amazement the hatch flew open and he was drawn out and upward. He had no time to inflate his life jacket or even to take a breath. As he recounted later, “I had no desire to inhale, but to forcibly exhale so that I constantly had to blow air out.” The air in his lungs had expanded as he rose. If he hadn’t exhaled, his lungs probably would have burst. The rest of the crew followed him; seven survived the ascent and were later picked up.

The upshot is that –- whether you are talking about teachers or technology –- stopping to identify and test your assumptions is something that isn’t done often enough, and can save a lot of money and a lot of lives. And a related lesson, is that the most effective people and organizations are often masters of the obvious.

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Posted in Beliefs and assumptions by Bob Sutton | | Permalink | Comments (3)