Does it always make sense to stick to your playbooks? There’s no clear answer, but it’s still something you should think about.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. When are you smarter than your playbooks, and when are your playbooks smarter than you? That’s a question that engineers rarely step back to consider. The rational, disciplined parts of our minds tell us that the playbooks we are supposed to follow were carefully designed and tested and that we should stick to them at all costs. But, on some level, there is also an instinctual – perhaps even arrogant – tendency to assume that ultimately, playbooks are not a substitute for human knowledge or expertise. Sometimes, the best way to resolve a problem is to deviate from the playbook. That’s a lesson that came to my mind recently when I listened to this Changelog podcast. At a certain point in the conversation, Nora Jones, Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo brought up the experience of Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the pilot who famously landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of birds rendered the plane’s engines inoperable – a feat that made him the hero of the 2016 film Sully, where Tom Hanks played the title character. What’s interesting about Sully’s story is that he didn’t do exactly what pilots (or engineers) are trained to do. He didn’t stick completely to the playbook that a pilot is supposed to follow during engine failure, which stipulates that the plane should land at the nearest airport. Instead, he made a decision to crash-land in the Hudson River. The fact that Sully did this without any loss of human life turned him into a hero. In fact, Sully the movie almost villainizes the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for what the film presents as an unfair investigation of Sully for not sticking to the playbook.
