Learning as a Margin of Safety

Learning as a Margin of Safety

Learning beyond the demands of today’s task can help us cope when circumstances change. It gives us more experience to draw on and may reveal blind spots before they cause trouble. That extra capacity acts as a margin of safety.

Books offer vicarious experience. In Anna Karenina, readers can consider the damage an affair causes a family; in Les Misérables, Bishop Myriel’s kindness offers another way to respond to theft. Fiction gives us room to examine choices and consequences without living through them ourselves.

One profession that demands that an individual have far more knowledge than they will ever use is astronaut. Carrying out your job in the hostile environment of space means that you have to prepare for as many variables as possible in order to have the best potential response to any challenge. Learning is a way for an astronaut to develop a large margin of safety, giving them the chance to deal with the unexpected in space. Astronauts must also apply what they have learned to situations that differ from their training. They need to assess new information and adapt their response.

In his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield explains how and why astronauts learn as much as they can. They don’t stop at what they need to know but continue lifelong learning to prepare for any eventuality they can think of. They reduce blind spots. He says of astronauts, “No matter how competent or how seasoned, every astronaut is essentially a perpetual student.”[4] They are “trained to look on the dark side and to imagine the worst things that could possibly happen.”[5] And then they train for them. Hadfield describes hours in simulators and classrooms, constantly training and preparing for an incredibly vast array of potential scenarios.

The culture of the space program is one of constant debriefs about every detail. The point of these is not to be pedantic or shame anyone but to get the information necessary to learn and to improve the program. Thus for both the individual astronaut and the space organization they are a part of, there is a recognition that ongoing learning is the key element in creating a margin of safety in space operations.

Although astronauts are well educated and very experienced, they come into the space program with an incredible amount to learn. Hadfield says of his early career, “Training in Houston, I hadn’t been able to separate out the vital from the trivial, to differentiate between what was going to keep me alive in an emergency and what was esoteric and interesting but not crucial.” Throughout the program, working both in space and on the ground, he says of his development, “Over time, I learned how to anticipate problems in order to prevent them, and how to respond effectively in critical situations.”[6] Hadfield’s experience demonstrates why it’s important for astronauts to learn meta skills: they always need to know something, they just don’t know ahead of time what knowledge they will have to use in the variety of situations they will face on a space mission.

In the space program, learning is critical to success. “Our core skill,” Hadfield writes, “the one that made us astronauts—the ability to parse and solve complex problems rapidly, with incomplete information, in a hostile environment—was not something any of us had been born with. But by this point, we all had it. We’d developed it on the job.”[7]

While the space missions get all the attention, the job of an astronaut is so much more. If all someone wants to do is be in space, they aren’t a good fit for the program, because there is no guarantee of any one individual getting the go-ahead for a mission. Rather, most of the job of an astronaut is performed on Earth, doing things like learning Russian and practicing mechanics in a spacesuit while submerged in a pool. The training is ongoing, with a mission to space only a possibility.

The account describes Hadfield’s six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including his service as commander. It describes crews of three to seven people, with the aim that at least one, and preferably two, can deal with a problem when it arises. There isn’t any time for someone to be flown in to solve a problem.

Although astronauts can communicate with the ground to get insight and advice, they have to rely on the group up in space to fix any problem. That is why, Hadfield says, “having ‘overqualified’ crewmates is a safety net for everyone.”[8]

Astronauts need overlapping practical skills so that essential work can continue if a crewmate is incapacitated or needs help. This means that time on Earth is best spent learning as much as possible that might be relevant to a space mission. “The more you know and the keener your sense of operational awareness, the better equipped you are to fight against a bad outcome, right to the very end.”[9]

Our ego gets in the way of capitalizing on the margin of safety that is produced by knowing more than you need to. Often we learn enough to solve today’s problem but not enough to solve tomorrow’s. There is no margin of safety in what we know. Another way our ego gets in the way is that we tend to coast on our natural strengths, too afraid or intimidated to dive into being the worst at something. But as Hadfield explains, “Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.”[10] Life will throw at you challenges that require capabilities outside your natural strengths. Preparation involves both building relevant knowledge and learning to recognize when it is useful.

Hadfield concludes that in space and on Earth, “truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong—and having a plan to deal with it.”[11] Even if the plan is just knowing how you deal with uncertainty, these plans, based on learning, are your margin of safety. Astronauts train in simulators all the time for all sorts of disasters that may come to pass on a mission. Instead of being disheartening, Hadfield suggests, they have incredible value because they teach the astronaut how to think clearly in real-life situations.

After decades in the space program, Hadfield offers this perspective on life: “If you’ve got the time, use it to get ready…. Yes, maybe you’ll learn how to do a few things you’ll never wind up actually needing to do, but that’s a much better problem to have than needing to do something and having no clue where to start.”[12]

After all, “When the stakes are high, preparation is everything.”[13] The more you know, the more you will be able to anticipate and avoid problems. Knowledge then can be conceptualized as a margin of safety, a buffer against the inevitable unexpected challenges you will have to face.

The professionals plan for “mild randomness” and misunderstand “wild randomness.” They learn from the averages and overlook the outliers. Thus they consistently, predictably, underestimate catastrophic risk.

—James Gleick[14]