of the Mind, sees this all the time. ‘Last year, we had one kid who sat so silently through the brainstorming sessions you could almost forget she was there,’ he says. ‘But she was actually taking time to process what was being said, and then 10 or 15 minutes later she would speak up. Often the team ended up taking her solution to the problem.’
We can all take steps to think harder. Even when nothing needs fixing, build time into your schedule to unplug from technology and let your mind wander. When tackling a new problem, make it a rule to sleep on it for at least one night before proposing any solutions. Ask why, why and why until you uncover the root cause. Keep an object on your desk – a piece of sculpture, a wooden snail, a photo of your favourite holiday spot – that reminds you to slow down and think before you act. Above all, test your solutions again and again, no matter how foolproof they seem.
Betting the farm on a quick fix that shows early promise is an easy mistake to make, even when we design systems to stop it from happening. The investigators at RAF Coningsby, freshly trained in the art of parsing ‘human factors’ and homing in on the root causes of problems, have fallen into the trap. Not long ago, during routine maintenance work, an engineer opened the undercarriage door of a Typhoon jet. It slammed down onto a heavy jack standing beneath it, ripping open a gash that looked like it could have been caused by enemy fire. In the past, the young corporal would have been punished and probably ridiculed by his peers. He might even have tampered with the evidence to deflect blame. Either way, his crew would have replaced the door without really probing why the accident occurred in the first place.
Under the new regime, the engineer filed a report on the spot, triggering a full investigation. Group Captain Simpson’s team quickly found that the safety pin that would have prevented the undercarriage door from lowering at the fateful moment was missing. So far, so good. Further digging then unearthed a startling oversight: though the safety pins are plainly listed in all the Typhoon manuals, three out of the four RAF squadrons had never even fitted them.
Simpson was stunned. ‘Everyone’s following the list. Everyone’s trained in accordance with the list. Everyone can see the pictures of the pin in place. And still no one had noticed that we’d never even bought any of these pins,’ she says. It felt like a home-run endorsement of the new safety regime. The RAF bought a load of safety pins and then closed the file on the Case of the Damaged Undercarriage Door.
‘Everyone said, “Crikey, isn’t this new system brilliant? We would never have picked this up before,”’ says Simpson. ‘We thought, “That’s all sorted now, problem solved.”’ Only it wasn’t. A few weeks later another Typhoon door was wrecked in an almost identical accident.
The safety pin was a red herring. When investigators took the time to think harder and dig deeper, they found a host of other factors leading to the mishap with the door: engineers distracted by changing shifts; poor lighting in the hangar; an illustration in the instruction manual suggesting the wrong angle for the jack.
‘We were so pleased to find the safety pin, which seemed like such an obvious answer to the problem, that we were completely blinded by it and just stopped looking for other causes,’ says Simpson, wincing slightly at the memory. ‘But the upside is we learned a very valuable lesson from this: just because you find one factor that seems to offer an almost perfect solution, you don’t stop. You have to carry on investigating, digging, asking questions until you have the full picture of what happened and how to fix it properly.’
In other words, if your first fix seems too good to be true, it probably is.
When I ask Simpson if all that hard thinking ever leads to a moment of perfect clarity, she falls silent for a few seconds before answering. ‘You do reach a point when you know what has to be done, but it’s rarely as simple as firing a magic bullet,’ she says. ‘There are always multiple factors you have to connect up.’
THINK HOLISTIC: Joining the Dots
All is connected … no one thing can change by itself.
Paul Hawken, environmentalist
They call it the ghetto limp. You’ve seen it in episodes of The Wire, in a million hip-hop videos, maybe even on the streets of your own city. It’s that lolloping, loping gait favoured by young men in tough neighbourhoods. It hints at an old gunshot wound, or at packing heat somewhere in those baggy trousers. It’s a gang thing, an affectation of the street, another pose designed to send the same message to everyone around: ‘Don’t mess with me because I am one mean motherfucker.’
When I meet Lewis Price, he is working the ghetto limp like a pro. Hair pulled back in cornrows; trousers on the baggy side; black and red Air Jordans ostentatiously untied; MOB (Money over Bitches) tattooed on his wrist. At 17, he is compact and muscled, with the coiled energy of an athlete on the starting line, or a cat waiting to pounce.
When Price starts talking, however, you realise he is not a mean motherfucker at all. His easy smile and gentle manner belie his appearance. He loves to talk and grabs hold of any conversation, eyes darting round the room as if searching for the next reason to laugh. Unlike many youths caught up in the gang violence that blights South Central Los Angeles, he is not feigning the limp for effect. When he was 14, a rival gang member took a pot-shot at him while he was hanging out on the sidewalk. The bullet sliced through his right leg and wedged so deeply in his left that doctors chose to leave it there. He can no longer play football or basketball and the limp now draws the wrong sort of attention on the street. ‘People think I’m walking like that on purpose, that I’m walking like a gangbanger to make a statement or something,’ he says. ‘But that’s the only way I can walk after I got shot. You know, the way I see it, I’m lucky I can walk at all.’
Price tends to look on the bright side these days. He has turned his back on the street, earned a place on the honour roll and plans to go to university – no mean feat for a kid born and raised in Watts.
This corner of Los Angeles has long been on the front line of black struggle. In 1965 the Watts Riots turned 50 square miles of the city into a war zone of charred buildings and pitched battles with the National Guard. Later, the gangs took hold, with the storied Bloods and Crips carving out violent fiefdoms. Over the last decade Latinos have moved in en masse, yet Watts remains plagued by the same old list of urban despair: poverty, crime, failing schools, ill health, unemployment, broken homes, drugs, teenage pregnancy, malnutrition, deadbeat dads, domestic violence. With gang members numbering in the thousands, fistfights, stabbings and shootings like the one that crippled Price are a part of life. Not many kids from Watts make it to college.
Price is not the first gangbanger to turn over a new leaf. But instead of crediting church, family or a heroic social worker, he puts his conversion down to his alma mater. To the delight, and surprise, of many Watts residents, the local high school now known as Ánimo Locke has gone from basket case to beacon of hope.
‘If it weren’t for Locke I wouldn’t be the person I am today,’ says Price. ‘Before I came here, I felt like, man, the only way I’m gonna make it is just survive on the street, but I got here and they just woke me up.’ He falls silent for a moment, as if pondering the road not taken, before adding, ‘If it weren’t for Locke, I’d be like all my old friends, I’d be dead or in jail. But now, you know, I got a future. I’m a good student now and I’m gonna make it somewhere.’
Many countries continue to grapple with how to break the cycle of poor children stumbling through lousy schools en route to a life at the bottom of the barrel. The problem is especially acute in the US, where 10 per cent of the nation’s high schools, most of them in
