Inappropriate Expectations

To understand how inappropriate expectations weigh us down, imagine that you are an airline pilot, flying to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. You expect to drop off your passengers, pick up new passengers, and return home. If all goes well you should be able to complete this process without coming too close to the number of flight hours to which you are limited for the month. This is important because pilots who exceed the legal limits for flight hours in your country can be fined, lose their licenses, or even be imprisoned. As you approach Las Palmas, however, you find out that a bomb has exploded at the airport. You need to fly to the airport in Los Rodeos, Tenerife, instead until the situation in Las Palmas is resolved. The extra time that these new orders add to your trip will put you dangerously close to exceeding the legal limits for your flight time this month. How would you feel?

Most people faced with this type of situation would feel anxious or tense. In turn, these feelings would affect how they perform. Physiologists Timothy Noteboom and his colleagues, for example, have studied how sources of tension (such as mild electric shocks) decrease the steadiness and precision with which people are able to grip a machine between their fingers and thumbs. Psychologists Mark Ashcraft and Elizabeth Kirk have shown that anxiety lowers people's performance on such activities as math tests. And neuroscientists Bernet Elzinga and Karin Roelofs have examined how increases in cortisol—a stress-related hormone—can decrease people's working memories when they engage in stressful activities such as giving public, evaluated speeches with only five minutes of preparation.

The ability to remain steady, be precise, and keep up one's working memory can have a significant impact on performance in many activities—including piloting an airplane. A little bit of tension may improve performance by activating people's nervous systems, focusing their attention, and motivating them to eliminate the tension they feel, but as tension increases these same biological processes can cause people to focus to the point where they lose perspective, decrease the efficiency of complex thinking, and make actions more habitual or more erratic.

Most of the negative effects that come with higher levels of tension can be seen in the actual story of airline pilots who were diverted from the Las Palmas airport. On March 27, 1977, two flights were told to go to Los Rodeos because of an explosion at Las Palmas. This diversion was not the only source of tension; the pilots on one airplane were in danger of exceeding their legal limits for flying hours, the airplanes were bigger than the airport was equipped to handle, and a cloud floated over the runway in Los Rodeos, reducing visibility. As a result the pilots and the controllers made many mistakes that are typical when people experience higher levels of tension. The pilots focused too much on getting to Las Palmas. They struggled to process instructions, asking what they were supposed to do only a few seconds after they had received instructions. Controllers issued orders erratically, changing some and refusing to be questioned on others. One pilot—who had spent more time training other pilots over the past ten years than actually flying—resorted to habit and authorized himself to take off rather than wait for permission to take off. When he did the wheels of his airplane hit the right wing and rear cabin of the other airplane, the fuel in his own airplane ignited, and 567 of the 586 people on board the two airplanes died.

Karl Weick, an organizational scholar, used research on tension to analyze the events that occurred at the Los Rodeos airport. He pointed out that people—like the pilots and controllers in Los Rodeos—usually feel tense when they expect events to turn out one way but those events turn out another way instead. Our nervous systems are designed to rally our effort and attention toward resolving disrupted expectations such as these, either by removing the disruption or by finding some other way to make events turn out the way we have expected them to. The longer it takes to do this, the more tension we feel. In Los Rodeos, tragedy occurred largely because disrupted expectations became harder and took longer to restore with each additional disruption. This increased tension and decreased the quality of pilots' and controllers' thoughts and actions.

The experience of disrupted expectations, increased tension, and decreased performance is not limited to dramatic events such as the tragedy in Los Rodeos. Our colleague Mindy had this same experience regarding her son's pending expulsion: it disrupted her expectations, and she was not able to remove that disruption. She felt anger and fear, two emotions that are high in tension. As a result she had trouble focusing on anything else, thinking through the situation carefully, and acting constructively. In this new situation her old expectations were like a poorly designed engine: they kept propelling her forward, but as they did so they also weighed her down—as well as everyone else with whom she interacted.