The Social Life of Paper : The New Yorker

Malcolm Gladwell,  The Social Life of Paper

Air-traffic controllers are quintessential knowledge workers. They perform a rarefied version of the task faced by the economists at the I.M.F. when they sit down at the computer with the comments and drafts of five other people spread around them, or the manager when she gets to her office on Monday morning, looks at the piles of papers on her desk, and tries to make sense of all the things she has to do in the coming week. When an air-traffic controller looks at his radar, he sees a two-dimensional picture of where the planes in his sector are. But what he needs to know is where his planes will be. He has to be able to take the evidence from radar, what he hears from the pilots and other controllers, and what he has written down on the flight strips in front of him, and construct a three-dimensional “picture” of all the planes in his sector. Psychologists call the ability to create that mental picture “situation awareness.” “Situation awareness operates on three levels,” says Mica Endsley, the president of S.A. Technologies, in Georgia, and perhaps the country’s leading expert on the subject. “One is perceiving. Second is understanding what the information means—analogous to reading comprehension. That’s where you or I would have problems. We’d see the blips on the screen, and it wouldn’t mean anything to us. The highest level, though, is projection—the ability to predict which aircraft are coming in and when. You’ve got to be able to look into the future, probably by as much as five minutes.”