In December 1978, a United Airlines DC-8 circled Portland while the crew worked a landing-gear problem. The aircraft was fine. The crew were experienced. But they became so absorbed in the gear that nobody acted on the fuel running down, and the plane came down in a suburb short of the runway.1 The cause was not a lack of technical skill. It was a failure of attention, communication and speaking up. Aviation's response was to change how it trained, and the results reshaped an entire industry.
Out of that era came Crew Resource Management, training built not around facts but around realistic scenarios where crews practise noticing, communicating and challenging under pressure. Combined with simulators that let people fail safely and try again, it helped turn commercial flying into one of the safest activities in modern life.2 Medicine borrowed the same idea, with simulation suites and checklists, for the same reason: you do not want the first time someone handles a crisis to be the real one.
Why scenarios beat slides
A slide tells you the rule. A scenario makes you use it, in context, with pressure and ambiguity and a decision at the end. That is the difference between recognising an answer and being able to produce one. The retrieval you are forced into during a realistic scenario is exactly what builds durable, usable skill, which is why the airline does not teach engine failure with a leaflet. It puts you in the simulator and fails the engine.
You do not need a flight simulator
The instinct is to say this is fine for pilots and surgeons but overkill for a normal business. It is not. A scenario can be a one-page situation read aloud in a team meeting: "A customer emails claiming we promised a refund we did not. It is Friday afternoon. What do you do, and what do you not do?" The value is not the technology. It is the structure: a realistic situation, a real decision, a debrief on what good looks like and why. Any manager can run that, and it teaches more than any module on "our refund policy".
The solution, as a build method
Build a scenario in five steps
- Start from a real failure or near-miss. The best scenarios are things that actually went wrong, with the names removed.
- Write the situation as a short, specific moment with a decision in it, not a topic. Pressure and ambiguity are features.
- Give people the decision before you give them the answer. They must commit first.
- Debrief on the reasoning, not just the outcome. Why did a good person make the wrong call, and what would catch it next time?
- Run variations. The same situation with one detail changed teaches the principle, not the trivia.
The part that makes it stick: the debrief
Aviation's real insight was not the simulator. It was the debrief. The learning happens when people examine, without blame, why a competent person did the wrong thing, because that is where the reusable lesson lives. A scenario with no debrief is just a quiz. A scenario with an honest debrief is how professionals in high-risk fields build judgement they can reach for when it counts. It also builds the culture where people speak up, which was the very thing missing over Portland.
Questions to ask when designing a scenario
- Is this based on something that really went wrong here or in our industry?
- Does it force a decision, or just ask people to recognise the right answer?
- Where is the pressure, the ambiguity, the reason a good person might slip?
- Who runs the debrief, and is it safe to admit you would have got it wrong?
- What is the one principle people should carry out of the room?
The industries that cannot afford to get training wrong stopped lecturing people decades ago. They put them in the situation, let them decide, and then talked honestly about why. You do not need their budgets to borrow their method. A real situation, a forced decision and an honest debrief will teach your team more about handling the hard moments than any amount of telling. That is training built to be used, which is the only kind worth paying for.
Notes and sources
- United Airlines Flight 173 (1978): crew fuel-exhaustion accident while distracted by a landing-gear problem, a catalyst for Crew Resource Management. NTSB / overview. Link. ↩
- Crew Resource Management: training in communication, decision-making and human factors, credited with major improvements in aviation safety. Overview. Link. ↩
From the book
Training That SticksA practical method for designing training that moves behaviour, embedding it in the first thirty days, and proving the difference it made, with no training department.