On February 12, 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in New York, killing all 49 on board and one person on the ground. In an effort to improve airline safety, Congress passed the Airline Safety Act of 2010. One of the requirements required pilots to accumulate 1500 flight hours before becoming a first officer.

Seems reasonable, right?

Paul Craig, author of The Killing Zone: How and Why Pilots Die, explains the unintended consequences of that law:

This is why the Airline Safety Act of 2010 is a bad law. The law ignores the fact that quality flight training is better than quantity alone… The law requires pilots to have accumulated 1500 flight hours and hold the airline transport pilot certificate before they can become eligible for hire as a first officer on a Part 121 air carrier. It sounds reasonable that an airline pilot should have an airline pilots license, but here's the problem: the pilots are required to acquire 1500 flight hours before they can move into this career field, then two things will happen. First, pilots will go back to “boring holes in the sky.” This is the phrase used for building a flight time in the fastest and cheapest way possible. That means find the most inexpensive (read slowest and least well equipped) airplanes… Second, if a pilot has to pay for this flight time on his or her own, then the temptation will be strong to cheat. There will be a few pilots interviewing for those first officer positions with falsified records.

As stated previously, the research indicates that it is not how much flight time you have but what you did during that time that makes a difference… Military pilots flew supersonic jets in combat over Iraq and Afghanistan with approximately 400 total flight hours. Those pilots had structured, targeted advanced training, and nobody doubts that they aren't the best in the world. None need to wait to acquire 1500 hours to fly in combat.

Every person and organization are familiar with boring holes in the sky: mindless repetition used to satisfy some metric that has little bearing on improving actual skill. Furthermore, by incentivizing measurable but poor repetition, we encode bad habits and unintended flaws into our routines, increasing the chances of the exact problem we are trying to avoid.

There’s one litmus test to tell if you’re boring holes in the sky. Is quantity being measured without regard to quality?

• Activity is mistaken for achievement

• Effort is mistaken for results

• Metrics are mistaken for creating value

• Facetime/hours worked is prioritized over delivering quality

Just as with the Airline Safety Act, what we require and what we get are two different things.

The intent is almost always positive, but the results are almost always negative.

In their book, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Hansson explain the folly of rewarding busyness and facetime as a proxy for quality:

We don’t believe in busyness at Basecamp. We believe in effectiveness. How little can we do? How much can we cut out? Instead of adding to-dos, we add to-don’ts.

“But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them?” Same answer as this question: “How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them?” You don’t. The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work. That’s the boss’s job. If they can’t do that job, they should find another one.

Seth Alexander, Chief Investment Officer at MIT’s Endowment, describes his thoughts on face time and “looking busy” in his article, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose in the Global Investor Role at MITIMCo:

Each team member is encouraged to take initiative and pursue unconventional opportunities, even if the payoff is far into the future. In addition to annual professional goals, we ask everyone to create personal development goals that they can pursue during work time. Finally, we discourage artifices such as office face time and efforts to look busy. People set their own daily schedules as well as have the option to take longer-term sabbaticals or work from another country for months at a time.

This is most evident with almost all compliance testing, continuing education, and mandated trainings you see in the workplace. It replaces rigorous skill development with convenient, cheap proxies.

First, most of the material has little practical relevance. By making the training applicable for everyone, it becomes so watered down it’s useful to exactly no one.

Second, the training can be gamed. Just sign your name on the sign-in sheet and you are “counted” for attending, even if you’re sleeping in the back row. Or, rapidly click through the online trainings without listening or reading the material. Even those programs with test questions to force attention are so laughably easy you can guess your way through.

But again, these programs were never about making people better. Instead, it’s a charade so grandstanding leaders can proclaim they “invest in their workforce.” Or regulators can show they are “protecting the public.” What they are really doing is ensuring that blame can be passed on to someone else when the next crisis arises.

Training is critical, but only if it’s quality. However, quality takes time, which most leaders don’t have. So we end up with training “theater" and checking the box behavior.