Charlie Munger is one of my inspirations. His expert-generalist thinking and his latticework of mental models shape how I work. As Warren Buffett's partner for decades, he helped build Berkshire Hathaway into one of the most valuable companies on earth. He was also capable of a bad call, and one of them is the clearest lesson I know about borrowing an idea from another field.

Munger built his career on borrowing from other fields. He was the one who said you need a latticework of models from many disciplines, and he was right. Some of the best answers to a hard problem are already working in a field you have never looked at.

The dormitory shows what that instinct looks like applied halfway. Munger carried the solution across and left the problem behind. A cruise passenger chooses an interior cabin, sleeps there for a week, and spends the days on deck. A freshman gets assigned a room, then lives, studies, and sleeps in it for nine months. Same room, different problem. That is why most borrowed fixes fail. The thing that made it work was never the fix. It was the people it was built for, and they don't travel with it.

Compare Munger's miss to a borrow that worked, also from cruise ships. In Making New Mistakes I wrote about John Padgett. At Disney he helped build the MagicBand, the wristband that lets a guest open a hotel room, pay for lunch, and walk onto a ride without pulling out a wallet or a phone. The park recognizes you and the friction disappears. Padgett took that idea to Carnival Cruise Line. The obvious move was an app, since every airline and hotel had one. But he noticed that many of his passengers were older and did not carry smartphones. So he kept the principle, that the service should find the guest instead of the guest working the system, and built a medallion the size of a poker chip instead of an app. Other cruise lines now copy it.

Munger and Padgett both borrowed. The difference is that Padgett studied the people who would live with the fix before he carried it across.

I flew half a dozen helicopters, and the fastest way to scare yourself is to carry a habit from one into the next. A sight picture, a power setting, an emergency response that is right in one airframe can be exactly wrong in another. The aircraft changed, but the hands remembered the old one.

Associations may be the best place to watch this, because they borrow constantly. I recently sat in on the working sessions of a national trade association as an observer. The membership team walked through a member journey map: six stages, each framed by the question the member is actually asking, from "Can I rely on you?" at the start to "Is this still worth it?" at renewal. The structure is a customer-experience practice, straight out of the corporate world. It worked here because the staff did the translation first. They treated their members as customers, mapped what those specific members needed, and rebuilt the stages around it in a strategy retreat before it ever reached a committee.

In the same sessions, members pointed to a safety template another industry's association had adopted, and to a professional society that reached near-full participation by making its training the credential employers require. Nobody in that room thought they had to invent their answers from scratch.

As the outsider in that room, I recognized the journey map and the safety template from other fields I had worked in. That is what an outsider is for: you carry the fixes across. But the outsider is also the one most tempted to make Munger's mistake, because you know the solution better than you know the room. It takes discipline to separate the two, and not borrow for the sake of change. The outsider who listens first, who learns the people before importing the fix, brings everything a specialist can't and none of Munger's risk. As I wrote in the book, a senior leader's job is less about what you know and more about how you connect what others know, and that only works once you have heard the people on the other end.

KEY TAKEAWAY: A fix from another field travels well only after you have asked the people who will live with it.

Before you import a practice from another field, answer three questions on one page.

By role:

This week: pick one practice you admire from outside your field. Run the three questions, then take it to one member, customer, or crew member and ask them question 2.

Munger's instinct was right and his dormitory was wrong, and both came from the same habit. The best leaders I know borrow constantly and test everything they borrow on the people who will live with it.

What is the best fix you have borrowed from outside your field, and what did you have to change to make it work?

Written by Travis Wright | ETL Advisory

Leadership and strategy for the people who lead aviation and the organizations that serve it.

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