How do ships really know where they are? Drawing on Edwin Hutchins’ ethnographic research, this essay explores distributed cognition, complex adaptive systems, and why effective leadership is about sustaining collective sense-making rather than command and control.

In the 1989 UA 232 plane crash, the intervention of an expert pilot significantly reduced the loss of life. I am discussing the contrasting views of Kahneman and Klein on expert decision-making and their convergence, using this case as an example.