Pilots call it 'get-there-itis' — the subtle cognitive drift where the destination becomes so fixed in the mind that incoming evidence stops updating the decision. Weather worsens, fuel margins tighten, but the plan holds. The National Transportation Safety Board has traced this pattern through dozens of general aviation accidents where capable, experienced pilots simply stopped revising. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, writing in the 1870s, had a name for the underlying failure: the 'method of tenacity' — clinging to a belief not because evidence supports it but because abandoning it feels like a kind of identity collapse. Peirce considered it the most dangerous of all epistemic strategies, precisely because it feels like resolve. The corrective he proposed was what he called the 'method of inquiry' — treating every belief as a working hypothesis, provisional until tested, revisable without shame. For anyone managing a team or building a practice, the application is quiet but significant: the moments when you feel most certain a plan is working are exactly when you most need to treat that certainty as a data point worth interrogating, not a conclusion worth defending.

Name the decision in your practice or flight planning that you've stopped actively reconsidering — the one where you'd say 'we already figured that out.' What would genuinely change your mind about it?

Drawing from American Pragmatism (Peircean epistemology) — Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief, 1877)