One Hand On The Yoke
This is from a new archival source—the original WikiWikiWeb. The page doesn’t have a creation date that I could find but it would be around 2000.
The topic seems apropos to The Forest & The Desert. In The Desert you don’t dare let go of the yoke because you already don’t have enough control. In The Forest, you can need less steering & it turns out that less steering leads to greater satisfaction all around.
An airplane's direction and altitude is controlled primarily by a 2D steering wheel called a "yoke" (plus other inputs like the rudder pedals, which don't bear on this story). When my ex-father-in-law first showed me how to fly, I immediately grabbed the yoke with both hands. We bounced around a bit. Then he showed me how much smoother I could fly straight and level with only one hand on the yoke.
An airplane is much more sensitive to controls than a car. Small inputs create large changes. Coordinating the pressure of two hands generates many, many small inputs. Counter-intuitive as it feels at the time, 10,000 feet up in a tiny little cigar tube, letting one hand go is the right way to solve the problem.
Now, when you do a maneuver, you do hold the yoke with both hands. Then you need the power provided by both armsful of muscles. At least you want that power available, and you are willing to pay the price in a little wiggliness, at least for the duration of the turn.
An ExtremeTeam is sensitive to small inputs. Much better to let one hand go and trust the self-organizing culture they have developed. Most of the time.
Another example of this is my rolling suitcase. The wheels are too close together, so it often starts oscillating between the wheels, eventually falling over. I tried grabbing tighter, which started the oscillation sooner and toppled the suitcase sooner. The solution is to pull the dang thing with one finger. Occasionally (but much less often) it still begins to wobble. I slow down until it stops.
I replaced the suitcase with a 4-wheeled Tumi. Problem solved.
I looked up the Wiki page to see what other people had to say on the topic, and found a really interesting and insightful corollary to this metaphor. To paraphrase: it's the feedback that makes the difference.
Steering with a light touch makes you much more sensitive to important feedback than if you have a death-grip on the yoke. There are times when it's appropriate to push/pull against that feedback, but at least you make that decision consciously (with the feedback itself as input). Contrast that with a leader who is always steering with both hands firmly, who's likely to miss some important feedback that might keep the plane out of a tailspin or vertical stall.
I remember reading this on the C2 wiki! I also took the advice to heart, both literally and metaphorically. I started training for my private pilot's license a few years later and found that I was indeed much smoother with control inputs using one hand only. It turned out, though, that most of my flying has been done on aircraft with a joystick rather than a yoke, but the advice is still pertinent.