American View: Why Your Instincts Can Betray You in a Crisis

Management

Have you ever found yourself waylaid by an unexpected “emergency” tasking? Found yourself completely caught off-guard by a “sudden crisis” that demanded fast action, even though no one knew what needed to be done? We all have. I’ve become so accustomed to getting dropped blind into projects that were already past the point of viable recovery that I get confused and slightly paranoid whenever I join a project call and nothing is reported to be actively on fire.

This panicked. flailing sensation was normal in the military, which I feel gives me a bit of an edge over my civilian peers. There’s a millennia old squaddie joke that goes “no battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy” and it’s largely true. No matter how good your plans were, there were always factors that you didn’t expect: bad weather, fouled traffic, accidents, broken gear, misunderstandings, unexpected contact … “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” All a leader can do it try is prepare for contingencies and be ready to improvise on the fly.

To be fair, most military “quick reaction drills” involve some combination of ducking, running, and shooting … activities that are generally incompatible with modern corporate culture. If a shot suddenly rang out in the office, ducking would be an appropriate immediate reaction. If a key supplier suddenly declared bankruptcy before they could deliver you the last parts you needed to complete an assembly, however, ducking would provide little (if any) protective value. Also, “gunshots” are supposed to be a very rare occurrence in the office, whereas third party failures are so routine that the excuse “supply chain problems” will be accepted without proof.

Still, the urge to react is often overpowering. Even people who have never served have been conditioned by decades of action movies, TV drama, and video games to believe that surprises are best mitigated by immediate, decisive action … which might not be the best way to handle a crisis.

I spent the last month thinking about this idea thanks to my pal Durga from The Book Publicist. Durga kindly tips me off to new books that I might like (as you’d probably expect from the name of her employer). Back in early June – which feels like five years ago – Durga let me know about a new book coming out from St. John’s University Professor Joan Ball titled Stop, Ask, Explore: Learn to Navigate Change in Times of Uncertainty. Was I interested in reading it? Yes! Yes, I was.

I never understood the allure of cocaine, although I assume it’s as addictive as books.

Much of what I read resonated positively with my personal and professional experience. Prof. Ball provided a killer quotable line in chapter two that I flagged for incorporation into my power dynamics and organisational behaviour seminar: “… when we’re presented with uncertain circumstances, even the most experienced and well-trained among us can default to knee-jerk reactions.” Amen, doc! That’s the justification I’ve offered my students on why we need to practice, drill, and constantly improve our “immediate action drills” … so that our instant reactions will be doctrinally sound and ingrained enough to execute without having to think.

That’s the Army way. It’s why our trainers spent so much time drilling survival behaviours into us: in the chaotic maelstrom of combat, an adequate tactic executed immediately is more likely to succeed (and save your life!) than the best possible solution executed too late. We were conditioned to react immediately with specific, “best-practice” actions that had been inculcated to the point of instinct – not with random knee-jerk reactions.

That said, Prof. Ball takes a different tack in her book than the US Army. As mentioned above, a grunt’s move-or-die conditioning can be counterproductive in corp-space. “Ambushes” in a white-collar environment are usually political manoeuvring. Cubicle warfare, not actual warfare. Even then, most “disasters” in the fabric cubicle pen threaten timelines, budgets, reputations, and/or quarterly earnings statements. Sure, the urge to react immediately to bad news is powerful, however acting before you have enough facts to know what you’re acting on is often performance art. It’s people who want to be promoted showing off for their bosses.

Pragmatically, the best reaction to a developing disaster is to disengage from the “threat” before your operational position is compromised so you have time and space to evaluate the situation. It’s best to only act once you understand the players, the stakes, the risks, and the odds, thereby allowing you to make the best decision possible under the circumstances.

Prof. Ball agrees. Her premise – stated a page before the passage I quoted above – is that it can be advantageous to acknowledge our instinctual drive to act, then suppress that urge. She urges the reader to pause to “… create space between our first, often emotional reaction to a threat and a response that is informed by both our emotions AND our circumstances.”

Circumstances matter. It I handed you a glass vial and said it was “full of Monkeypox,” your emotional reaction would be to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Whereas, if I handed that same vial to you in a laboratory under a containment shield, because you needed it to perform a medical test that you were there to perform, you’d have little or no emotional reaction to taking the vial.

That argument made sense to me. Just like it made sense that I’d respond well to a book on leadership … especially one that seemed to echo my own beliefs. If your reaction to the last few paragraphs was “Ha! He’s reading what he already believes. That’s Confirmation Bias in action! I can’t fully trust his reviw,” I commend and applaud your scepticism. Well done, you.

The thing is, I did find parts of Prof. Ball’s work that I initially rejected because they seemed to contradict my deeply held beliefs. I had to go back and re-read several passages to consider the author’s point without allowing my experiences to skew my interpretation of her point. For example, there’s a great section towards the end of Chapter 8 (“Learn By Doing”) called “experiments are not decisions.” Prof. Ball’s opening paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

“… it is important that we fully embrace the notion that taking a step in a certain direction is not a decision to go in that direction. This can seem counterintuitive for those of us who were raised in cultures that favor making a decision prior to action – preferably the “right” decision. Instead, by … exploring possible routes forward through action rather than speculation in a structured way, we can answer questions in practice rather than theory. … by taking steps in one direction or another, we can make sense of unfamiliar terrain and gain deeper understanding of the possibilities and choices in front of us.”

That made sense … after the fifth readthrough. This section challenges a learned behaviour that I’ve held fast to for decades. Early on in my military career, one of the most important leadership aphorisms I was taught was to “move fast and adapt.” When startled or confused, my officers explained, a leader’s best option was to swiftly move to a new position and reorient yourself. Repeat at high speed until you’ve figured out where you are, where the enemy is, and where you need to be. Looking back, I see how I’ve adopted that mentality in my approach to adopting new business practices. [1]

Rather than follow Prof. Ball’s approach of experimenting with a new program or process specifically to learn its “unknown unknowns” and better understand the operational dynamics before committing to a specific process design, my conditional reaction always has been to select an approach that I’m confident will deliver an acceptable result and get cracking. I don’t expect my crude, brute force approach to work correctly at first, however I’d rather start immediately with a known-good approach to get early wins on the board (so to speak), in the hopes that we can bang the process into shape on the way and eventually hammer out something more efficient when we’re no longer “under fire” from upper management.

This is where I believe most trend-chasing “consultants” completely screw up teaching “decisive leadership.” The gormless Bobs of the business world can’t differentiate between “confidently making decisions” and “shouting at their employees until they give in and do whatever crazy thing you told them to do.” Decisive doesn’t mean “say stupid things, but LOUD.”

Put another way, rather than starting an experiment solely to learn how to decide the best way forward – “exploring possible routes,” in the professor’s words – my go-to approach has been to begin production work immediately on the assumption that whatever approach we started with can be jury-rigged to be “good enough” to address whatever’s on fire and optimize it later to become as good as it can be. The idea of trying out a process with the intent from the beginning to abandon it after a set period and then re-assess possible alternative processes has always seemed, to me, to be a dangerous squandering of time. My instincts have always said that it’s better to get something – anything! – in motion immediately because time wasted leads to death, destruction, and defeat.

That’s a suboptimal survival mechanism left over from lessons learned in a different environment, operating under different rules, and for different stakes. If you stop for too long on top of a hill during a tank battle, someone is going to convert you and your ride into a messy pile of smoking debris. But that doesn’t apply here, does it? No one is getting blown up in corp space. There are no shells or missiles whistling in on your last-known position. Speed isn’t life; it’s an advantage but rarely ever a life-or-death requirement.

Sure, there are good reasons to execute immediate action drills in business life. SOC intrusion detection procedures come to mind. Business restoration drills following a power or connectivity outage. Such events are usually rare and non-lethal. Most new work requirements would be better served by applying Prof. Ball’s approach: give yourself permission to stop and think. Sort out the best solution and only then commit to a course of action. In that respect, I feel I got my money’s worth (so to speak) from the Prof. Ball’s new work because it made me re-evaluate a potentially suboptimal work practice.

This right here is why I read other people’s books on leadership: I owe it to my team to identify, reconsider, and mitigate my own weaknesses and biases. Even a belief that served me well for years might have become obsolete or even harmful as the world has changed. Professional development is supposed to focus on continuous improvement, not ego preservation.

So … yeah. Thanks, Durga. Good selection. I’m looking forward to whatever you suggest next.

[1] this idea appears constantly in my writing. One of my first articles for the March 2013 print edition of Business Reporter was titled “A customer in need? It’s time to bring out the cavalry.”

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