We Are Always Preparing for the Last Disaster
By Jonah Goldberg
The availability bias is defined as the tendency to give disproportionately high weight to immediate and easily recalled examples when making decisions. It is one of humanity’s most well-attested psychological biases, and we can find its manifestations everywhere. Most people who enter the ocean worried about the prospect of a shark attack, for example, do not realize that they are more likely to be killed by a vending machine than by a shark. Or that they are more likely to become president of the United States than to be killed in a terrorist attack. However, media coverage distorts our expectations, and so we are preoccupied not with logical risks but with the rare—yet salient—events presented to us.
This cognitive effect is compounded by two other psychological habits. First, we remember recent events far better than earlier ones, a phenomenon called the recency effect. If we take a pop quiz based on material learned during the last three weeks of a class, we will typically score better on the content from the third week than from the first. Second, we are extremely attuned to loss, a bias that psychologists call loss aversion. Studies show that we remember negative information better than the same objective facts framed in a positive light (a 10 percent chance of harm matters more than a 90 percent chance of safety) and that in economic games, we almost always opt to prevent a loss rather than achieve an equivalent or slightly greater gain.
These cognitive tendencies have deep evolutionary roots. Early humans who erred on the side of caution and quick response—responding to false alarms just in case, making a decision now instead of weighing evidence about an approaching predator and assuming any problem someone else faced would happen to them next—had much better odds for survival and propagation.
In modern decision-making environments, however, these biases create a dangerous cognitive cocktail that the writer Shane Parrish has dubbed preparing for the last disaster. One partner cheats on you, so you become jealous and possessive with your next partner. One of your proposals is rejected for lacking a clear time frame, so your next proposal hammers in logistics at the expense of emphasizing why the client should consider your firm in the first place. Two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Centers, and a country overhauls its airline security but barely revisits precautions against any other type of attack.
The key problem with preparing for the last disaster is that we are unlikely to be hurt the same way twice. Our efforts after a crisis need to be mainly directed toward making ourselves more resilient, prepared and flexible in the face of a variety of potential future crises.
As we hit the two-year mark for the coronavirus pandemic, I invite you to approach anticipating your next crisis in a different way with these questions as suggestions for shifting your focus toward becoming more resilient all around.
Before the Crisis
No one can predict with perfect accuracy what the next problem will be, but there is one thing we can be 100 percent sure about: There will be a next problem.
Keeping this in mind, you can brainstorm crises that might hit you or your organization. I like to run through three “I”s. The following questions are just examples of the many angles to look at for your field.
Internal: What would we do if we suffered a breach that exposed customers' data or was the result of a ransomware attack?
Industry: What would we do if our industry became the target of congressional scrutiny or new regulations?
International: How would we handle a change in relations between our headquarter country and a country (e.g., China) supplying important components? We can also note that COVID-19 was not the world’s first pandemic, and there are unfortunately many recurring man-made and natural disasters that we can expect to face again.
When you have a list of possible crises, it is not too difficult to go through them and find common threads. From there, you can find safeguards that address multiple potential threats before they arise. Making this a team exercise can also create a space for encouraging creativity and improving morale when a problem strikes that the team has prepared for.
During the Crisis
Part of Olin’s own strategy during the pandemic has been to hold regular faculty-staff town halls. Research backs up this type of communication strategy for two reasons:
It encourages interpersonal support and dialogue at a time when everyone instinctively retreats inward. The paper “Team resilience: How teams flourish under pressure,” in the journal Organizational Dynamics, explains that “members of resilient teams are more likely to provide backup and assistance to one another. Recall that during times of stress, individuals tend to focus on themselves. Unfortunately, that is also the time when others are most likely to need backup.”
It creates productive disruptions that prevent dysfunctional momentum and keep everyone attuned to the changing situation. The paper “Resilience in action: leading for resilience in response to COVID-19,” in the journal BMJ Leader, notes: “When situations are volatile, unpredictable and complex, we can get so engrossed in the action that we do not notice small indicators that new problems are emerging or that the situation has changed so that our assumptions no longer hold. … Especially when situations are evolving quickly, it is critical to disrupt the momentum and to create opportunities to check in with one another about what is actually happening as opposed to what we assume is happening.”
The BMJ Leader authors specifically recommend huddles, short debriefs that look backward at unexpected recent events and forward at upcoming and ongoing challenges.
What formal and informal measures can you put in place to check in with your team and share the workload as needed to pull through? What support systems can you set up to help yourself get through a crisis and come out of it ready to tackle what comes next?
After the Crisis
Although our learning should not all be focused on the specifics of the last disaster, I want to add one note on the value of running a learning-focused postmortem.
Debriefing with your team after a crisis may sometimes seem like a simple and trivial process. However, the Organizational Dynamics paper justifiably argues that it is essential for improving your team’s performance and trust moving forward. A productive debriefing meeting (or series of meetings) should accomplish three things:
Ensure that everyone shares a situational awareness—being on the same page about what the “new normal” is for the team, what areas are still in need of recovery or support and what everyone’s responsibilities are.
Voice everyone’s opinions and agree on what should be prioritized during future stressful periods. The Organizational Dynamics authors recalled working with a financial services firm after a recent challenge. It came up in the debrief that some team members felt the firm had responded hastily, while others felt the team should have moved faster. They were able to come to an agreement about how they would respond to similar challenges in the future. Approaching the debrief with a forward-looking mindset helps surface and resolve questions like this that may be passed over in a meeting solely focused on putting away the previous crisis.
Learn from both successes and failures. The creator of the Service for Learning from Success, an organizational development team at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, has noted that most organizations have meticulous processes for learning from their failures but do not put in the same investigative rigor toward learning from their successes. Name what was done right, and be as specific as possible about the actions taken. (If someone says, “We mobilized quickly and were able to stay in constant communication,” interrogate how that happened and whether those systems are still in place.)
When we are hurt, personally or professionally, nothing feels more urgent or important than making sure it does not happen again. This has never been an irrational desire; however, it is not usually the most rational part of ourselves that responds. The best way to prevent future loss is not just to prepare for the last disaster but rather to debrief with a focus on building future resilience against a broad range of possible crises.
We also do not have to wait for the availability bias to call us to action. Many of the right steps—below, you can find the full set of 40 items that the Organizational Dynamics authors recommend to foster resilience and address acute and chronic stressors—can be taken today to prepare for and even prevent the next disaster.
Source: “Team resilience: How teams flourish under pressure,” pg. 9.