Tara Rodden Robinson :: The Productivity Maven

Oldie but a goodie: Sources of Power (repost)

A couple of years ago, the city of New York again found itself in the news. This time, it was a collapsed steam pipe that disintegrated beneath an ordinary tow truck, sending a geyser of boiling water and steam hundreds of feet into the air. The emergency crews that responded had to act rapidly and decisively to rescue the tow truck driver as well as tend to other people at the scene and get the flow of water under control.

Gary Klein studied how emergency and military personnel make decisions under the kinds of stresses that the broken steam main created. When he began his research, detailed in his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, one of the firefighters he was interviewing told him: “I don’t make decisions. I don’t remember when I’ve ever made a decision.” As it turns out, firefighters do make decisions, lots of them, and those decisions are made so rapidly that they are simply not aware of it.

Emergency personnel and other people in crisis situations use time-pressured, super decisive, act-now sorts of decision making. For example, a fire fighter responding to the broken steam pipe arrives on the scene, assesses the situation,  and acts or gives orders. In those moments (often just seconds), he or she is using knowledge and experience to determine what to do and what might occur. The synthesis can happen so quickly that it almost appears to be ESP. For example, Klein tells of a fire fighter  who ordered his men out of a burning building without really knowing why he was giving the order; seconds later, the floor they’d been standing on collapsed.

According to Klein, people use four “sources of power” to make these rapid decisions.

• Intuition which is the synthesis of knowledge & experience and converting that synthesis into action. The synthesis is almost instant and is not accompanied by conscious thought. It is sometimes experiences as a “knowing.”
• Mental simulation: Imagining how something might work--what to do and what the results would be.
• Metaphor: Comparing the current situation to past experience or knowledge to the current situation, looking for parallels. Metaphor differs from intuition because it is more thoughtful and conscious.
• Storytelling: Debriefing aloud to solidify insight, learning, and understanding of past experience. Storytelling shares the process of decision-making with others allowing them to have the experience available as future metaphor. It also allows the teller to review what went wrong and what went right in view of the next time a similar situation might be encountered.

Klein calls this sort of decision making “naturalistic.” Naturalistic decision making is most often required when there is little or no time for contemplation or planning along with inadequate or incomplete information about the situation at hand, sometimes poorly defined goals and outcomes, and a need for rapid innovation to create novel procedures, solutions or approaches to resolve the situation. The context for naturalistic decision making is often a situation that is embedded in something deeper--a big picture--that has its own set of goals, tasks and requirements. Naturalistic decisions are often made under great uncertainty and under rapidly changing conditions. The situation may also be complicated by stressors like fatigue and emotion along with external factors such as distractions, interruptions, weather conditions, light, temperature, etc.

The decision makers themselves must possess experience and knowledge (the more the better), be adept at “cue learning” which allows them to find patterns and notice distinctions amongst often ambiguous and noisy data. Finally, Klein found that high stakes naturalistic decision making takes place in a group setting. Most often there are multiple actors (and thus, decision makers) who must coordinate intake of information, analysis of pattern, and synthesis of the four “sources” into coherent and effective action.

The naturalistic bit comes from the distinction that Klein makes between what decision makers under fire really do (naturalistic) versus what theoreticians think that people do (which is analytical, linear, and comparative). In reality, decision making is much messier and must take place far too quickly to allow careful analysis, comparison of options, and a systematic planning and execution of actions.

You, too, can access the sources of power that are used in high stakes, life or death decision making.

• Intuition is developed from experience. The more experience you accumulate, the better your intuition will become. Intuition isn’t some airy-fairy, woowoo notion. It’s a very real activity that you can engage in everyday. By paying attention to when your “gut” speaks up and what you know, you can fine tune and develop a great ability to know what you know faster.
• Mental simulation is simply imagining. One of the things that Klein points out is that decision-makers get stuck when they hit the limits of their imaginations. When they can’t imagine how something might work, they can’t move forward. In your world, the more imaginative and creative you are, the more likely you’ll be able to access the power of mental simulation. Get outside the box, seek other perspectives. What you can’t imagine, someone else may be able to. Ask them.
• Metaphor is powerful because you are making comparisons and drawing distinctions. This is part of mindful learning and research shows that mindful learning significantly increases what’s remembered later on. To use metaphor, ask yourself what does the current situation remind you of? How is it different? How is the situation relevant to you or someone else? Don’t wait for a crisis to engage this sort of thinking. The more you practice it now, the better you’ll be at using it when something goes wrong.
• The final piece of the puzzle is the debrief or storytelling. If you can’t review what happened with someone, at least take the time to make notes. As I’ve noted earlier, research shows that debriefing allows you to learn more now and perform better later on.

The next time you see a fire truck barreling down the highway or a video clip of emergency personnel on television, take a moment to think about what you’re watching. The bravery and courage that these men and women exhibit, their lighting fast responses, and their decisive actions save lives every single day. The sources of power that they use to make decisions can be yours, too.

It's not about You

The last week’s news has been full of talk about Tiger Woods. As a major star on the world stage, Tiger was a golden boy. Great golfer, champion, blazing trails and breaking records. He seemed to have it all: good looks, good sense, great life. And then Boom!

A great deal of Tiger’s very public downfall has been attributed to ego and arrogance.

In a recent blog post on HarvardBusiness.org, John Baldoni gives some great tips about avoiding a loss of ego control. There’s some very valuable advice here. One important point, however, was left out.

When you are receiving praise (lavish or otherwise) or criticism (scathing or lukewarm), they are not talking about You. Yes, the comments or whatever are directed at or to you. The feedback may related quite directly to something you did or failed to do. You may have real responsibility and ownership. There may be a need for reparations. In any case, remember this incredibly important point: You are a soul, playing the role of a human being.

The information you receive in the forms of praise and criticism are not descriptors of the actual You, the Soul. To understand what I mean, compare the following two sentences.

“I have a cold.”
“I am a cold.”

No one describes themselves as being the cold itself. That would be silly. You have a cold--you don’t become the cold.

We know the difference between these two states: having and being. Yet, we ascribe to ourselves and others words that confuse that understanding. We call people stupid or arrogate or brilliant or wonderful as if the people in question are those things. And yet, they are not. Like us, they are souls playing the roles of human beings.

When you are the subject of great praise or excoriating criticism, it will be very hard to remember that no matter how good the attention makes you feel about yourself or how badly you are being wounded, none of this is about You. You must exercise tremendous ego strength, enormous emotional will, genuine mental toughness to recognize both praise and criticism as equally empty. Yet if you master this recognition, you will gain priceless perspective and reduce the chance that you will fall prey to the same demons that took down Tiger and so many more like him.

Optimize your life!

Right after I wrote Wednesday’s post, I got an email from my dearly beloved. “Take a look at this!” he wrote. What followed was an invitation to be nominated for an influential position in one of the most prestigious professional societies in his field. “What do you think?”

My first response was, “Wow, do it!” But then I paused. I’d just been writing about this stuff--what would my coaching self say? In my reply (for the record, he was out of town), I posed three questions:

• What would this leadership opportunity allow you to do?
• What does it make possible for you?
• And, how does it fit into your goals?  

Over breakfast this morning, this topic came up again. The key question that did it for him wasn’t one I’d asked. “What I got thinking about was ‘what will I have to give up to do this?’” he told me. It was one of those smack-up-side-the-head moments. What a brilliant question!

When we were graduate students, and in our earlier career days, it was nothing for us to slave away for sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. Any and every opportunity was fair game. Take it all on! Now, somewhat older and hopefully wiser, we know that our time and energy are finite resources. We have to be strategic. As coach, I often think in terms of possibility. But the truth is, opportunities taken can diminish possibilities as they open paths ahead.

This is where knowing what your non-negotiables are becomes key. If an opportunity threatens what’s most important to you or complicates your life in such a way as to make tending to the essentials very hard, think twice.

In the end, it’s not about maximizing our lives. It’s about optimizing. Optimizing our day-to-day so we can have more of what we want not more for the sake of more.

Find your aaaahhh moment

There are few sounds more calming than bamboo wind chimes. Something about their tone, something in their subtle music, is so soothing. Outside my office door, my little wind chimes are dancing in the breeze. The only way I was able to hear them was to stop typing and get still. To listen. And as soon as I did that, a feeling of ease came to me. Just that tiny moment of being present. It’s not an ah-hah moment. It’s a aaaahhhhh moment. We all need these.

I don’t know about you, but it’s been a hard week. Full of appointments. Lots of demands. Many balls to keep in the air. Somehow, miraculously, I remembered to breathe, hike, and pause for meditation every morning. I don’t know how I did this except through determination not to fall prey to the notion that I didn’t have time to take care of myself.

Yesterday, as I was driving from one appointment to the next, I saw a wheelchair-bound woman making her way along the sidewalk. She paused and maneuvered herself to the edge of someone’s yard. Leaning over , she pulled a rose toward her face, buried her nose in the huge pink bloom with an expression of pure bliss. Clearly an aaaahhhh moment.

This week, take some time to find your aaahhhh moment. Find your rose. Hear your wind chimes. Don’t follow your bliss--be your bliss. Aaaahhhh.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings....

Remember that song? It’s one of the mind worm songs that gets stuck in your head: Paul Anka crooning away about feelings, those warm and fuzzy, touchy-feely, mushy feelings. In the real world, you should know better. Put your feelings aside! After all decisions have to be made rationally, right?

Psychologists at the University of Toronto put this idea to the test. They took two groups of people and gave them all the same two options: tell the truth for no gain or lie to get a reward. To make the decision between the two options, one group was told to be rational about the decision and rule out emotions. The other group was told to go with their gut feelings.

The rational thinkers decided that it was okay to lie--yep, 69% of them rationally convinced themselves that lying was perfectly okay as compared to only 27% of the gut-relying decision makers. The more time subjects had to think about it, the more easy they found it to lie. Take home message: when faced with a decision requiring ethics, your gut is more likely to lead you to behave ethically. However...the same study showed that people preferred to trust a person making their decisions rationally over trusting someone using their gut instincts.

The study’s authors interpreted their results by explaining that by thinking about something long enough, it’s relatively easy to talk one’s self into believing that it’s okay to act unethically. The trick the liars used was to focus on their anticipated reward and rule out their emotions. The flip side, then would be to rule out the (ill-gotten) reward and acknowledge and consult your emotions.

My suggestion is this. When faced with a tricky ethical decision, go with your gut and don't linger over the deliberations. This strategy is far more likely to lead you to the best decision, ethically and morally. If you find yourself wavering, rule out any thought of a reward (remember, avoiding consequences is also a reward) and ask your emotions for guidance. Your gut knows the difference between right and wrong--trusting your instincts is the most rational thing you can possible do.