This article started from chats with a colleague about how I managed doing volunteer emergency work at night or weekend adventure sports and then went into the office the next day to deal with important, but less extreme matters. It turned into lessons I’ve learned, (or think I’ve learned anyway), from that part of my life and how they affect my perspective on working in more corporate environments. She thought I should share them. I quickly ended up with more than I’d thought so this will turn into a few posts perhaps. Here we go…
It’s often not the emergency that kills you. It’s a panicked response.
There are times when there’s nothing you can do about something bad that’s about to happen. Or just happened. A cable under tension just snaps. And what it does next is all chance. Or things are developing poorly, but fast… and you have a small amount of time. The car is skidding on black ice. Or – and this is from aviation now – you’re losing oil pressure. You have a real problem that cannot be ignored. You’re likely between a few seconds and a few minutes from your engine eating itself. How high up are you? Over what terrain? Daytime? Nice weather? You need to make choices. Right now.
In these cases, time is not your friend. There’s a few response types. (Run, Fight or Hide comes to mind, but here we’re focused on fighting when there’s no place to run or hide.)
- Emergency / Immediate: The issue is right now and demands immediate response. There’s often a procedure that’s a memory item reaction. For example, you need to already know how your air pack works and failure modes, or in an airplane spin, how to recover. Regardless, you’re working via trained memory items or you’re just reacting as best you can. (Pro tip: It’s better if you’re executing trained behaviors vs. trying to work a new-to-you problem.) There’s no time to check the book. That being said, you may have a bit more time than you think. And when you have just enough time to make one right choice, that one moment to take a breath and assess might make sense.
- Urgency / Quick: The issue allows for at least a bit of thought. You have time – maybe – to pull out the book and look something up. Phone a friend! (Or use a radio to reach someone who can help.)
- Priority / Incipient: Something is on its way to going wrong. You might continue normal operations with heightened awareness. You can monitor, diagnose and maybe take early preventive measures.
There’s another, which is “catastrophic.” The thing has already happened. Now the priority becomes: “life saving, life preserving, then property.” Having a priority framework already in place is useful.
In these situations, you have a bag of skill, and a bag of luck. Your challenge is to not run out of both at the same time. Here’s the thing, you have control over the skill part. The more prepared you are, the less you have to rely on luck. None of this means you can’t adapt if necessary. But having already known targets give you baselines around which you can pivot as the situation demands.
How does this apply to my day job? Systems can fail. You have to decide the level of urgency. Often, things are less urgent than they seem at first. Thinking through these issues has helped me when I’ve worked on projects with mission or safety critical issues. What would practitioners in the field face? How can software we’re designing help? Or hurt? Are we making anything worse? What are failure modes? What are backups for edge cases? What are we missing? Maybe some of these things don’t apply to you, but if you do anything that’s safety critical, you should probably be thinking about these things.
In An Emergency, Wind Your Watch
This one comes from aviation. The idea is, in an emergency, a simple, deliberate task helps you take a moment to gather your thoughts, assess the situation, and approach it with a clear mind. By doing something routine and controlled, you can avoid panic and make better decisions. Maybe you have time to run though a quick OODA loop! OODA Loop is a decision-making process standing for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. This framework is used to improve decision-making in fast-paced and high-risk environments. (Remember, it’s just a metaphor. Even if you still wear a watch, chances are it doesn’t need winding. Some of you might not even know what this means. The point? Maybe just take that one breath and think before acting.)
In business, we have catastrophes of various sorts. If working on products with potentially high-stakes failure modes, your run books should have responses defined. If not, you may want to define some. For a software example, did you have a release plan that allowed for a staged deployment? What about rollback? Have you tested rollback? What about backup and restore? Yes, you have these things in place, but have you ever tested the procedures?
Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.
One of my fire instructors told me, “We do not run on the fire ground. We move with alacrity and purpose.” After I looked up the word alacrity, I thought, “Wait, I’ve seen firefighting on TV. People are always rushing around.” I didn’t say this of course, which was fortunate. It was then explained to us something I think we mostly already know. Sometimes it’s faster to go slower. Because Slow is Smooth. And Smooth is Fast. When we rush, when we panic a little bit, that’s when we forget things. That’s when the buckle is harder to buckle, the snap is harder to snap, and so on. When we get emotional, when our adrenaline spikes, our bodies and minds change. We get benefits like more strength and power, heightened reflexes, reduced pain sensitivity and more. But we also suffer from reduced fine motor control, impaired complex thinking, higher anxiety, maybe emotional instability. And that can get us – and others – hurt. Or worse. (See: How We Process Under Pressure: Thinking to Lose, and Stress signalling pathways.) Stress can be useful in high performance situations. Other times not. It’s useful to try to understand the difference.
Now, corporate life should not be life threatening! It may be stressful and career threatening, but that’s it. We may have pressure for speed and action beyond a basic drive to market. And there’s the “Minimum Viable Product” idea with Agile Development designed for speed. It’s supposed to be about product market fit and early validation. But often it seems we’re going for speed over effectiveness. If features you’re launching are failing a lot, maybe you’re not “failing forward” and learning. You might just be going too fast and making mistakes. Did you have a sensible prioritization strategy? If you find your goal is to just pluck things off the backlog to fill up a sprint, that’s motion, not necessarily progress. Yes, you want to get features to market to test. Question: Do you have an experimental thesis for what you’re up to? Are you instrumented to learn from results? If you’re doing experiments, are your analytics tools set up to allow you to understand outcomes? Speed is fine. As long as it’s taking you to where you want to go and you have a means to course correct if you’re off track.
Head towards Safety. Not Away from Danger
“Head towards Safety, Not Away from Danger” in firefighting emphasizes the importance of maintaining a proactive and strategic mindset. Firefighters are trained to identify and head towards safe zones rather than just moving away from danger. This ensures they’re moving in a direction that leads to safety, not into another dangerous situation. It highlights the need for situational awareness. Simply moving away from danger without a plan can lead to panic and disorientation. In some situations, retreating towards safety may involve taking a longer route or facing temporary risks. (One fun drill is crawling around in full gear with mask blacked out feeling your way down a hose line. Are you going the right way though? “Bump, Bump, to the Pump!” The idea is when you can’t see, you need to feel for and follow the bumps (rocker lugs) on the hose couplings after the smooth part, which leads to the pump (engine) outside the structure.)
The key is to retreat strategically rather than reactively, ensuring the goal is met. Overall, this saying encapsulates the principle of making calculated, informed decisions that prioritize safety and effectiveness in high-risk situations.
There’s a tendency to react immediately to extreme stimulus. This can be a problem. Our society has become used to twitch responses. It’s understandable to want to react quickly to challenging situations. We want to make things better. Unfortunately, reacting poorly might go beyond just not solving a problematic issue. We can make things much worse, possibly harder to troubleshoot, solve or mitigate. (See Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Tversky, Kahneman and Does Stress Lead to a Loss of Team Perspective, Driskell, Salas, Jolinston.)
“Head towards safety, not away from danger” may seem a subtle distinction. But if you think about it, you’ll likely find some sensibility in the concept.
Wrapping Up
Every industry has its special nuances. Some ideas are transferrable across disciplines; others not so much. Insofar as any of these ideas are useful to you, wonderful. I fully understand that most day-to-day corporate life does not have the same immediacy of nature as things like fire / rescue services, or aviation, and so on. But that’s kind of the point. I think we can learn a lot by looking at environments that can be less forgiving of carelessness or neglect. Understanding what needs to be done now, next, and later is possibly the simplest of prioritization frameworks. The takeaways should be “not everything is an emergency,” and “not everything has to be made to felt like it is” just to try to engender a – possibly known to be overly dramatized – sense of urgency. Your vision and mission should be what inspires and instills some degree of intrinsic underlying urgency. Act accordingly.
If you’ve gotten this far, it seems you liked some of these ideas. Good news then… There will be at least a Part 2 coming soon!