Decision making in a crisis

This post is about decision making in complex scenarios: How to have a strong mind and make the right choice in a crisis. How to manage your own emotions to best help others in a crisis. 

On August 12, 2017 a car plowed into a group of peaceful protesters in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. The attack that killed one and wounded 20 followed a tense morning of exchanges between so called ‘Alt Right’ groups and a large group of counter protesters. Just after the one year anniversary of the event, I’ve assembled some thoughts on crisis management that I started writing just after last year’s event. 

---

Mindsets for crisis response
My response to this local domestic terrorism in my hometown automatically activated my crisis response brain. This is the thought process and framework that I have developed with 15+ years of international humanitarian response work in disaster affected countries and working as a consultant on special projects related to these crises. 

My visceral feeling of fear, apprehension and alertness reminded me of times working overseas during critical events such as the 200-4 civil war in Ivory Coast. In many violent events, the chaos happens in your area, but you cannot physically see and experience the event. This close-yet-remote experience causes a specific type of physical stress and cognitive load to the human mind. As humans, we interpret the descriptions of these events from bystander accounts, friends and family and the media and create and imagine a scenario unfolding. We feel the mental and physical effects of the events even if we are not directly present. We create the experience through media images, personal accounts and discussions with people who were physically present.   

In some cases, this creates a real phenomenon known as vicarious trauma. In this case, we read the social media feeds, media reporting, talk to friends and family and feel the hurt of the violence and hate. Then we have to figure out what to do with these emotions and how to act in the hours and days following the events. 

There is no singular answer to the question of how to respond to a disaster. My framework for thinking and acting in this chaos is decision making in ‘grey areas’.  This means making the best possible choice in complex scenarios that have no clear right answer or course of action. 

Decision making amidst complexity is always unsatisfying.  We are choosing or avoiding a choice over several seemingly bad choices. Rare is the time when crisis decisions are clear, with no doubt as to  the best course of action. Proving a counterfactual if we had not acted, is usually impossible.  Information to support your decision is often missing or inaccurate. Short timelines and external media and interest group pressure puts decision makers into a vise-like grip. 

Knowing that there is no clear answer is the best mindset in meeting these challenging situations. 

Decision Making in complexity involves the following areas:

Getting the best information - Getting the best of social media, conversations with people, and our own observations out on the table. There are many ways to organize information. Choose what works for you. 

Plan - Make a simple plan on how to act related to a variety of scenarios. Think through each good and bad outcome so you are prepared for a wide range of possible outcomes. 

Act -  Follow your plan. This can also mean consciously choosing to not take action. 

Revise - Collect additional information on the results of your plan and begin the cycle again. This method mirrors the Lean Startup approach of: Do something, see if it works, change your approach based on learning. 


Tactics for recovering from a crisis
Everyone from the prepper movement to your grandmother has some tactics on how to act in and bounce back from a crisis. These are a few of the tactics that I used to get back on track after last week’s clashes and domestic terror attack:

Turn off the screens - The information stream is a modern privilege and overall blessing, but only in correct dosages. Read about the low information diet and decide how much information you truly need. If you’ve been overdosing on coverage of an event, consciously turn off the stream and do something else for a few hours. 

Get outside - The natural world helps with any stress. For me it was a short canoe trip with the kids the week afterward. 

Talk to people - Talk to real people that you know on both sides of the issue. Don’t know someone who has a different opinion than you on this? That’s a red flag. Think about how to break through the bubble. 

Think of three things you are going to do to memorialize the event - Mark the event, don’t ignore it. It happened. Make sure that you think it through, visit the memorial, light a candle or say a prayer. Do something meaningful to you that acknowledges the event. 

Make a plan for your next steps - What are the three concrete steps that you are taking to make your community a better place and engage in the issues that caused this crisis? Feeling the hurt is essential, but only for a short time. Consciously let yourself feel the pain for a defined period. It is equally essential to then put it down, and take positive and massive action. 

Nothing can change what happened in Charlottesville on that day. We cannot predict future critical incidents. But we can control and perfect our own decision making. We can learn to recover quickly from crisis. This allows us to refocus on work for the best possible impact. It allows us to open up to the best possible life. 

Happy Trails.

​