2: Fear

No one would argue that disasters come in many forms. Could we consider, then, that disaster comes in many sizes? After all, what separates a verifiable "disaster" from any other bump in the road of life?

A friend of mine was on her way to bring her daughter to the pediatrician. The child had a fever of 104F. The cause was a virus. But the virus had caused congestion that had led to an ear infection and now the kid's health problems were becoming complex and intertwined. My friend knew she couldn't do anything about the virus other than waiting it out. But this ear infection was compounding things.

While she was stopped at a red light she glanced into the rear view mirror and saw her child convulsing in the car seat behind her. She quickly turned to pull over to the side of the road but as she did she crossed a lane of oncoming traffic and was hit. The collision was at fairly high speed, and both cars were damaged. The occupants were relatively unharmed thanks to passenger restraints and air bags.

While she fumbled in a fog for her cell phone to call 911 she heard a knock on the car window. Miraculously, there were already paramedics on the scene. They were taken to the nearest hospital. She and her daughter were released with minor injuries, and her daughter was given a prescription for antibiotics. Insurance covered the car repairs but it was determined to have been her fault. Even so, it was the first accident she'd ever had in 20 years of driving, so her rates were not increased.

Was this a disaster? Could it have been worse? It certainly could have gone easier. Had she more sense of situational awareness, she might have noticed that she was stopped at a traffic light metering cars that were exiting from a hospital parking lot. She needed only await a couple seconds till the light turned green, or even awaited a break in the traffic, then drove into the emergency room lane and taken her convulsing daughter right into the hospital.

Fortunately there were a group of paramedics standing beside their ambulance who witnessed the collision, and they were able to run to the scene. It certainly was not disastrous those paramedics got to the scene so quickly. In fact, had she not been concerned for the safety of her daughter, my friend would have considered the placement of her daughter's fevoral seizures a stroke of incredible luck.

Not to mention the damage to the car and the subsequent injuries could have been much worse had she been hit by a heavy truck or a vehicle moving much faster. In fact, people might have been killed in what amounted to a head-on collision. So wasn't it indeed a stroke of luck that the bad judgment exercised in panic did not result in the serious injury of additional people, who were associated in no way with the original problem of a child going into fever convulsions in her car seat.

While the world is full of genuine unmitigated disaster - tsunami, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other acts of God, I posit there are a much greater number of smaller issues turned into serious problems through mindless or even wanton acts of panic. Of course, we are fighting our instincts when we talk about the idea of keeping our heads in a crisis. Under immediate stress the vision focuses and we lose awareness of our peripheral vision. Blood flowing with adrenaline our muscles tighten, heart races, breathing quickens and becomes shallow, and we are put into a fight-or-flight mode which feels for all intent and purposes like drowning.

Reacting fearfully, then, puts us into a state of mind not unlike that of a dying person.

In my career I have witnessed perfectly level-headed managers lose all sense of propriety and purpose over minuscule events which to them become the nucleus around which aggregates an unnatural sense of fear. In this state they fail to see the obvious - we have a medical situation and we are 100 feet from a hospital. Instead, they focus on the problem at hand like a robbery victim focuses on the muzzle of the gun. They are literally blinded, drowning, and want only for the situation to end in any way possible, as quickly as possible. If others have to be taken out in the process of the panic, so be it. The higher mental functions give way to the raw animal emotion of the hindbrain.

Because the subconscious sense of dying overwhelms the individual he becomes infinitely manipulable.

Step 2, then, is recognizing that what is most likely going to destroy our efforts is the ineffective management of personal fear. This is not to say we need all become war heroes. But rather, we must learn to function effectively when our senses are heightened by fear. We need to keep the higher brain functions engaged.

A manager who is paralyzed by his own fear, rational or irrational, is incapable of evaluating any act which considers the health of the team above the sating of his own immediate mental state. Thus he is incapable of leadership. Thus he is incapable of finding the best solution.

In such a state of fear, we are incapable of inspiring, evaluating, or performing miracles.