by Anna Dewar Gully, co-CEO of Tidal Equality

It’s April 20th, 2020. Our entire world (just about) is still consumed by #covid19.

According to a number of statistics, it’s obvious the majority of us are feeling significant stress.

We hold concerns about our health and the health of our loved ones, financial stress and concerns about our economy, and worries about uncertainty itself. According to recent statistics from Ipsos, it appears that pessimism is on the rise just about everywhere in terms of us being able to achieve a near-term return to life as usual even as some countries are slowly beginning to open up again. We are all under pressure.

In our various roles, diverse organizations, and across continents and countries, all of these stressors and the pressure of this evolving situation are having an impact on our decision-making.

Many of us are falling prey to the risks of fast - or at least rushed - decision-making, scholar Daniel Kahneman describes as “System 1 Thinking “ - reactive or instinctive decision making - which I explore in more detail below.

Unfortunately, decisions that are the consequence of only System 1 thinking may pose some significant risks for today and for tomorrow.

“Nobody works better under pressure. They just work faster.”
~ Brian Tracey

Are fast decisions necessarily bad decisions?

When the dust settles what will we discover?

Not all fast decisions amount to bad decisions…

However, when the dust settles, many - if not most - of us will soon discover that a good percentage of the fast decisions that we are making right now, and others that we have already made during this crisis, whether as CEOs, as leaders of a team, as policy-makers, as communicators, community leaders, as doctors or as ethicists, etc. are actually bad decisions.

Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
~ Mark Twain

By ‘bad decisions,’ I mean decisions that will have significant negative consequences for our organizations and for our communities in the short, medium, or long term.

We are already seeing some of these bad decisions materialize in the heat of the crisis. A piece in the Washington Post shares the perspectives of an ICU doctor working on the Covid-19 front lines. He reflects on how fear and high pressure in this situation is negatively impacting his medical decision-making as well of the decisions of his expert colleagues, he writes:

Fear can be healthy or unhealthy. This fear was unhealthy — like a barrier keeping me from the man I was there to try to help. I began to wonder whether this fear is driving some of the striking deviations away from standard care that we are seeing for covid-19 patients. These deviations are potentially dangerous for patients, and they are contributing to ventilator and bed shortages that are predicted to get worse. Such changes from standard guidelines include earlier intubations, deeper and lengthier sedation courses, prolonged immobilization. This leads to each patient occupying the ventilator and ICU room longer than usual, which contributes to resource shortages
~ Dr. E. Wesley Ely

Many of us are making bad decisions… in business

The other day I heard about an engineering firm that has spent the last 5 years trying to build up the representation of women on their team. They’ve invested in changes to their hiring process, changes to their policies and practices, they’ve invested big bucks to re-engineer their male dominated culture, really they’ve invested a lot. Then Covid-19 hits and the CEO sends out a missive to a legion of staff now working primarily from home to say all staff need to maintain their hourly billing at the same rate as prior to the crisis or risk being let go.

The CEO may have been entirely unaware of the gendered implications of his decision to communicate that… he may not be consciously aware that women still hold 70% of childcare responsibilities in our society. So now (if statistics are to be believed) with women in their workforce disproportionately holding down the fort to homeschool and care for their children while working from home, the company stands to lay off many of the women they’ve spent the last five years trying to hire and retain when these women can’t maintain previous expectations in a new situation.

… in policy

Then there are the policy decisions that governments all over the world are making. Where I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, this week I discovered that as part of the collection of emergency benefits being offered to various groups in our society, decisions for how we will support those most vulnerable in our society have been sub-optimal to say the least. For example, decisions pertaining to how we support those living in poverty on welfare or disability (social assistance) during the crisis.

It was clear that those living on social assistance were going to need extra money to subsist. However, the Province of Ontario elected to make the available benefit for extra money for food during this crisis for those on social assistance available through a “discretionary benefit” meaning people seeking the benefit need to contact a case worker and plead their case about needed extra money for food. Case workers themselves don’t always make fair decisions, and like all of us are less likely to make good fast decisions during a crisis. Pair the decision to make the benefit discretionary with the decision to close all but three of our welfare (Employment and Social Services) offices across the City of Toronto, and you’ve inadvertently created a huge barrier to access for a food benefit which some of the most vulnerable people in our society need access to right now.

I could write a book on how those two seemingly innocent fast decisions will mean that Covid-19 has a disproportionately negative effect on expanding inequality in our society (and perhaps one day I will.)

Some of these decisions, like the ones Dr. Wesley notes bravely above, will be so bad that scholars, governments, and activists (like me) will be learning from and thinking about them for decades to come.

The risks: why are we more likely to make errors in decision-making right now?

In short there are three primary reasons we are at elevated risk of making poor decisions right now and they relate to the quality of information we are accessing, how many fast decisions we are making under pressure, and our proclivity for defaulting to problematic biases during situations like these.

Let me dive into each of these risks for you and offer you a solution or two that you should endeavour to put into play…

Information gaps, uncertainty, & fake news

Throughout this crisis many of us are operating with limited, missing, or erroneous information on the basis of which we are making decisions.

The truth is none of us, not even the experts, really know how this is going to turn out. We may be using our best models, our best evidence, and our best ideas, but none of us are really experts in the novel corona virus 2019. It is after all, novel (new). So there are gaps in our knowledge and information and a great deal of uncertainty.

There is also a great deal of fake news! In recent weeks leaders from organizations like the United Nations have raised their voices to a panicked pitch to assert the significant risk of the spread of misinformation during the Covid-19 crisis. For example, factcheck.org posted this mid March about the risk of viral social media reports spreading false Coronavirus Tips:

Posts are circulating false and misleading tips on social media — in some cases wrongly attributed to Stanford University — about how people can monitor and avoid the coronavirus.
~ March 12, 2020 from factcheck.org

Derek Thompson, writing for the Atlantic, made a parallel to the phrase the fog of war, a reference to the uncertainty that military leaders have to operate in in wartime conditions. In his article The Fog of Pandemic he argues:

What we’re experiencing now is the fog of pandemic. The officials tracking COVID-19 are swimming in statistics: infection rates, case-fatality ratios, economic data… We are already seeing how, in the haze of confusing data, political leaders are trying to marshal that uncertainty to override the advice of public-health experts .
~ Derek Thompson

So clearly, when information sources are variable in their quality, when there is missing information, and when some are deliberately spreading fake news, we are at risk of making bad decisions due to bad information.

Defaulting to “system 1 thinking” (fast thinking)

Daniel Kahneman is sometimes known as the Godfather of Behavioural Economics and he is author of the international bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. He helped many of us to understand that our brains have two thinking systems, System 1 (fast thinking) and System 2 (slow thinking).

Personally, I like to think of System 1 as “reactive thought” …. “Yikes! There’s a spider!” and System 2 as “deliberative thought” … “Hmm, that’s an interesting theory, I need to read and think more about it!”

In our fast-moving society, thinking fast tends to have positive connotations and thinking slow, negative. Both systems, though, as it turns out, have value, and both also have serious flaws.

Leadership gurus like Tony Robbins want us to believe that great leaders are those who can make fast decisions in a crisis:

Leaders spend 5% of their time on the problem and 95% of their time on the solution .
~ Tony Robbins

Be careful not to be tricked by leadership Guru-thinking right now, though. Under pressure, especially if we think we are great leaders, we are most at risk of defaulting to System 1 thinking, to fast thinking.

Further still, under pressure, we are more susceptible to being overconfident about our ability to make effective fast decisions. Many scholars refer to overconfidence as the mother of all biases, as it lays the foundation for us to be susceptible to other problematic biases that we hold, and to skip the process of checking our thinking with ourselves and with others.

In fast, System 1 thinking, the risk is that many of our decisions may seem like logical reactions at the time, but actually, given how cloudy the situation in this crisis really is, and how uncertain we are about the risks and the future, we could be making quick decisions that could have long term negative consequences that we didn’t pause long enough to think about or consider.

Many of these unintended consequences could, in fact, be anticipated if we slowed down our thinking for a few moments, and deliberately attempt to kick System 2 thinking into gear.

There is an imperative to slow down our thinking and add in deliberative thought.

Listen to Daniel Kahneman explain this phenomena on NPR’s The Hidden Brain podcast here.

You will learn from Kahneman, if you don’t already know, that you are unlikely to always be a “rational actor” capable of reasoned effective fast decision-making. In a crisis situation, we are even more susceptible than usual to defaulting to System 1 thinking in order to make decisions, fast.

That means we’re at risk of making fast decisions as irrational, overconfident, and reactive actors.

Now you know…so please don’t soon forget.

Bias in decision-making

Last, but definitely not least, there is the issue of bias. It is perhaps the single most important reason we are prone to making bad decisions during this crisis.

All of us ares biased in some way or another. Some of our biases are conscious and others unconscious, and our biases inform and shape our decision-making at the best of times.

I mentioned above that overconfidence is sometimes referred to as the mother of all biases since it turns off our ability to consider what other biases we may be defaulting to consciously (and unconsciously.)

Many decision-makers are particularly susceptible in crisis situations to making mistakes and bad decisions due to overconfidence, excessive risk-taking, and conscious and unconscious biases of all kinds.

Many of you may have read stories about how Covid-19 is radically exposing the inequality of our society. Read for example this great piece and deeply concerning situation regarding the disproportionate death rates for example among other unjust consequences of Covid-19 among Black and other racialized and marginalized populations in the United States.

You may be less aware that your biases may put you and the populations you impact more at risk of expanding inequality during this crisis.

In terms of risk taking, according to this study, men in particular run the risk of becoming bigger risk-takers under stress, whereas women become more risk averse.

Also interesting is this study from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, which suggests that it’s more common for senior leaders in organizations to develop overconfidence as they rise in an organizational hierarchy and to overestimate their capacity to make sound decisions based on their existing knowledge, expertise, and networks.

In calm waters, as leaders we often take the time to consult beyond leadership populations to make decisions… after all, we have more time to consult. That consultation process brings in “non-leader” (i.e. less overconfident) perspectives and improves decision-making overall and also helps us check our own biases.

In a crisis situation like this one however, many leaders are thinking and feeling that they don’t have the time or the means to consult beyond the leadership table or even their own desk, and they may be overconfident in their ability to make good decisions alone or with only other leaders in the room.

All of these factors mean that we may unknowingly be defaulting to biases that impact those already facing inequality due to gender, race, socio-economic status and beyond, and we can see these biases in our decisions, and sadly, in the medium and long term consequences of those decisions.

Opportunities and solutions to enhance decision-making in this crisis and beyond

Here are three quick ways to guard against these risks

EVALUATE INFORMATION QUALITY

Check your information sources carefully and be transparent with fellow decision-makers when information is missing or unclear. Name the problem of problematic information in your decision-making processes.

GUARD AGAINST OVERCONFIDENCE

Be vigilant and remain wary of your own overconfidence and the overconfidence of your peers as you go about making decisions during this crisis. If you sense overconfidence in yourself or in others in your line of sight, take a moment to pause and engage in deliberative thought (System 2 thinking).

INTRODUCE A PROCESS OF REFLECTION

Speaking of deliberative thought, what practices do you have in place to support deliberative decision-making, to slow down your fast thinking, and to reduce bias in your decision-making? My team at Tidal Equality has created a simple 5-question system called the Equity Sequence ™ you and your team can learn in under 2 hours and practice applying daily in under 20 minutes to slow down your thinking (engage System 2 deliberative thought), and to consider the bias and equity implications in your decisions in order to improve them. This practice not only helps you consider different perspectives, reduce unequal consequences, we also know it makes decisions better. You can learn the Sequence quickly in our digital training Equity Sequence for Covid 19.

Conclusions and next steps

Given the elevated risks and the potential consequences of fast decision-making in this crisis, we all need to take steps to prevent our fast decisions from becoming bad decisions. All of us who lead people and organizations need to spend a few moments every day to consider carefully what can we do to improve our decision-making and reduce the long term negative impacts of this crisis on our organizations and our society.

Minimally during this time we should be striving to do no harm, maximally we could all be using this crisis to build a better world.

As Winston Churchill once said, and as Rahm Emanuel not so long ago reprised: