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2020 has been a never-ending year of adversity and uncertainty.

How well do you feel you were prepared?

Did you easily adapt to the difficult environment? Or did it feel like an endless battle to figure out what’s going on and what to do about it?

If you’ve struggled this year, you’re not alone. Most people don’t handle the unexpected well. And the idea of hoping for assistance from the government or other institutions has been disappointing with their unreliable, haphazard efforts.

Your ability to survive chaotic environments is, and always will be, up to you.

Laurence Gonzales is one person that can help us through these environments. Gonzales is the author of Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things. He explains why we feel so unprepared for life’s surprises. The message is clear - we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’re lackadaisical in our preparation to deal with the unexpected. We coast through life, becoming more fragile and susceptible to the unknown.

Ultimately, it’s our choice to figure out how to thrive in a volatile world.

Here are 9 ideas from Gonzales on how to do it:

1. We Live in a Vacation State of Mind: We’re Unable to Deal with the Unexpected

Short of an airplane crashing into my house, there is nothing in the immediate environment that will reach out and kill me. But as a result of our great achievement, we have evolved into a vacation state of mind, a culture that teaches us to drop our guard. With the illusion that we have dominion over the earth, we conclude that we have nothing to fear. [All italicized quotes attributable to Gonzales]

Comfort and complacency have replaced attention and learning. We’re overconfident in our ability to handle change. When change happens, we are caught off-guard and flounder aimlessly. We’ve become over-reliant on life always unfolding according to plan. We overoptimize and overspecialize, rather than build a margin of safety by being well-rounded. We don’t spend enough time being curious about the world.

As children we become brilliant generalists, curious about everything. But most of us gradually become specialists in our narrow little preserves, focused only on the minutia of our own lives. We stop learning and then, when something unexpected happens we don’t know what to do.

As Gonzales describes, our inherent curiosity is gradually eroded with work, meetings, and the urge to be “productive.” We can’t enjoy anything without some underlying objective – more money, a new promotion, or greater recognition. We rob ourselves of the ability to spontaneously enjoy the moment. We’re always planning or worrying - usually both. Eventually, the tunnel-vision makes us siloed and unable to deal with the unexpected.

2. The Need to Live in the Moment

When we are not living examined lives, when we are not paying attention, when we are not practicing self-reliance, other forces slip in to dominate our lives, our behavior, and ultimately our faith and our future.

We constantly worry about the past and the future. The present is never good enough. We second guess our past decisions and fret about the future. Of course, there’s a time to learn from the past and plan for the future. But there’s also a time to live in the moment. Make time for each.

We live best when we are present, immersed in activities that align with our purpose. Fight the urge to ruminate about the past and the future.

How can we experience the live performance of our own lives? To be in the moment is the ultimate act of redemption. To live with an unquenchable curiosity that sweeps away our mental models and makes everything new is the ultimate triumph we can experience as humans before inexorable forces pull us apart.

3. Our Assessment of Human Error is Often Wrong

Accidents of all types used to be analyzed in terms of their physical or mechanical causes. When the cause was clearly human error, they were often written off as a result of foolishness or lack of training. But among those who investigate accidents there is an increasing awareness that this type of analysis does not fully explain why otherwise rational people do what may seem irrational.

As I’ve explained in other articles, lazy thinking allows us to write off human error with vague clichés and empty explanations. We invest little time addressing the underlying complexity and “messiness” of the situation. We judge with hindsight, forgetting to put ourselves in the shoes of the people under question.

Without uncovering the root causes, we’ll never learn. And for leaders, your team will never improve unless you unearth the underlying reasons for mistakes.

Gonzales tells the story of Lynn Hill. Hill is an expert climber who one day made one small mental mistake before a climb. It almost killed her. Her story highlights the complexity of human error and why more experience and expertise is not always the solution.

…In May 1989, Lynn Hill, the winner of 30 international rock climbing titles, was about to climb what she called a “relatively easy” route in France. She threaded her rope through her harness; but then, instead of tying the knot, she stopped to put on her shoes. While she was tying them, she talked with another woman, then returned to climb the rock face. “The thought occurred to me that there was something I needed to do before climbing,” she later recalled, but “I dismissed this thought.” She climbed the wall and when she leaned back to repel to the ground, she fell 72 feet, her life narrowly saved by tree branches.

In her case more training would not have helped. In fact, experience contributed to the accident. She had created a very efficient script for tying her rope to her harness. She could do it without thinking. But the script for tying her shoes was perilously similar to the one for tying her rope. The act of tying her shoes after threading the harness allowed her brain to reach the unconscious conclusion that her rope was tied, even while leaving a slight residue of doubt.

Routines and habits drive most of our decisions. We operate on autopilot because it works so well.

Most of the time.

For Lynn Hill, she made a disastrous mistake that anyone could have made. It wasn’t a question of intelligence, work ethic, or commitment. It’s the unavoidable result of our brains trying to make decisions in a complex and changing environment.

It is the failure of thought and reason that leads to such outcomes, in which people have followed a seemingly logical path to reach complete nonsense. Hence the phrase “intelligent mistakes.” When people abdicate responsibility and come to rely on a system of rigid rules, matters can take an ugly and dangerous turn.

To paraphrase Gonzales, education and sophistication are useless when our mental models and scripts encounter a changing environment. We assume we’ll automatically adjust to changes. But we don’t. We keep using the same habits and scripts because that’s how our mind is programmed. Unless we are constantly evaluating our assessment of the world, we are susceptible to using the wrong script at the wrong time.

4. Automated Scripts, Not Conscious Choice, Drives Behavior

One of the reasons for this has to do with the way the brain processes new information. It creates what I call behavioral scripts to automate almost anything we do. Behavioral scripts are an extension of the concept of mental models. Mental models have been widely studied and written about by psychologist for decades. A mental model can be something as simple as the image on a sign indicating where handicapped people can park their cars. We instantly recognize it as a wheelchair even though it looks very little like a real one.

Automatic routines dictate most of our behavior. If we didn’t have this system, we’d go crazy consciously deliberating every little action.

By understanding this system, we can begin to know our limits. We can’t ignore it. While it works so well most of the time, it can also fail spectacularly.

The model displaces the real world and sends this message: you already know about that, you may proceed. That’s how many of our worst decisions are made. They aren’t really decisions in the normal sense of the word. They are simply automated behaviors, formed out of the inheritance from our animal ancestry.

Once we break out of our vacation state of mind, we can change these behaviors as needed. It takes deliberate effort. It doesn’t happen on its own. This is the path to live a better life. Actively examining why we do the things we do. Not just accepting it. We think we do this, but we don’t.

Knowing those patterns we can begin to see them all around us and together we can marvel at them and ask new questions about them. We can also see how they have quite naturally led to our behavior over time and perhaps begin to understand better how that behavior has led to the predicament we are in.

5. Don’t Encode Bad Repetitions: Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

While we conceptually understand the value of practice, we’re terrible at the actual implementation. We go through the motions - making minimal progress while encoding significant errors in our technique. We are what we practice. If we practice poorly, we’ll perform poorly.

This is exactly what it means to live in the moment. Completely focused on the task at hand, not worried about other things. Tough to do in today’s world. But it’s a skill we need to learn. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to learn and struggle because society rewards immediate success and making it look easy. It rarely is.

As Gonzales highlights, bad repetitions can lead to life-threatening mistakes. Lazy practice encodes behaviors that will come back to haunt you.

Most of the time, we aren’t really aware of what we are practicing. The behavior that emerges may therefore surprise us. In his book On Combat, David Grossman describes a law enforcement officer who taught himself how to snatch a pistol out of an assailant’s hand. During practice, he’d snatch the gun, then give it back and try it again. Finding himself facing a real assailant one day, he snatched the gun out of the man’s hands, taking him completely by surprise. Then he handed it back. Luckily, his partner shot the assailant.

Deliberately live in the moment. Cultivate an obsessive curiosity about how things work. Don’t accept things at face value. Don’t go through the motions.

We are all, to one extent or another, slaves of our unconscious rehearsals. The rehearsals create the scripts on which we act without thinking. Our only recourse is to live mindfully, to learn broadly, and to be prepared to dislodge and revise those scripts. Doing that is not easy. But knowing how these human systems work can help.

6. Recognize and Compartmentalize Bureaucratic Nonsense

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

I’ve worked in different corporate environments. All organizations have their flaws and issues. No company is perfect. It’s the unavoidable nature of the organization.

But that doesn’t mean you let bureaucracies get in the way of what you need to do. It’s your duty and obligation to remain steadfast and aware of what constitutes bureaucratic bullshit and what constitutes valuable activity. Keep those distinct and don’t mix the two.

Understand that some level of nonsense is inevitable. But don’t allow that to affect the real work you need to do. Complete the bureaucratic nonsense as required (and after trying to minimize it if at all possible). But don’t let the nonsense take precedence over the groundbreaking work you should be doing. It is this work that will change you and your company.

Your colleagues and bosses may not get it. Just understand you’re playing a different game. If you prioritize nonsense over the valuable work, you’ll end up deceiving yourself for decades and wonder what went wrong when you feel unfulfilled or worse, fired, because your nonsense tasks were automated or eliminated.

7. Never Underestimate the Power of Groupthink

Groupness, then, is a force that should not be discounted as an influence over our behavior. “The strong emotions associated with groupness were inherited from [our] ancestors…They served the same purpose, and were passed down in the same way, as the instinct that impels a bee to give up its life to defend the hive.

We believe we think independently, impervious to the influences of other people. We’re not. We are more conformist than we’d like to admit. But if we understand when we succumb to group pressure, we can create offsets to counteract the groupthink. If we fool ourselves into thinking peer pressure doesn’t affect us, we remove any chance of learning. Once we admit it, we can deal with it.

Leaders should be especially cognizant of this. While leaders desire honest and unbiased communication, they often get feedback tainted by cultural norms and external influences. Leaders need to counteract the pervasive nature of groupthink.

Gonzales highlights one of the most revealing experiments on the power of group pressure.

The drive to fit in with a group is almost unbelievably powerful. Numerous experiments have been performed show that people will deny the evidence of their senses and even risk their lives to do what others around them are doing. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer of social psychology, performed an experiment that is legendary in academia. A group of people in a room was asked to judge which of the three lines on the right matches the one on the left.

The answer is obvious, but all the people in the room except one had actually been recruited by Asch to give the wrong answer. More than a third of the test subjects when against their own perceptions in order to go along with the crowd. In another experiment, the subjects were asked to fill out a form in a room full of people. Again, only one person was not in on the experiment. During the session, smoke begin point out of a heating vent. When everyone ignored it, so did the test subjects, despite the obvious sign of danger.

Asch’s experiments have never been more relevant than today. Misinformation spreads at an unprecedented rate. We are constantly pressured to adopt the beliefs of others, without investing the time to verify what’s true. Suppress the urge to immediately adopt what you hear without deliberate thought. Leaders need to push their teams to be disciplined in what they believe and what they say.

8. We Don’t See an Unbiased Reality

Mental models make our world, but they also shape and constrain the possible…In a real sense, seeing is not believing. On the contrary, believing dictates what we see. But once we can disrupt those models and truly see, then seeing becomes believing, and believing begets doing.

We never see an unbiased reality. Reality is always filtered through our own mental models: our experience, personality, beliefs, perspectives, etc. Every time you listen to the news or get an update from a colleague, there’s always a bias and things left unsaid.

Reality distortion is similar to groupthink – we need to recognize it exists before we can deal with it. And when we start dealing with it, we’ll never make it completely go away. The best we can do is to recognize reality distortions and correct before being misled.

Gonzales explains how the breaking of the four-minute mile shattered one tightly-held model of human performance:

These models and scripts form the basis not only of how we act but of what we perceive and believe. We tend not to notice things that are inconsistent with the models, and we tend not to try what the scripts tell us is bad or impossible. For example, it was long thought to be impossible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Doctors said it might prove fatal. Then on May 6, 1954 a 25-year-old runner named Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Within a month another runner beat that record. By 1966, various runners had knocked 8.1 seconds off of Bannister’s original time. By 1999, 16.27 seconds had been shaved away. Humans had not evolved into gazelles in those few years. What changed was the mental models and scripts of the runners.

Challenge the assumptions about what is possible and how you do things. You’ll be surprised how many of your deep beliefs have never been challenged. Step back and think about your worldly assumptions. It helps us reframe how we interpret the world, rather than just going about using outdated frameworks.

9. Make Time to Reflect, Not Act

Gonzales tells the story of Xerox and its former CEO, Peter McColough. Xerox became an instant success in the 1960s with the model 914 copier. But the success of the copier infected the company with an arrogant and erroneous belief that they were the world’s top tech company. In reality, Xerox was really an inefficient, industrial corporation that got lucky with the 914 copier.

McColough believed Xerox just need to work harder and harder to succeed. He was always successful because of the sheer effort and work ethic put into his endeavors. But sometimes, more effort isn’t the answer. Periodically, we need to slow the manic pace, stop, and reflect. We need to sit and assess our goals, behaviors, and activities and make sure we are not: 1) pursuing the wrong goal 2) missing the big picture because of tunnel vision 3) ignoring feedback from our colleagues, friends, and competitors. Pure work ethic is often praised for its level of sheer commitment and determination. But what never gets acknowledged is the drawbacks of relentless, blind work. Our goal should be producing value, not activity.

He [Peter McColough] was a well-liked, energetic, impatient man with ample evidence that if he just made up his mind and worked hard, he and his company could achieve whatever they wanted. This is exactly why success is such a dangerous element of any endeavor. Embrace the struggle. Beware the achievement.

All his experiences in life at taught him this lesson: effort equals success. If at first you don’t succeed try try again. And that forceful action turned out to be exactly the wrong sort of lesson to learn when what was needed was new learning and quiet reflection.

No one disputes the value of hard work. But sometimes you need to step back and make sure the hard work is aimed in the right direction.

To summarize the big ideas:

• We Live in a Vacation State of Mind: We’re Unable to Deal with the Unexpected

• The Need to Live in the Moment

• Our Assessment of Human Error is Often Wrong

• Automated Scripts, Not Conscious Choice, Drive Behavior

• Don’t Encode Bad Repetitions: Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

• Recognize and Compartmentalize Bureaucratic Nonsense

• Never Underestimate the Power of Groupthink

• We Never See an Unbiased Reality

• Make Time to Reflect, Not Act