It is 2 AM, and the phone rings. It is never good when the phone rings at 2 AM. Your heart is racing, and dispatch tells you that a major fire has ripped through a senior housing development. The watch commander is requesting resources and the EOC to be activated.
Decisions are being made, and you need to get into your OODA Loop fast, or you will be behind the eight ball.
When making decisions under pressure keeping things simple makes a huge difference. One of the flaws of being human, we are drawn to complexity.
"Build a tower, build a team" is a six-minute TED talk by Tom Wujec, which has been viewed well over 2 million times. We watch small teams, from CEOs to recent kindergarten graduates, given 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of string and a yard of tape, one marshmallow, and 18 minutes to build the tallest, free-standing tower they can – typically in competition with other teams. The marshmallow has to wind up on top.
The fantastic part of this talk is that the kindergarten students had taller and better towers than the complex towers that civil engineers made. Why is that the case? It was a simple decision-making process.
The kindergarten students did not make lists of what was necessary and did not have an ego about who was in charge. See, when everything becomes a priority, nothing is a priority. And at times, a complex system slows down the decision-making process.
Einstein may have been known for being a math genius; however, his ability to sift the essential from the non-essential made him think better and make better decisions. Of course, this is harder than it seems.
In emergency management, there is an ever-increasing amount of information coming at us. Why is it so hard to sift the essential from the inessential? It is the ability to zero in on what matters most. And yet most of us spend time cluttering our minds with things that don't matter rather than focusing on the simplicity that does.
How do we turn complicated problems into simple ones? We need to break down a problem into its components but look at the problem holistically. Keep things as simple as possible. Simplicity has a way of improving performance by enabling us to understand better what we are doing.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
