Two Essentials to Decision-Making Under Stress
This winter my son and one of his friends entered the school Imagination Fair. It’s an annual opportunity for students to display their STEM creativity. My son picked a committed partner with strong technical skills, and they had a compelling idea: create a machine that dispenses gumballs if you choose the correct track to roll a marble down. Anything with guessing, marbles, tracks, and gum would surely elicit strong interest from kids at the fair.
Ideation and construction progressed well…until the morning of the fair.
Have you ever felt like everything was in order — and then it all fell apart? Were you able to think clearly and make good decisions in that moment?
The night before the fair, my son’s partner checked the machine before going to bed, and everything seemed ready to go. But he woke up the next morning to find the machine had collapsed. If you’ve ever been in a house on a school morning with an eleven-year-old, you know that it’s usually a rush to get them out the door dressed and fed. Layering a rebuild of this project on to the morning routine seemed impossible.
Naturally, my son’s partner freaked out.
His parents were sympathetic but needed to get themselves ready for the day and on their way. It seemed all might be lost…until his mom entered the room and made a remarkable statement:
“You’ve got a great mind and can figure it out.”
And then she walked away.
In my last post, I wrote that decisions often end up rising to higher levels of leadership because people struggle to deal with complex and ambiguous problems. One of the reasons for that is that complex and ambiguous problems frequently need to be made under stress. And stress can result in unproductive thinking about the problem. It reminds me of the great poem by Rudyard Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
My son’s partner took a deep breath and quickly went to work. Despite the instinct to lose his head and lose trust in himself, he looked for a solution. And he knew something that anyone with strong technical skills knows: Duct tape will fix most problems.
With additional resolve, and a big roll of tape, he managed to get it all back together.
How well do you help yourself and others make stressful decisions?
The two biggest mental culprits that sabotage decision-making under stress are:
- Scarcity mindset. These thoughts complain, “I’m not enough,” “We don’t have what it takes,” or “The resources aren’t available.” Constraints and limitations are real. That said, we often don’t realize what’s available to us. Remind yourself or others what you/they have. For example: You’ve got a great mind.
- Catastrophic thinking. Thinking the worst possible outcome can be helpful for a moment as you accept what’s at stake. But “what if” thinking can be paralyzing. “What if we can’t fix this!?” “What if my partner thinks it’s my fault!?” “What if we have nothing to display in the fair!?” It’s so important in these moments that you remember what’s possible. Like: You can figure it out.
You’ve got a great mind and can figure it out.
Imagine the growth potential for yourself and others if you led with this statement in moments of crisis.
I’m not recommending a superficial positivity or an abandonment of support. It’s simply re-framing how you see problems.
Do you or the people you lead look at problems with a scarcity mindset and catastrophic thinking? What might happen if you instead approached decisions with abundance and possibility?
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