Decoding Crisis: Unravelling The Human Brains Role in Crisis Response - Bec McKeown

well welcome and welcome to decoding crisis unraveling the human brain's role in crisis response so my name is be mccuan I'm a chartered psychologist and I'm the founder of Mind science which is my own business and I use psychology to improve efficiency and Effectiveness in PE for people who work in high stakes Industries my background I've been doing this for 20 years now and I've mostly worked in the a creation industry and for in defense for the ministry of Defense have done a lot of research so that's where this knowledge all comes from um and then I moved into industry and I'm starting to apply that a little bit wider across the board so that's a

little bit about me so what's going to happen in the next 20 minutes or so we're going to have a very very quick trip around your brains so I'd like to explain a little bit about how your brain works what happens in a crisis and then what you can do about it and I think it's it's quite important to understand how your brains work because then you're at least understanding why people do the things they do sometimes okay so a little bit of uh Basics here um what happens when you get information into your brain so it comes in from all of your senses what you see what you hear smell touch taste but what

you're getting is raw data you don't actually understand what it is you're seeing until your brain go goes back into your memory and sort of looks at all the cues so you know if you're looking at a chair you won't know it's a chair your brain is going to tell you well it's got a flat seat it's got a flat back it's got four legs hey it must be a chair and then it will tell you and you can make a decision from there I've overly simplified that quite clearly but that tells me that the brain is it's a it's a limited capacity information processor because if you think about the amount of information that's coming in

and it's processing and the speed that it's working at is actually quite phenomenal it doesn't always get things right because you're processing so much information you're not going to take it all in so it decides what you're going to pay attention to so for example at the minute you're sitting in here you're listening to me you're looking at the slides you're probably thinking oh it's a bit chilly in here but you haven't noticed the feeling of the chair on the backs of your leg until I just brought it to your attention yeah so you've got an awful lot of information going in so the brain has to find some way of coping with it and that's kind of the the topic of this

talk um we've got two systems of thinking system one thinking and system two has anybody ever read Thinking Fast and thinking slow yeah this is what we're talking about so um so system one thinking is the non-conscious stuff it happens really quickly your gut reaction very automatic the things that you just know how to do system two thinking is anything that you actually have to deliberately and consciously think about so the usual example I give of this of system one thinking is when you learn to drive or certainly when I learn to drive I couldn't do that thing between the clutch and the accelerator and I used to bounce the car down the street and stall at traffic

lights I became experienced in that and now I don't think anything about it if I stole my car it's just like well how did that happen um the system to thinking is me reading a map it's very slow it takes an awful lot of effort and understanding for me to do that I don't do it automatically so there's two different things going on there when you're doing thinking now they're not sort of independent they do interact with each other but the important thing to note is that system one happens milliseconds before system 2 and the takeaway point from that is is that even when we think that we are being reasonable and rational and we're

making thought out decisions that system one thing is still ticking along in the background so it massively is going to influence your logical thinking and that brings me on to the subject of bias I'm fairly sure you've all heard of unconscious bias um if you've worked anywhere I'm fairly sure you've probably had to do some unconscious bias train diversity and inclusion etc etc this is where all this stuff comes from um I don't particularly like the word bias because I think it's got a negative con connotations to it um preferences isn't quite the right word I'm not really sure where we go with this but I just want you to think that bias isn't a

bad thing it's just way that we do things and according to a lot of the research there's 172 different biases that we have and it must be true because I read it on the internet now these biases mainly sort of divide themselves into four categories and these are the ones that you can see on the slide there so ambiguity if we don't have much information there's a set of biases that make us fill in gaps if we have an information overload that's another set of biases in ways that we do our thinking um and the same for memory and speed if we have to think quickly and we've got to make fast decisions now you'll see there's a

little thing called the decision lab I've put that on there because hey that's where I took this photograph from um the clip rather but if you're interested in having a look at that I recommend that you go to their website because it's fabulous resource which explains all the different types of biases um and it really is it's it's filtered by experience this is where that system one thing comes into that is your filter for what goes on in system 2 too so it influences everything that you do it influences the the way you understand what's going on around you it influences the way that you perceive things the way that you make judgments the way you make

decisions um not all bias is bad that's the other thing to remember it's there for a reason it's there so we can actually function because if you think about the way that I described how the brain works if we didn't have shortcuts then you'd be stuffed because everything would take forever to actually do okay so just a couple of examples of bias here Choice overload now this is how I felt this morning when I was trying to connect all this stuff up um so thank you to everybody that helped me with that um Choice overload when you've got way too many choices um the the natural go-to is to Simply pick whichever's quickest or whichever seems right at the time you

might not consider all options open to you because you just need to get something done fairly quickly recency effect this is quite interesting because you tend to remember events that have happened most recently that can in cyber security actually result in bad security Behavior sometimes um I was reading something the other day and it saying there some I can't remember the percentage but a lot of um a large percentage of security teams admit to ignoring security alerts because the ma majority of them have been false positives so if you've had a lot of false positives and there's another one comes up are you really on alert to that false positive or are you just thinking

that's just another false positive so again that's that's how that sort of thing works um there's also a Primacy effect where you remember the first thing so if you think about meetings that you go to on a regular basis you remember the first couple of meetings that you went to and you remember the last couple everything in the middle turns into some sort of aor this mess unless something spectacular happens that's going to stick out in your memory so that's another example of bias um anchoring this is quite an interesting one if there has been well as there is there's always a cyber security threat incident in the news so that's it's it's something that you you're very aware of

and if you've got a particular cyber threat on higher priority what you might do is to focus on that and not actually think about the entire threat landscape so that's anchoring this is also used quite a lot in um advertising I think there was a good example of the time subscription service so if you go in and you sort of anchor on the price then anything lower than that seems a little bit better so start to look at the way you see advertising and you're being persuaded to make Selections in how to spend your money and you'll start to see these type of things being used S cost fallacy I couldn't resist this one it drives me nuts um so cost

fallacy is we've spent so much money on it we have no choice but to get on with it and we make bad decisions and carry on with things that really should have been binned um but uh that happens an awful lot um and I'm fairly sure that we see that with people oh having worked for the mod I know a lot about the way they do their purchases and I know a lot about the way that they buy their battleships haven't actually been fully you know the runways don't work with the airplanes they bought to go with them etc etc so yeah we can all fall for that one mostly influence you think it's it's

political really isn't it we can't be seen to step back from where we a position that we've held um and you might find that um I see it sometimes in teams in relationships with people you know somebody's made a decision to go down a certain track and everybody's criticizing them but how do step back without a bit of ego damage so again more biases there have we got any ux people in the room nope okay this is um heuristics now so this is shortcuts and I've put this picture up here because we all know what that means full battery it's done like that because it's very easy to just look at it and totally understand it frees up your cognitive

resources so if you have a look at the dashboard in your your car that is designed around these principles so for example your petrol gauge is a picture because it's easier for you to understand a picture than it is to look at a number work out how many liters of fuel your car holds how many it has taking one figure away from the other and finding out exactly what sort of State your fuel systems in so when you get into your car have a little look because all of those dials have been designed to make it easy for you to read so rate or state what sort of information do you need to know guides

how that's designed it's incredibly powerful so I want to just engage with me and we're going to do a little exercise and I want to demonstrate the power of your brains okay so I'm going to present you with a list of words and I'd like you to read the words out loud okay right three 2 one bled blue yellow green red blue green red yellow green yellow well done how was that fairly easy okay we're moving on to list two this time I'm going to present you with a set of colors and I want you to say the color out loud have you just clicked on what's going on yeah I thought you might did

okay

reded yellow

bleden yell blue okay have you all right still fairly easy so now we're going to mix things up a little bit and what I'm going to do is mix those two tasks and this time you're going to have a list of word colors I want you to say the color of the word out loud not the word okay right let's go yellow red yellow

how was that yeah um that to me it's it's it's called the Stroop test it's even in the science museum if you have a little wander around there in the psychology section and I learned it a long time ago and I did my undergrad but it stuck with me because I think it's a massively powerful demonstration that your brain is up to all sorts of things that you know nothing about and we take it for granted and we don't really necessarily understand exactly what's going on so what is the point of all of this apart from it's quite amusing so let's just talk a little bit about more about what happens in a crisis so focusing really

in on system one thinking um it's there for a reason it evolved so we function effectively and efficiently in natural environments um it's it's a bias that enables us to respond very quickly um and keep our mental resources free for the unexpected so people sometimes refer to this as the old the ancient part of the brain well it's not the ancient part it's been there forever it's just what they're referring to is the way that we used to have to run away from saber-tooth tigers to get back to the cave before we got eaten um and that kind of releases anxiety anyway I'll come to that in a moment so we're all doing this it's quite magical really but

we're all doing this many many times every day so you know when someone's angry in the first word of a phone call I know when my M Rings up and says Rebecca for a start that's the first clue um you know if you're the topic of conversation when you walk into a room you just get that Spidey senses start going um have you ever driven down a motor I mean some of you may have driven here and you see a car that you just want to either get past or Draw back from because you've just got a feeling that whoever's driving it is possibly not trustworthy um and there's a picture of a book up there the thinking fast and

slow one um I mentioned it earlier I mention it a lot I'm not on commission I should be um it is absolutely fabulous and it explains a lot of these things and I just wanted to read out this this quote from it and it's a story of a team of firefighters that entered a house in which the kitchen was on fire so soon after they started hosing it down the commander heard himself shout let's get out of here without realizing why the floor collapsed almost immediately after the firefighters escaped only after the fact did the commander realize that the fire had been unusually quiet and that his ears had been unusually hot together these Impressions prompted

him what he called his sixth sense of danger he had no idea what was wrong um but he knew something was wrong and it turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men stood so that's a a really big example of how powerful these These intuitions are and that's great but they're not always right especially when you're faced with things that are new particularly I mean cyber security I've never done the job I have to be honest so how do I know what it's like but I can only imagine how you must feel when you realize that something's about to happen so that brings me on to emotional

responding now a lot of us some people are more emotional than others that's kind of not what I'm talking about here I'm talking about the the psychology and the um Neurology of emotional responding so it's a tiny little part of the brain called the amydala and that is responsible for setting off lots of signals that send um messages down your spine cord to the adrenal gland reduces releases adrenaline and then you get that fight flight or freeze and it's quite interesting I don't think you always know how you're going to respond you you it could go any which way and when I used to do cabin Safety Research it was really interesting when we looked at videos of

what was going on in the cabin because some people would just sit in freeze and do absolutely nothing some people get up and crazy they run across the top of the seats they're punching people out the way to get out the plane before them um and some people just run away and what people tend to do is to run to the door they came in because that's what they know regardless of whether the fact that that door might not open or it's on fire the other thing that we saw was that a lot of people you could tell the drivers from the non-d drivers because when you say under your seat belts and get out the hand goes down as

if they're in a car seat belt and of course it's not the same is it because a lap drop on an aircraft is quite different um so again it's that sort of it's what we call cognitive narrowing your brain knows that you're in danger so what it's doing it's cutting out all of that information so you won't be thinking about the seats you know the back of your seat on your legs or whether you're hungry or anything like that your brain focuses you right down on the thing that is causing you danger um if you've ever been in a car accident you'll probably know this it happened to me once everything took ages to happen I could

see the car coming towards me I couldn't move out of the way I knew what was going to happen and it just took forever and that's because of cognitive narrowing the other thing that can happen is we have what we call an amydala hijack now an amigdala hijack is the Red Mist it descends I think we've probably or maybe I'm just going to make an embarrassing confession here I don't know when you're on a in a car roundabout somebody cuts you up and you might just sort of have a little gesture and or things that's an a migdala hijack you know it's just an instant reaction doesn't always happen in bad ways I get a migdala hijacks frequently in handbag

shops you know you just lose all control and you have to go and do something so those sort of things are the responses that you might get in a crisis so if somebody's behaving a way that doesn't seem quite natural to you just have a little think about where that's coming from and what I like I quite like this slide I've used it for a lot of years now um this to me is sort of an analogy about how the brain works so that elephant that's the emotional side of the brain so when that's rampaging through the rider hasn't got much chance and nor is the environment and it's just a little bit of a way of thinking about

how you do things and certainly when I was working at the University if somebody was having a bit of a fit about something we'd say the ride is falling off the elephant um but it's really just to sort of let you know that there is that emotional that instinctive reaction thing that is probably a lot more powerful than you perhaps realize okay so what can you do about it you have to go a bit quickly now because I think we're going to run out of time um a couple of things the first one is about bringing non-conscious into conscious I call it reflective practice Gibb's reflective cycle there's a reference there if you're interested in

it I didn't call it reflective practice when I talk military folk because it sounded too fluffy so we called it critical self analysis um a critical self analysis toall sea salt so it even had an acronym which went down particularly well with the Navy um what it is is just thinking about what actually happened so what actually happened in the event that you've you've just come out of for example so who was there what did they do what happened the feelings bit is the really important bit so so it's what were you feeling before during and after and that's important because if you identify those feelings you can then start to identify what it was your

triggers what it is that sets you off military fate would call it left of bang so what happened before it all kicked off so what's your personal left of bang what was it that triggered you to do something good bad or IND different whatever it was um evaluation so what was good and bad about that what went well what didn't go so well and who contributed to that and was it a positive or A negative contribution um analysis well why did it happen what can what sort of sense do you make of that and what knowledge can help you make sense of that so when you're thinking about those biases why did that why did

somebody else behave in that way why did I behave in that way why were we sparking off each other because if somebody causes friction or annoys you in some way there's probably something going on unconsciously and then again what do you conclude from that and then what are you going to do again to put that right I'll be honest this is an absolute nightmare to do because it's hard it takes time and we have a natural bias to action like let's get on to the next thing why do we want to bother with this but what I have found and especially working with elite special forces is that actually it makes you more able to self-regulate and

control emotions because you know exactly you learn what your triggers are you know what sets it all off so I have found that it's been really useful it does mess with your head a bit because then you start to understand how other people work and then you start to sit on the fence in an argument and then you can't vote and it goes on so you do start to see other perspectives and we found it very powerful we had somebody come in after the weekend on a residential course to say you know what I don't like my friends anymore they're very judgmental and when you start to get that sort of reaction it it yeah it was

it was quite big so um I'm a great fan of it now I can do it learning to do it is just awful um it's about building resilience as well um it's a word that lots of people Bandy around and I see all over the place on LinkedIn um what is resilience four components to it that says adaptability so that's the way that you think and behave and the way that you respond to situations then you've got social support so that's the teamwork being with people you trust and it's easier to trust people when you understand them and you understand why they're behaving the way they do hence all of the other stuff we've talked about confidence is

technical term for this is self-efficacy and that comes from positive um motivational psychology Theory but basically what it means is is that you know that you can do something and you know that you can deal with this this situation that you're in um also self-regulation which I've talked about so understanding how you work um and then purposefulness is the ability to adapt positively it's to learn from mistakes so instead of just being crushed by it so it's a more of a mindset thing okay so I think we're just about at the end now so my three top takeaways are reflect on what you do learn to be adaptive and have social support and I'll leave you to decide what you want

to learn amongst yourselves okay any questions from anybody you can always ask me all my details are up there anyway so if you ever want to know anything or want to some more resources to go look into these then just drop me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn or something okay we're done