In an emergency situation, a team that is coherent and on the same page has a much higher chance of surviving than both teams that act like a “debating society” and lone wolves.
There is a time for disagreement and debate, but that time is BEFORE or AFTER a crisis not in the middle of it. Debate in an emergency can cost lives, that’s why it’s important to have clear, team agreed upon leadership and planning.
The Prime Rule Of Diving
There’s a rule among cave divers: Any diver can call the dive, at any time, for any reason.
If one buddy gives the thumb up during or even before a dive (in that context it means ‘go up’ rather than ‘all’s well’), the other buddy isn’t asking why, that buddy confirms the call and turning his nose for the exit. Sometimes two people are a team.
No recriminations, no name calling, no peer pressure to ‘suck it up’ and go on. The dive is just done, and the team heads back to shore.
Sure, it can be discussed later, and if you don’t like the pattern of a buddy’s decisions you may quit buddying up with him; but that’s not in the heat of the moment and it’s done respectfully.
Why is this relevant to prepping?
Accident analysis reveals that very few disasters have a single cause. The pilot didn’t just ‘oopsie’ and fly into the side of the mountain. He was flying to an airport with a challenging layout. A sudden storm degraded conditions as they approached. The instrument that had shown some minor intermittent glitch progressed to complete failure. The flight crew was extra low on sleep due to previous delays. The co-pilot knew the approach was wrong, but phrased his objections so tentatively and diplomatically that the distracted pilot didn’t get the hint. And then the pilot flew the plane into the side of a mountain. (True story)
Most disasters arise not from one problem, but from a whole series…that no one feels free to call to a halt. Thanks to Potjernik* for the pic.
If you’ve ever found yourself looking at the aftermath of some disaster, major or minor, and saying “I meant to get that [whatever] fixed.” raise your hand. Those of you with raised hands: Welcome to the human race. We all tend to procrastinate getting the dang thing fixed and gamble the need for the fix will hold out just a little longer. I’ve been meaning to get a water catchment system up at The Place before it gets dry. What prepping job have you been meaning to get around to?
Another common thread
There’s another common thread in the airplane disaster story. There was an expert who was in charge. There were others, less experienced but supposed to be helping. The others ignored their own judgment to rely on the assurance of the expert. But hey, sometimes even experts are wrong. In diving, the detour to get around that is to have every diver take ownership of the dive, and know she can call it if it doesn’t seem right to her.
A big part of the ‘any diver can call the dive’ rule concerns the aftermath — or to be more precise, the lack of an aftermath; the part about no recriminations. Human psychology has some quirks that tend to make us do stupid. One is our need for approval. It’s not just teenagers who take bad chances because of peer pressure or not wanting to look ‘chicken’. Your companions will make better choices if they trust you not to poke at them for not being bolder. You’ll make better choices if they treat you similarly … or failing that, if you do the grown up thing and follow your judgement.
The mental edge
From inside your own head, the biggest threat to the ‘call the dive’ rule is the problem of sunk costs. “If we turn back now, we’ll have to retrace several miles to take the alternate route.”… followed by an attempt to drive over a water-covered road is an example of sunk cost fallacy. And sunk car fallacy, perhaps. Sunk costs reflect time/money/effort already invested. We humans hate abandoning them.
Have you ever met someone trying to sell a house or boat or whatever for way too much money? He explains ‘he has to get out of it what he paid for it’ but since he’s charging way over market value, he keeps can’t sell the thing as it continues to depreciate. He’s enslaved by the fallacy of sunk costs. It’s hard to look past sunk costs to make good decisions, but you’re less likely to compound your errors if you’re at least aware of the tendency and try to avoid it.
Losing the sunk costs beats losing the sunk car.
How does teamwork help in an emergency, when action is required?
It’s not risk I’m against, folks; it’s badly considered risk (else I would never scuba dive in caves). One of the things stress does to you is sharpen your focus. That has an obvious upside – hey, kinda cool to be able to get your whole brain figuring out how to deal with the bear charging your way, right? – but it’s also got a down side called ‘tunnel vision’. In this case, ‘calling the dive’ can mean keeping the mental flexibility to switch to a new course when the original one isn’t working.
In sum, keeping the policy of ‘Any diver can call the dive at any time, for any reason’ reduces our tendencies to do stupid because of social pressure. It helps us keep our options open to choose the best course under changing circumstances. The policy stops us from silencing important voices because they’re not the one most expert (or most dominating) member of the group. It helps keep the critical balance of flaws from collecting without someone interrupting the progression. It would have kept that plane out of the side of that mountain, and it deserves to come up out of the water.
- By Potjernik (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons