Fight the Chaos

Everyone wants to feel secure in their decisions.

Everyone wants to feel certain.

Everyone wants to feel safe.

Our basic survival instincts drive us to avoid difficult situations if at all possible—to optimize for our own comfort. But old-school survival instinct biases our decisions and actions, reducing our ability to deliver anything more complex than exactly what it was designed for: our own immediate comfort. Such that it the biggest obstacle between us and achieving the greatest overall value we could provide, which often requires taking the comfort of others (our team, our employees, etc.) into account.

Being unclear about the perceived outcome is an adaptive strategy for surviving in a blame game world. It’s not a particular good strategy for becoming as well calibrated as the human brain is capable of.

What we need for to achieve that level of value is what Philip Tetlock calls “aggressive open-mindedness.”

This isn’t the jungle anymore. In modern organizations and even modern commerce, it doesn’t have to be “eat or be eaten” anymore. Optimizing only for your own survival and ease perpetuates the chaos. But all the investment into a prefrontal cortex has bought us as a species a chance at much more than that.

When you know you’re in the Chaos

Last week I was having lunch with a friend who is just finishing up a huge internal project that has gone way over time and been incredibly stressful. We got on the topic of how she could keep her next project from spinning out of control like this one. I started throwing out some ideas based on what I knew had gone wrong, but she was just shooting all of them down, getting more and more frustrated.

“But our company just sucks at planning!!”, she fumed.

What she was implying was, “Ergo, any planning my team does — any investment in planning or processes or skills around how to plan better on our side — will just be made irrelevant by these overwhelming, chaotic demands of the company, so why even try?”

I think a lot of people feel like this. Especially when you’re on a team that’s in high demand. Especially in an age when finding “interesting” or “impactful” work often means working in very unstructured environments where there isn’t a lot of organizational maturity (or even, unfortunately, coworker maturity) to buffer you from the constantly moving demands of the market.

And that’s just the joy of working in a job that doesn’t ask the same thing of you every day. More and more, it’s just the reality of working in our super fast-paced world where industries and technology are changing incredibly quickly. So no:

• You can’t make those demands go away
• You can’t avoid the situation those demands will put you in
• And you probably have no control over the circumstances, either at your specific company or in the wider world, that are causing the demands in the first place.

But that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do.

You can learn to respond better

Your brain on Planning

Most of the negative things that we associate with moving very quickly — with high powered, super chaotic demands that we’re dealing with— actually stem from our own reactions to those demands. They aren’t inherent to just being exposed to that kind of environment. So while you can’t change the demands being made of you, and you can’t necessarily change the people that you’re working with or the way in which they make those demands (i.e. how good they are at planning or communicating), you can change your reaction to it. And that can be super powerful.

Changing your response changes the situation.

At Webity, we used to call this “fighting the chaos.” It’s not something we understood how to do when we started the company. It’s a skill we identified and honed in the heat of battle, and over the course of three years we got very, very good at it.

“Fighting the Chaos” is the biggest thing that defined how we structured our work and is what I’m most proud of having built there. But this fight isn’t just some cultural artifact we made up ourselves. There’s actually a lot of science around how your brain thinks about planning, how it responds to chaotic environments, and how much of that is actually beneficial in a modern setting vs. what is innately programs from the old school monkey days.

So let’s talk about planning. Planning is really just a type of forecasting, right? We are looking at what we estimate the benefits to be, what we estimate the cost to be, and what we estimate the risk to be. And based on that, we’re trying to forecast what path is going to be the most beneficial to take.

Now the funny thing is that humans are naturally very bad at forecasting. Our brains originally learned how to forecast back during a time where we had access to almost no information except what we ourselves had experienced. So we place way too much reliance on our own judgment and our own immediate perceptions as being reality: We react to things that are associated in our minds but are actually not connected in the real world and we overvalue the feeling of total certainty in our decisions over accuracy.

So yes, by default, humans brains suck at forecasting. In fact, the average person will produce statistically worse results than if you just threw a dart at a dart board. Yet, our brains are also programmed to make us feel like we’re good at it even when we’re wrong. Bizarre.

Luckily, forecasting it turns out, is actually a skill. It’s something that you can work on and get better at. Philip Tetlock recently wrote a book called Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. It introduces the history behind some famous data-based types of forecasting, like weather forecasting, and how the lessons learned to hone that science actually show how to forecast for more qualitative things, like changes in government in unstable regions.

Teaching the Lizard (brain)

So how do we teach our brains to get better at this skill? The way weather forecasters do this is to actually write down their predictions and then they give themselves a score based on calibration and resolution. Calibration means that over time the distribution of their forecasts is similar to the distribution of actual events. Resolution means their forecasts are close to the occurrence of actual events.

Tetlock tested this on qualitative forecasting with a team of amateur political forecasters. They competed against professional intelligence officers to make predictions about how international political issues, like the situation in Syria for example, would play out. The intelligence officers actually had access to large amounts of classified data, while the amateur forecasters had access to exactly what you and I would — the news, social media, and other non-classified reports coming out of these countries.

Tetlock made his team diligently score their predictions over time so that they could learn from them and by the end of the competition that they were performing 30% better than the professional intelligence officers. So even with less information their predictions were better, and were actually correct about 75% of the time. With no access to classified information.

This is because scoring and being realistic about the results allowed the team to see the reality behind many of mental fallacies that our brains fall for when it comes to planning and forecasting, like:

• The gambler’s fallacy — detecting non-existent patterns in data
• Over-compensating for previous mistakes
• The mind’s tendency to be extreme in its responses to new information — to either over adjust or under adjust to new evidence rather than consider it in an appropriate neutral light.

When we talk about “fighting the chaos,” we’re actually talking about fighting these reactions in our own minds, not the unstable and uncertain environment that we’re being asked to make decisions in or plan through.

If management were a car…

Let’s bring this back to the real world. If we imagine planning and making decisions in a fast moving, unstable, and uncertain environment, it’s easy to identify why our brain jumps to these extreme reactions:

Missing deadlines or targets stresses us out, right?

Our brains see it as danger. That initiates our fight or flight response causing us to get more aggressive and more reactionary to our environment.

Just like when you are about to be in a car crash, your brain starts taking in lots of extra information to try to help you respond better. The same happens when you realize you’re on course to miss a deadline. You’re being flooded with energy and hormones to help you do something, to help you get out of the bad situation as fast as possible. Because human brains are primed to over indulge any new information, and because you are stressed and taking in information at hyper-speed, you feel compelled to respond — to respond a lot and to respond quickly.

Reacting to every new piece of information in extreme ways makes us feel like we’re doing a lot, and makes us feel like we’re responding to the situation in a timely manner. But it’s important to understand that this fight or flight response response, and the positive feedback loop you get from instantly reacting to it, are based on types of situations that don’t exist anymore. This is an old school evolutionary brain chemistry that’s not well suited to the workplace, especially in knowledge industries.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve socially and mechanically evolved beyond our basic brain functions. What about that car accident we were discussing? Responding as quickly and extremely as possible is not always the best response in that situation either.

If you start to lose control of your car on a patch of ice, this same response kicks in and your gut unconscious reaction is to slam on the brakes and yank the wheel back the other direction as hard and fast as you can.

For all you coastal Californians that haven’t had to deal with this every winter, that is actually the worst thing you can do. It makes you more likely to lose control of the car.

Instead, you slowly pump the brakes and spin into the slide. It’s super-counter intuitive…but it’s the only way to get back control over your vehicle.

In knowledge work, unlike driving, we don’t have unconscious physical reactions we’re trying to counter, but the principles aren’t that different. Your basic brain chemistry is going to tell you one thing, but you’re going to override it because you know better.

Don’t Be an Amplifier

If you are one link in the supply chain for a software product, and you start reacting based on your stress response (making extreme, reactionary decisions) because your environment becomes more chaotic, your behavior now becomes more chaotic. You are actually taking the chaos that is already putting stress on your organization, and amplifying it.

If there are three other teams that you work with to make this product, and they all react to your chaos in the same way you reacted…amplifying it even more…now a somewhat uncertain situation has become almost completely unmanageable. You aren’t actually making your team, or your company, any better at responding to what was legitimately a difficult and uncertain situation to start with. You’re making it harder.

So how do we fight this chaos? How do we fight these overreactions? How do we learn to be better at responding to chaotic and uncertain environments?

“Be explicit in your predictions, track the outcome of those predictions, and learn.” — Philip Telock

Be your own Umpire

It turns out there’s really just one thing that you have to do: keep score.

In the software world, this means you have to be diligent and disciplined about writing down how long you think things are going to take, and then checking at the end of the day to see how long they actually took. You have to track the assumptions behind your decisions and at the end of the day check to see if those assumptions were true or accurate.

This tracking is not about blaming people for being good or bad at guessing what was going to happen because everyone is bad at it. Even Tetlock’s team of superforecasters are only right about 75% of the time and that was after doing all this training.

And this all takes time, no lie. You have to write stuff down, track it over time , and communicate it clearly. And then you have to to come back retrospectively and score yourself about how accurate all that was and think critically about what you can learn from the delta. It’s not something you can do just once time in an hour or so. It’s something you have to make a consistent, non-negotiable part of your process.

The ironic thing is then, that when you most need to do this — when you are under the gun, usually behind a deadline, in a stressful and uncertain situation — you’re going to feel like any time spent on something that isn’t actual typey-type work moving the product out the door is a waste. Everyone around you in the situation is probably going to be telling you same thing. So here’s your first practice at driving on ice:

Do Not Slam on the Brakes. Do Not Yank the Wheel.

It is actually even more important to take time to stop and write down what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and check yourself on those expectations. When you have the least amount of time to to spend on these activities is when they become the most valuable. But if you do it (consider this your first experiment in forecasting) you will find it actually saves you time although it seems totally counter-intuitive.

Keeping score is the first step. What you learn from keeping score will start to reveal a lot. Not only where you go wrong and what fallacies are keeping your from responding appropriately to the chaos, but where your company— the system in which you work — where it’s biggest fallacies are.

Just like writing down your estimates and assumptions, and looking at them again taught you the ways in which you were overreacting to situations, you can learn the ways in which the people around you in the system are overreacting to situations and design processes to counteract them, or at least buffer your team from them. Most of the time this is as simple as just saying no and sticking to your system.

Pro Tip: If you’ve been keeping score, now you’ve got the data to back that decision up.

In Summary

What my friend and I came down to was that there were two things that would be most valuable for her to track and review to change her situation:

• How long her team thinks things are going to take
• Why people are asking them to make changes to their schedule, and the reasons/assumptions behind those asks.

Studying what is and isn’t correct overtime will give her the confidence in the future to say no to feature requests and schedule changes, and to actually design a work environment for her team that makes them as efficient and effective as possible for the organization overall.

Her organization might not change, but keeping score and fighting the chaos protect her team and allow her to do good things whether the organization matures or not.