EP 77 — Nathan Smith, PhD, on Resilience in Extreme Environments
Highlights
- How to Navigate the New Workplace
Key takeaways:
- Highly skilled people should be able to adjust their approach to navigate through novel or difficult situations.
- This is often referred to as least worst decision making.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
When we're talking about highly skilled people, people that have been very well trained, very well trained on standard processes and procedures, but maybe also selected for their abilities to solve problems and be creative and be adaptable and flexible, you would hope in those situations those people are able to adjust and adapt their approach so that they can navigate their way through those situations. I refer a bit to a good colleague of mine, a guy called Professor Lawrence Allison, who has done a lot of research on decision making under pressure, and they do work on kind of least worst decisions. So people that are put in a situation where you've got five decisions and they're all rubbish. Like, you know, all of the outcomes, they're all bad decisions, so they call them least worst decisions. So what they're really trying to do in that situation is find the least worst one out of those options. And when they talk about doing that, they're very clearly, it's like, what's the goal? That's the thing that people go back to is to avoid this experience where they call redundant deliberation. So people sometimes get into those situations that are so new and novel that they end up in this trap, in this cycle of trying to figure out, like, what is the best thing? And they call it redundant deliberation where they're just going through the potential consequences of these decisions rather than going, actually, my goal here is to save lives. And this is the best choice to get to that point. (Time 0:12:04)
- The Role of Self-Talk in Resilience and Performance
Key takeaways:
- People use selftalk to cope with difficult situations.
- Selftalk can help people feel more in control and connected.
- Selftalk can help people feel more effective.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, so it's a bit of self-talk. I think there's a lot of people do it as part of their sort of pooched performance routines. So like they've been in a performative scenario and they use it as a way of kind of capping it off and mentally detaching from what they've been doing so that they can then kind of get the rest recovery in and stuff. That's a common thing that we hear is like, I'll cycle home from work at the end of the day and I'll be using that time as well as concentrating on the road, but I'll be using that time to process some of the stuff and just being reflective of what's happened and how I've dealt with some of those things. I think within that there's a tendency, at least the people we've interviewed around kind of the psychology of resilient function and performance. There's a tendency for them to move away a little bit from technical and tactical things to more of a human being. Of a human behavior focus, so they're starting to venture into a little bit more of that kind of how effective was my team working today or how well did I make decisions or not? To what extent was I able to manage my thoughts and feelings to allow me to do the things I wanted to do so that they're sort of shifting a little bit from did I press these keys right or did I press the buttons right on this phone or did I write these things correctly on a sheet to what was I doing that enabled me to perform those kind of core technical skills I needed to do? That's one observation that we've found. I think the other thing that keeps coming up and now we are doing three or four data sets that we're writing up at the moment on people that are operating in extremist, so out in the field where we're looking at core psychological experiences and the three things that keep coming up so agency, do you feel in control relatedness or connection? Do you feel like you belong in that environment? Are you trusted and supported by other people and competence? Do you perceive yourself to be effective? (Time 0:16:15)