How not to be stupid

I melted wax to fix my wings

I've done all the dumb things

Paul Kelly

Those of you that know me will be well aware that I have done some pretty stupid things in my life. A number of those stupid things involved one or two beers and listening to Paul Kelly. The lyrics of his hit song “Dumb Things” echo inside my head as I thought of Icarus flying so close to the sun that his wings melted. I was reflecting on doing something stupid again on the weekend and thinking about what I could do to stop being so stupid. Beer is rarely involved these days which helps me stay a bit clever but stupidity still creeps in.

I know I’m not alone. We’ve all done stupid stuff. Sometimes it’s harmless and fun. Sometimes it down right hilarious and sometimes it’s really quite embarrassing. But on occasion, the consequences of unintended stupidity can be very serious. If you or your staff do stupid stuff in your business it will cost truckloads of money and put people's lives at risk.

So why do smart people do stupid things? Turns out there is a lot of research that has gone into stopping people from being stupid. That’s why doctors and pilots have checklists, it’s why our field staff do a Risk Assessment before starting every job, and it’s why you get a big fine for using your mobile phone in your car. Smart people are always doing stupid stuff. It’s not that we plan to be stupid, it’s just that humans are…..well they’re human.

The good news is there are a few things we can do to prevent or minimize our own stupidity and that of our teams. First, we have to understand the contributing factors to stupidity or errors.

Research has shown the main contributors to unintentional stupidity are:

• Rushing - running late, reversing into a pole

• Information overload and not being able to discern fact from fiction

• Physical stress- lack of sleep or exhaustion

• Mental and emotional stress

• Being distracted - multi-tasking, putting a quote together while watching youtube

• Operating outside your domain - sit in a primary school classroom and you quickly feel pretty stupid

• Being influenced by the presence of an “expert’ - being in the presence of a self-proclaimed or qualified expert makes others switch off

Strategies to avoid unintentional stupidity include:

Check Lists

Used by doctors, pilots, train drivers, and many others can help reduce errors in many applications. Check Lists are a great tool for any repetitive task whether it’s in the field or the office. When first trialed in operating theatres hospitals saw a dramatic drop in mistakes - especially when they allowed nurses to intervene if the doctor missed something - we all benefit from someone looking over our shoulder.

It can also be a distraction as seen in an on ground aircraft disaster that resulted in 583 lives lost. Two planes collided in 1977, the pilot in the plane that caused the crash was distracted by rushing through a checklist at the time of impact.

Taking a checklist to another level is the point-and-call technique.

Japan's rail network reduced mistakes by 80% and accidents by 30% through this technique of pointing and calling. https://youtu.be/RZun7IvqMvE Engaging the eyes, ears, arms, and voice the operators maintain a higher degree of concentration with results in a reduced error rate.

Managing Mental Stress - Yerkes-Dodson Law.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law says that you need a certain amount of stress/urgency/stimulus to reach your maximum performance. I’m sure you have felt the rush of getting a task completed with a tight deadline to a high standard. On the other side of the curve is where you may have made mistakes because you were rushing. There is a sweet spot for you and your team. Just the right amount of urgency gets people moving but, too much stress can cause a dramatic drop-off in performance. Does the phrase “Dear in Headlights” come to mind? The technical term is ‘The point of instantaneous incompetence’. I’ve seen people go from performing well to completely frozen in an instant if the stress gets too high.

Every individual has their own curve, some like it hot, and some need to be calm and don’t respond to increase pressure. As a leader, you need to read not only the individuals but also the whole team. Knowing where the limits of the team are is very useful. This curve is not static. You can push the curve out and up by applying a bit of pressure and then backing off. Then repeat and each time you push a team or an individual the curve pushes out bit by bit. Just like lifting weights in the gym, increasing the size of the weight little by little.

Slow down: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” Navy Seals

So many of the mistakes I’ve made are from rushing and I see people around me making mistakes by rushing. It is never quick to rush a job out the door without the proper setup, you always pay for it down the track. It’s really hard to manage the pressure from clients and others in the business to stop rushing. There is no question when on-site that your team doesn’t start until everything is set up, tools and materials are at hand, the right risk assessment is done, the work method is planned, and away you go. Smooth and fast. Yet in the area of knowledge work or in the office these principles seem to fade away.

Here’s a little chat about becoming a smooth operator. https://youtu.be/PgwZYXs7g9Y

Physical Stress: Eat, Sleep, Move and be kind to yourself.

Protect the asset. The asset is you. My basic structure for looking after my physical health is very simple, but simple is never easy.

• Eat well

• 8hrs sleep

• Exercise regularly

• The hardest of all - be kind to yourself. Cut yourself some slack. Connect with people that are kind to you and you start to follow along

Pre Mortem

Research conducted in 1989 by Deborah J. Mitchell, of the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; and Nancy Pennington, of the University of Colorado, found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.(HBR 2007)

Step into your time machine and travel through to the end of the project and pretend it’s a total failure. Discuss with your team why it has failed. What were some of the contributing factors to the failure?

This is a great exercise to do with your team. There is strength in diversity, each of your team members has a different perspective aligned with their different strengths. Being able to tap into these different points of view before you kick off a project is invaluable and will add so much to the Pre Mortem. Covering off as many contingencies as possible will help you form a strong plan allowing you to mitigate many of the risks.

This is a great exercise to tease out all the possibilities of failure before the stupidity kicks in. It is said that hindsight makes a genius of us all - why wait until after the train wreck!

My stupidity on the weekend….

I was racing my sailboat, leading around the first mark, fighting it out in close quarters with the second-place boat. We got a break on them and were heading to the next mark extending our lead.

But…..we were headed to the wrong mark. From first to almost last by the next mark. We fought our way back to second by the end of the race. When will I ever learn……

I’ve been racing sailboats all my life and I have learned this particular lesson too many times. So much so that I have systems in place to help prevent this particular form of stupidity.

1. Read the sail instructions, listen to the radio for the course number, and check the flags/signs on the start boat.

2. Check List: I write the course on some masking tape across the bulkhead in the cockpit

3. Pre Mortem: I brief the rest of the crew on the course and tell them I’ve sailed the wrong course before so let's all be on the lookout

4. Point and Call: As we talk through the course I point at the marks and call out the marks name or numbers. (sometimes we draw it on the chart/map)

So why on the weekend did I make this mistake again?

1. Stress - we were under pressure from the other boat and totally focused on boat speed

2. People were operating outside their domain - in this case, we were short on crew, people were doing two or three jobs on the boat -

3. Rushed - being short crewed means we are rushing on the boat

4. Distraction - there were boats from another club headed to our “wrong” mark so it felt right for a while.

5. Presence of an expert. This is probably the most significant contributing factor. As a skipper, I am a “self-proclaimed” expert and my crew members trusted that I knew what I was doing. This was made worse by the fact that early in my career I was trained as a Navigator in the Navy and drove warships for a living.

The scenario in the hospital showed that when the nurses were checking the doctors the number of errors decreased significantly. I needed someone checking me, the so-called expert. When running technical teams we have an abundance of experts, and rightly so.

Who’s checking your experts because like the doctors and the pilots we all make mistakes, especially if we’re ‘experts’.

Not all stupidity is preventable but we can reduce the chance of mistakes by thinking about our own weaknesses and taking care of our teams and managing their distractions. You will no doubt have your lived experience of doing dump stuff and the contributing factors will be different for every individual and every team. My tips for avoiding stupidity in myself and my team are:

1. Slow down

2. Prepare well

3. Minimize distractions

4. Manage stress - physical and mental