Beware of the KILLER COWS! - How emotional memory gets in the way of good leadership.
Beware of the killer cows! Really… Bessie is almost 40 times more likely to kill you than Jaws. Cow related deaths account for the loss of 40 lives per year. Sharks account for less than 1 per year. Consider this factoid next time you hesitate to dip your toes in the ocean, but think nothing of driving past entire pastures of “killer cows”.
What do cows and sharks have to do with leadership? Nothing. But the reason we feel more afraid of sharks than cows means everything.
The idea of being eaten alive by a giant menacing killer fish is a lot scarier than the thought of smashing your car into a stray heifer. The fear factor of a shark attack makes us think of it in a different way, that inflates its importance. As a result, we build it up in our minds, and amplify the reality beyond what logic would otherwise tell us. We call this phenomenon emotional memory. It’s the same reason we remember the red traffic lights we have to stop at more than the green ones we cruise right through. Things that we perceive as negative simply tend to dominate over those that don’t.
Emotional memory clouds our judgment, and if not kept in check, can lead us to stray way off course. Lets look at one example from my business. In the world of Psychiatric hospitals, when a patient becomes agitated, if the situation isn’t handled properly, people can and do get hurt. So as you can imagine, there is always a lot of focus on preventing these situations, and when they do happen, deescalating them in the safest way possible. To do this, hospitals spend a lot of time looking carefully at every incident where staff go “hands on”, analyzing what went wrong, and what can be learned from it. Data is very important here. At one such review, I remember asking the question “How many codes are actually called per month?” (A “code” is when someone calls on the speaker system for all available staff to help in an emergency). There was no formal counting being done on calling codes, so we asked around to get a best guess. The answers were striking. Many staff estimated that 10-20 times per month, they were responding to a code. Some went as high as 35, but the answers were always on the high side and definitely got our attention. Could this be true? If so, changes would definitely need to be made. As we started brainstorming the next steps, I needed to know for sure, so we decided to start actually counting them. We asked the receptionist to mark down every time a code was called and when. After two months of data, we asked staff again. We got the same answers as before. 10 – 35 codes per month estimates. Then we checked the receptionist records, the real answer: THREE. That’s right. Only three codes actually occurred per month. How on earth could the findings be so different? Was the staff lying? Of course not! They were simply responding to emotional memory and any of us would have done the same thing. You see, “codes” are highly charged events that tend to stand out in our memories. They are exhausting and can be scary. A five-minute code can feel like it lasts for hours, and one event can feel like ten.
Had we acted solely on what the emotional memory had to offer at the time, we would have spent much of our limited resources on the wrong issue. We very well could have abandoned efforts that were actually working pretty well, and in the end, made the problem much worse, while distracting us from bigger opportunities.
Of course, leaders aren’t immune from emotional memory. It happens to all of us. But it’s the leader’s job to recognize when a situation could be ripe for emotional influence, and guide their team away from feelings, and towards data. Because if there is one thing that is true for ALL of us it’s that we don’t know what we don’t know.
