11

What to Do When You Run Out of Gurneys

How to Navigate Uncertainty

 

IN 2012 I was invited to do a session for the nurses at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. Six weeks earlier the trauma and critical care units had endured the aftermath of a mass shooting inside a local movie theater, and they were still recovering from it. During the midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, a man dressed in tactical clothing had deployed tear gas grenades and fired into the audience with a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun, killing twelve people and injuring seventy others.

They told me how they’d coped with the sudden influx of wounded even when they ran out of basic necessities such as gurneys. One of the nurses, a young woman who looked fairly fresh out of school, reminded me that while they were in the thick of the crisis, they knew less about what had happened than people at home watching news reports about it. The hospital staff, emergency workers, passersby, family, and friends didn’t know if it was a lone gunman or part of a larger attack, if it was domestic or international terrorism, or if the killer or killers had been caught. This particular nurse, still shaking, recalled that she hadn’t known what to do, that she hadn’t had any information at the time, and that she’d just wanted to quit.

How could she avoid feeling that way next time? she asked me. She didn’t want to ever feel so unprepared, so lost and helpless, when things went wrong.

I wanted to tell her that things would never go wrong for her again. I want to tell my son and everyone I care about and everyone I work with the same thing. But things will go wrong for all of us. Life will present us with too many uncertainties and too few gurneys. I call this place the gray area. In the gray area, things aren’t clear-cut. Instead, they are weird, messy, noisy, and chaotic. The lines between good and bad, guilty and innocent, rational and irrational, and intentional and accidental are blurred.

The gray area is dangerous because it lends itself to sensationalism and emotionalism. Make a mistake, and TMZ will make sure everyone knows about it. You can go from miscommunication to damage control to disaster in the blink of an eye. The headlines are full of stories about situations where it isn’t clear who was right and who was wrong, and the subjective opinions of a crowd can cause real damage, from lengthy investigations and lost business to death threats for those involved. The longer we live and the higher we move up in our careers, the more often we’ll find ourselves having to negotiate this nebulous place, to make tough calls in perplexing situations.

I train many first responders in medicine and law enforcement, but in reality, everyone is a first responder at some point. As we saw in chapter 4, flight attendants are. Parents are on a daily basis; so are teachers. The same can be said of employees, bosses, students, and anyone who is ever out in public, really. The first people at the scene of an emergency, crisis, or crime usually aren’t the news crews or emergency workers. They are regular people like you and me.

I took off my microphone, went into the audience, and sat with the nurse and her colleagues. I told them my own first-responder story, how on 9/11 I was exactly where you didn’t want to be. I was right there in New York City. I saw, I smelled, and I heard things I never want to experience again. Every week when I step on a plane, I ask myself, “Is this the one that’s going to go down?” Every time I kiss my little boy good-bye, I think, “If something happens, how am I going to get him?” I’ve been there. We all have been or will be. But we must go on.

How do we do that? How do we move forward in life despite the things we can’t un-see or undo? How can we be confident in all scenarios, even in the face of constraint and chaos? How do we make decisions in a gray area where nothing seems to make sense? With the same organized and methodical processes we used in previous chapters.

In any situation, but especially in one that’s gray, we need to focus on what we do know and let go of what we don’t. The nurse I met was stuck on the unknown “why.” But as we’ve seen, we don’t need to know the why to move forward. That’s the last piece of the observational puzzle and sometimes the one that’s never filled in. On our list of priorities, “why” falls somewhere near the bottom. Instead of standing around waiting for answers to the why, focus on and objectively deal with what you can see: the who, what, where, and when. That’s what the leaders in a small town in the South did the year before Trayvon Martin was shot, and why you’ve never heard of Jasmine Thar.

In December 2011, two months before Trayvon Martin’s shooting gripped the nation, sixteen-year-old Jasmine Thar was killed standing in her godmother’s driveway two days before Christmas. She died in front of her mother, younger brother, and other family members and friends. The bullet that killed her also hit and injured two women. It came from a high-powered rifle across the street. When the police went to the shooter’s home, they found a Confederate flag, a noose, and neo-Nazi materials.

How did the local police manage to keep the peace in their town and keep the situation from escalating into a national incident? By conscientiously choosing open, inclusive, and objective information gathering and communication.

Time was of the essence, even though the young woman had already died.

Tensions ran exceedingly high. Perceptions and prejudices abounded as the shooter, a twenty-three-year-old white man, maintained that the gun had malfunctioned, while Jasmine’s black family believed the shooting was racially motivated. On the surface, the notion that a man who possessed neo-Nazi materials would accidentally shoot a young black teenager across the street did seem unlikely, but before making any assumptions or bringing any charges, the chief of police in Chadbourn, North Carolina, had the presence of mind to send the gun to ballistics experts at the FBI to test for malfunction.

When we’re working in the gray area, we must be extra careful, because it is likely that others will be scrutinizing our actions very closely. To get out in front of the crisis, local law enforcement invited the spiritual leaders of the community to participate in every step of the investigation.

When the FBI reported that the gun had in fact accidentally discharged, the shooter was not indicted. Not everyone in the community was satisfied with the findings—they didn’t bring Jasmine back to life—but the leaders in North Carolina had effectively confronted the difficult perceptions head on, articulated them, and kept all parties apprised of the investigation. They carefully sorted through objective facts and subjective inferences. They kept the big picture in focus—the community’s grief and need for answers—while taking care of the small details, such as having the gun checked right away. Doing so kept them off the map in the best possible way.

Johnson & Johnson provides another example of successfully navigating the gray area. In 1982, when news broke that seven people had died after ingesting Tylenol Extra-Strength capsules, panic spread quickly. The victims died within minutes of consuming pain reliever laced with sixty-five milligrams of cyanide; just seven micrograms is fatal. Advertising mogul Jerry Della Femina told the New York Times, “I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name.”

The situation had many unknowns. How did the medicine get tainted? Who did it? Was it chemical terrorism, a deliberate poisoning by someone outside Johnson & Johnson, or the fault of the manufacturer? (Cyanide was available at the product plants.)

Instead of waiting for answers or attempting to duck responsibility, Johnson & Johnson acted quickly and decisively. Chairman James Burke prioritized the two most important questions the company was facing—first, “How do we protect consumers?” and second, “How do we save this product?”—and proceeded to work on answering them.

The company immediately stopped production and advertising and recalled all Tylenol capsules from the market—approximately 31 million bottles valued at more than $100 million. It also offered to exchange all of the millions of Tylenol capsules already in consumers’ homes. Going further, it offered counseling and financial assistance to the victims’ families. It put up a reward for any information about the poisoned pills and pledged not to put any Tylenol products back on the market until they were more securely protected. They spent more money and time developing new three-part tamper-resistant packaging that included stronger glue on the boxes and both printed plastic seals and foil stamps on the bottles. Johnson & Johnson did all this before it was ever determined if the company was at fault.

The company also opened lines of communication with all news media outlets to ensure that warnings were distributed to the public and established relationships with local police departments, the FBI, and the Food and Drug Administration.

Johnson & Johnson never got its “why.” The case was never solved and spawned several copycat crimes across the country. But rather than letting the unknown paralyze them or obsessing over what they didn’t know, the company set its priorities on taking care of what it could, and as a result produced a corporate miracle. Johnson & Johnson completely recovered its market share and reestablished Tylenol as one of the most trusted brands in America. How? By objectively handling the facts and not letting the subjective suck them under.

 

SUBJECTIVE PROBLEMS, OBJECTIVE ANSWERS

 

That some situations aren’t straightforward and might never have definitive answers doesn’t mean we can’t address them. When the problem or scene or challenge we face is nebulous, morally ambiguous, or otherwise in the gray area, consider it a subjective problem, then deal with it objectively.

A problem is a problem. Handle the subjective ones the same way you have learned to handle the objective ones. Gather what facts you can by looking at both the big picture and the small details, step back, consider other perspectives, analyze, prioritize, ask questions, and communicate clearly and concisely.

In 1993, a Denny’s restaurant outside of Washington, DC, was accused of racially discriminating against customers. Six black uniformed Secret Service agents claimed they weren’t served as quickly as their white counterparts because of their race. The waitress claimed that the delay was caused by the large size of the Secret Service contingent—twenty-one people entered the restaurant together, with the six black agents sitting at one table—the complexity of their orders, and the black agents having ordered last. The proof of the alleged prejudice? The waitress was seen rolling her eyes after turning to leave the black agents’ table. The result? A class action lawsuit. Discrimination is hard to prove. Did the waitress do it on purpose? Only she knows.

Denny’s Corporation didn’t waste time with the subjective—did the waitress discriminate or not?—but rather immediately handled it objectively, understanding that it must overcome public suspicion at once by showing a clear opposition to racism and a respect for its customers in general. Denny’s took responsibility, apologized, made restitution, instituted new policies, and communicated directly with the public that whether the accusations were true or not, the company wouldn’t accept even the appearance of racial bias at its restaurants.

Gray areas will differ in size, importance, and context, but they will arise in both our professional and personal experiences. In either situation, a subjective response can increase the risk of negative escalation and, even more dangerous, obscure the facts. We must respond objectively even when the situation itself is subjective. In doing so, we might not be able to eliminate hard-to-solve problems, but we can minimize our risks when things get messy.

 

BEING CREATIVE WHEN RESOURCES ARE STRETCHED

 

Adapting our skills for success in a less-than-perfect world means not only managing the gray, subjective areas around and within us, it also means doing the very best we can with what we have. In situations with shocking shortfalls—in information, time, materials, manpower, money—leaders cannot shut down or walk away. In a crisis we don’t get to fill out an acquisition report or complain to our boss. We throw someone over our shoulder and do what needs to be done without the luxury of all of the information, and in a stressful time crunch. Nobody has enough money. No one has enough time or manpower. Everyone’s resources are stretched. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

As necessity is the mother of invention, so can constraints bring out the best in us. Tightened circumstances force us to rethink, reframe, and do things differently, instead of conducting business as usual.

 

El Anatsui, Skylines, 2008.

In art, this is called “objet trouvé,” making new art from found objects. Ghanaian artist El Anatsui is famous for it. As you can see, he creates magnificent, room-size pieces that look like glittering mosaics from afar and are assembled to resemble woven cloth. Up close, you see that they’re made of countless tiny pieces of metal, pinched, twisted, and shaped, linked together with copper wire. Get even closer and you can read words on the metal: Dark Sailor, Top Squad, Chelsea.

One day on a routine scavenger hunt for free, local material to work with, El Anatsui discovered his medium. It was plentiful along the roadsides in West Africa, thrown away with the trash: metal caps from liquor bottles. Using it to make art, he in turn makes a statement. The layers of his work are many: it is repurposed beauty; it’s a comment on world issues such as industrial waste; it’s a communal endeavor made by teams of people; it’s endlessly flexible, never hanging the exact same way twice; it’s inexpensive, created from literal trash; it’s large and powerful and yet portable enough to fold down and fit into a suitcase.

If the son of a fisherman born on the Gold Coast can do this with discarded bottle caps and wire, what can we do with our own finite resources? How creative can we get?

 

El Anatsui, Oasis (detail), 2008.

 

The need to be resourceful doesn’t just come around with quarterly budgets. It’s ever-present in our personal finances, in our parenting needs, in our education system, in our government, and especially in emergencies. We can have confidence in the face of chaos when we know we can be creative with our resources no matter what the situation. To prove that we can deal effectively with a deficit, we’re going to use the observation, perception, and communication skills we’ve learned throughout the book to analyze works of art that are not finished.

 

THE ANXIETY OF THE UNFINISHED

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York alone has more than two dozen unfinished works on view—not hidden in the closets or tossed aside but up on the wall installed next to their finished treasures. Why? Because art historians believe that they afford us the opportunity to study the process and appreciate the hard work, skill, and inspired thought that precede an object’s completion. Life, after all, is a work-in-progress, and everything isn’t always finished off with a neat bow on top.

Not everyone enjoys looking at unfinished works, however. Blank spaces where faces should be, missing hands, and visible scribbles can make some visitors extremely nervous. They’re uncomfortable not because they have obsessive-compulsive disorder but because they are human.

Humans crave completeness, so much so that some psychologists claim we have an “incomplete” complex. Whether it’s unopened emails, loose ends at work, or undone home-remodeling projects, things that aren’t finished hang over us like a weight and haunt the corners of our minds. The unfinished occupies our brains because humans, as evidenced by numerous studies around the world, have a need to finish a task once it’s been started. The search for closure stems from the brain’s preference for efficiency. A completed task is a closed loop. An incomplete one is an open loop that uses up cognitive energy searching for a solution or worrying that there isn’t one yet.

The phenomenon of incomplete tasks dominating our thoughts is called “the Zeigarnik effect.” It’s named for Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who was in a café in the 1930s when she noticed that the waiters had exceptional recall skills only for the orders they hadn’t yet filled; the minute they set the food and drink down, they were relieved of the pressure of thinking about it. Many believe that the Zeigarnik effect is why television shows ending in “cliffhangers” convince us to tune in next time, and how quiz shows suck us in. Dr. Tom Stafford from the psychology and cognitive science departments at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom writes, “You might not care about the year the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded or the percentage of the world’s countries that have at least one McDonald’s restaurant, but once someone has asked the question it becomes strangely irritating not to know the answer (1927 and 61%, by the way).” Stafford, author of Mind Hacks, even credits the Zeigarnik effect for the enduring success of the game Tetris. Invented by a Russian scientist in 1984 and still going strong thirty years later, Tetris has been played by an estimated one billion people because “it takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in tidying up—and uses it against us.”

Incomplete things cause us stress. In his book Getting Things Done, productivity consultant David Allen argues that the major cause of everyday anxiety is that we all feel we have too much to do and not enough time to get it done, which frustrates us because our brains subconsciously obsess over the incomplete. According to Allen, the obsession is relatively democratic for all tasks including “everything from really big to-do items like ‘End world hunger’ to the more modest ‘Hire new assistant’ to the tiniest task such as ‘Replace electric pencil sharpener.’”

Incomplete things that threaten our productivity aren’t limited to the tasks on a to-do list. They also include everything we’ve internally agreed to do, such as the implicit understanding that we’re obligated to answer every email, return every phone call, and answer every question that’s asked of us. The stress of the incomplete can affect corporate managers and news bureau editors as easily as students or stay-at-home parents. We don’t have to keep a conscious tally of how many incomplete things are circling in our brains to know that they sap our energy and attention. Backlogs drive us crazy.

And so, as with other things that cause us discomfort, we avoid them. Which makes them worse.

Instead of evading the incomplete tasks, we’re going to trick our brains into not being caught in that infinite open loop by dealing with them as if they were complete. And we’ll do it—you guessed it—with art.

 

FINISHING THE UNFINISHED

 

Famous artworks are left unfinished for the same reasons projects, promotions, and problems in the workplace remain undone, unfilled, and unsolved: politics, disasters, indecision, changes in direction from above, death or illness, lack of time, money, or resources. The ability to pick up where someone else left off is invaluable, especially now, when the national annual employee turnover rate across all industries is over 40 percent, and new workers are expected to successfully complete projects they didn’t start. If we can separate our subjective emotion concerning an unfinished project—our disappointment or frustration at having to work with the less-than-perfect—from the objective facts, we’ll find that in many ways, working with the incomplete is no different from working with the complete.

Take a look at this unfinished sketch by Gustav Klimt:

 

 

Can we objectively assess and analyze it? Yes. The important elements are all there.

Who is it? A woman with dark hair, a long face, light eyes, dark eyebrows, and a thin nose. We can see the slender fingers on her right hand resting on her lap; her left hand is not visible. She appears to be alone. She wears a choker of black ribbon and lace that suggests she’s from the early twentieth century, or at least dressing in the fashion of that time.

What is she doing? Sitting, looking straight ahead as if posing for a portrait. Where is she? It appears that she is indoors, possibly in a studio or other nondescript location.

When is it? Probably daytime, judging by the lighting. We cannot tell the time of year.

What don’t we know? Her name, her relationship to the painter, where she is posing, what the remainder of her dress or covering looks like, why she is there, why the painting wasn’t finished.

What would we like to know the most if we could get more information? What would answer the most important questions? Who she is.

Even though the painting itself is unfinished, we can use the objective facts we know to find out more.

We know the work is by Klimt. Why is it only half completed? Investigating what Klimt was working on near the end of his life, we can discover that the sketch is the beginning of a portrait he painted in Vienna from 1917 to 1918. It was left unfinished when he died suddenly of a stroke at the age of fifty-six.

So we now have a time and a place. Following those leads, with a little historical research we can uncover that the portrait Klimt was working on in 1917 was of a woman named Amalie Zuckerkandl, and from that the story blossoms.

Amalie Zuckerkandl knew all the right people. She was the sister-in-law of Klimt’s good friend Berta Zuckerkandl, an art critic, journalist, and literary salon hostess, and a friend of Therese Bloch-Bauer, sister-in-law of one of Klimt’s biggest patrons, the Jewish sugar baron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned the portrait of Amalie along with at least seven others, including two of his wife, Adele. The Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, spreading chaos for both Jewish citizens and resident artists. While her daughter Hermine was able to hide safely in Bavaria, Amalie was executed in a concentration camp.

The painting of her was at that time hanging with the other Klimts in Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s Vienna palais. Although Bloch-Bauer managed to flee to his castle in Czechoslovakia, he hired a lawyer in Vienna to protect his property; that lawyer turned out to be a high-ranking SS officer who then helped liquidate his estate for the Nazis. Bloch-Bauer’s Vienna palais eventually became a German railway center and is now the Austrian rail headquarters.

The painting of Amalie was lost for a few years but is believed to have come into the possession of Amalie’s non-Jewish son-in-law, who sold it to an art dealer. The dealer kept the painting in her private collection and donated it to the Austrian Gallery in 2001 when she died at the age of 101. In 2006 an Austrian arbitration panel ruled that all stolen works including Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (unfinished) be returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs, but then changed its mind and decided that Amalie should stay in Austria.

We never would have unearthed this rich, riveting story if we had shied away from the Klimt because it was unfinished. Instead, we tackled it the same way we tackle any finished work: with a methodical plan and a process. Being prepared to use our skills in less-than-ideal circumstances where important things are missing will prepare us for the curveballs that can bench other people: layoffs, firings, sudden departures, bad hires, drastic changes in policy, rules, and regulations. We need to make a go of it even when we have only incomplete information or resources. I did just that late one night at a hotel in Washington, DC, and I was more than satisfied with the possibly life-saving result.

I’m often in the capital for business and stay at the same hotel downtown so often, they’ve given me birthday gifts. However, during one stay I was awoken at 2 a.m. by screaming outside my door.

“I’m not going to let you do this to me again! I’m calling 911, I swear I will!” a woman’s voice rang down the hallway.

I got out of bed and looked out my peephole; I saw nothing. As an experienced solo traveler, I knew better than to open the door and possibly put myself in harm’s way. The screaming continued.

I had a very incomplete picture of what was going on. I didn’t know who was involved, how they knew each other, or the context of their communication. But I could hear the tone in the woman’s voice, and it told me she might be in trouble.

I called the front desk and reported what I had heard. I was very careful to articulate only what I knew: what I had heard being said, where, and when. The front desk summoned the police.

An hour later I got a call from the hotel asking if I would give my statement to the officers now on the scene. I was the only “ear witness” to the argument, the only person in the hotel who had called to report the incident. I’m sure I’m not the only person who heard the screaming. It was very loud and lasted a good while. I believe that other guests didn’t call in because they were put off by the incompleteness of their information. They didn’t know what was going on, so they ignored it. I didn’t know either, but my entire professional career from attorney to education director to The Art of Perception president has taught me not to ignore anything.

During my interview, I was forthright about what I knew and didn’t know. What I’d heard was incomplete, therefore both my observations and my perceptions were incomplete. But that lack of information didn’t preclude me from cooperating. I relayed the facts I knew, leaving out the subjective, my opinions, and my assumptions: At approximately 2:15 a.m. I woke to screaming in the hallway outside my room, 226; I went to the door, looked out the peephole, and saw nothing; I heard a woman’s voice scream and relayed exactly what I had heard, as I remembered it; I also heard a male voice with her but could not make out what he said; the screaming and arguing continued for at least fifteen minutes.

The police found the woman from the hallway hiding in the lobby behind some furniture. She had been unwillingly employed as a sex worker and was fighting with her pimp. Instead of this being a he said, she said situation, however, the police had an impartial third party on record confirming that the woman said what she did, that it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel as the man was claiming. As a result, the police were able to intercept a prostitution ring that had been operating out of the hotel.

We can employ the same techniques with other incomplete things in our lives. For instance, say it’s the long list of bold, unread emails in your in-box that’s currently clogging your brain. Instead of letting the subjective take over—I’ll never get to all of them! There are too many!—look for the objective facts the same way you would with a finished piece of art. Start with numbers. Count how many you receive a day, and figure out how many you can reasonably answer. Determine when they come in, then schedule a time each day when you can focus on nothing else but email.

Ask yourself, what are the differences between the incomplete and the complete in this case? Incomplete emails are both read and unread but still unanswered. Complete emails are read and replied to. Can you do something to treat the incomplete as if it were complete? Perhaps you could read the emails all at once without answering them but with an eye toward sorting and prioritizing them. Don’t have time to answer every one as quickly as you’d like? Remove that stress by doing what you would do for completion: answer them but with an autoresponse. Inc. columnist Kevin Daum suggests, “Thanks, I got this. I’m a little busy but I will respond within a day or two.”

Amazingly, just planning to put this new email protocol in place, planning to attack the incomplete as if it were complete, alleviates much of the stress that causes us to avoid it in the first place, whether we’re successful at implementing it or not. In a series of studies in 2011, psychologists at Florida State University found that the mere act of planning not only eliminated the mental interference caused by unfulfilled goals, it freed cognitive resources, which ultimately facilitated the attainment of that goal. Or as Dr. Stafford puts it, “[Our] mind loves it when a plan comes together—the mere act of planning how to do something frees us from the burden of unfinished tasks.”

As we’ve seen throughout this book, the ability to see clearly, process, and communicate in any situation brings with it big benefits both professionally and personally, including job security, personal safety, financial gain, and universal respect—huge rewards for an easy and almost automatic process that anyone, with a bit of practice, can master.