Over many years of working with government departments and multinational companies, both in real crises and simulation exercises, I saw a wide range of crisis outcomes.

The differences in these outcomes led me to reflect on what it was that marked out the best teams from the rest.  I then set out to discover if recent research findings from the fields of neuroscience and psychology could help to provide a rationale as to why some crisis teams appear more able than others to demonstrate agility in response and a capacity to sustain high performance in the face of ambiguity, scrutiny and urgency.

The first key finding was that differences in leadership style had a central role in team performance. At one end of the spectrum some leaders seem to feel a need to demonstrate a mastery of detail and avoid the counsel of specialists, whilst at the other end of the spectrum some leaders freeze in the face of critical uncertainty.

The first approach can lead to ill-informed decisions taken in haste, based on the leader’s ‘gut-instinct’, whilst the second leads to a ‘paralysis-by-analysis’ approach resulting in the organisation constantly reacting to external pressures. The work by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, and others, on thinking styles and cognitive biases, provide important insights into how to optimise decision-making under pressure.

The second key finding was that the way members interact, both formally and informally, is an important differentiating factor. Project Aristotle was conducted by Google to determine the predictors of super high-performing teams.

Results from the two-year global study indicated that there were five predictors of team success, with ‘psychological safety’ being the biggest single predictor of high-performing teams.

Psychological safety is the ability of team members to feel able to offer succinct contributions without feeling that their views will be dismissed or ignored.

In my presentation at the ‘ISO 22330 – Duty of Care in a Crisis’ event hosted by Fortress Availability Services Ltd on Thursday 4^th October, I will highlight the implications of these research findings. I will also provide practical guidance on how to promote sustainable high-performance in crisis readiness programmes and during a real-world event.

Other experts in the field also speaking at this event are:

• Gianluca Riglietti, BCI – The value of planning, exercising and training.
• Jon Mitchell, Clearview – Maximising employee engagement in resilience
• Richard Stephenson, Yudu – How communication technology helps meet the duty of care.