How to Make Big Decisions in Challenging Circumstances: Jonathan Reimer (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Emergency manager Jonathan Reimer’s talk titled “How to Make Big Decisions in Challenging Circumstances” at TEDxVictoria conference on May 15, 2024.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Two Wildfires

JONATHAN REIMER: So I’d like to start with two wildfires. In 2016, I was the director of the Wildland Urban Interface for the Fort McMurray fire. I arrived days after the fire had jumped the Athabasca River and entered the community as a torrent of flame and ember, starting hundreds of fires simultaneously throughout the community. And in many neighborhoods, these fires arrived before the evacuation orders did, and the flames licked at the bumpers of those fleeing. And I was there to relieve the first responders who had been working without sleep since that time, and I had never seen anything like it.

At the time, no one had. Rows of homes decimated, interspersed, seemingly at random with homes that were untouched, cars abandoned in the roadways, a city strangely silent except for the hum of our pumps and the clang of flaskies. Now, our crews were able to protect the remaining neighborhoods, but when the 88,000 people that were evacuated returned, some had little to return to. And Fort McMurray remains the most destructive and costly wildfire in Canadian history.

The next year I responded to a fire threatening the town of Waterton, which is a beautiful community in the Rocky Mountains. This fire appeared more distant, some 25 kilometers on the other side of the Great Divide, which is a high mountainous ridge where our crews were trying to hold it. One night the fire did something that no one expected.

When night fell, and the fire behavior normally reduces, the fire surged over the ridge, moving 100 meters a minute. Flames overran the town at 10 p.m., and the fire quadrupled in size in about five hours. When the smoke cleared, we hadn’t lost a single home in Waterton, and there were no injuries. And that is because three days earlier the community was evacuated, and firefighters had established extensive community protection efforts.

And though the landscape was transformed, people could return home safely a few days later. Now the difference between these two fires was a single bold decision. Firefighters in Waterton couldn’t have anticipated exactly what would happen, but they assessed the risks, and they made a great decision with huge consequences for their community. It was up to them, and they rose to the challenge.

Making Big Decisions Well

Now we all face times when it is up to us. I am an emergency manager and an incident commander, and I’m deeply curious about this question. How can we make big decisions well, decisions that are high impact, that are complex, where we may not have all the time we would like and all the information that we need? How do we make big decisions well?

Now on a wildfire, these decisions include whether to use direct or indirect attack, or when our best option is to move people out of the path of a wildfire, and we might make these decisions in an incident command post, an emergency operations center, or hunched over the hood of a truck with paper maps pockmarked by ash. But as a medical professional or a CEO, you might be making these decisions in a boardroom. As a parent or partner, you might make these decisions at the kitchen table. And I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about making big decisions in challenging circumstances.

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The Limits of Information

So here’s what we normally think happens, right? You know, we face a big problem. We collect all the available information, we evaluate our options, and we select the one that maximizes the things that we want to happen and minimizes those that we don’t. And in this view, decision problems are essentially information problems, that we can’t eliminate the uncertainty, but we can chip away at it by adding more information.

And so I committed to providing the best information for our incident commanders. But I kept encountering situations that I couldn’t make sense of, where adding more information didn’t seem to be helping people make better decisions. In one study, increasing the amount of information available to incident commanders consistently decreased their performance, although they thought they were performing better. What was happening is that more information was not reducing uncertainty in practice, but causing these incident commanders to focus their attention on evaluating all of this data and overlooking more important aspects.

Intuition and Pattern Recognition

And some of the best firefighters that I knew didn’t have better information. They seemed to work by feel, that on a big day they could bend down, touch the grass, and tell me with great accuracy what the fire would do later that day. And so I turned to psychology to help me understand all this, and I discovered that I had missed something of a revolution, that we have our rational minds, of course, but we have an entirely different set of tools to help us make complex decisions, and that is our gut, our intuitions. They’re fast. They’re effortless. They often don’t feel like making a decision at all. You just see the solution. They’re how we drive our car to work and how we look over in the next lane and spot a dangerous driver from a tiny observation.

In fact, most of our judgments in life are made intuitively, and they can perform amazing feats. Chess grandmasters form an idea of the best move extremely quickly, within a few seconds, and four out of five times, that is the decision that they ultimately play. How do they do that? If you ask them, they’re not entirely sure either.

And it turns out our intuition is a form of unconscious pattern recognition, that it can keep track of details that our conscious mind misses. And that is how those firefighters were able to predict complex fire behavior by touching a few blades of grass.

They had a lifetime’s worth of patterns stored in their memory. But our intuitions are not magic.

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The Limits of Intuition

They can be fooled. They create useful thoughts rapidly. But they can see patterns that aren’t there. They can see the Virgin Mary in burnt toast. They can see a conspiracy behind every setback. And crucially, they struggle with any form of statistics. If you take these two packages, for example, if we choose to reflect on them, we may know intellectually that these are equal, but we’re always going to prefer that one on the left, right?

Now, on a grocery aisle, that’s not a big problem, but if we are evaluating a fire containment strategy with an 80% chance of success, it helps to reflect on that 20% chance of failure. And so we have these two types of thinking, our gut and our rational mind, each with their own different sources of wisdom and their own blind spots. How can we draw on both in challenging circumstances?

Start with a Size-Up

Now, I don’t have all of the answers for that, but I do want to share an insight from firefighting, and that is to start with a size-up. When we arrive on scene to a new fire, we systematically gather information on what’s burning, the fire behavior, the hazards, what could be threatened in the area, and only after that is complete do we turn our attention to strategies and tactics.

You can imagine fire response is extremely time-sensitive, but a good size-up will help you save time, and often lives. Now, a size-up will look very different in a boardroom or at the kitchen table. What matters is that you identify the critical pieces of information and then you go out and assess them. This may take a few moments or a few months. What’s important is the order, that we establish a reliable base of information before we turn our mind to an overall assessment.

Then we can switch gears and call on our intuition to help guide us towards a great decision. Now, this is the opposite of what we tend to do, right, where we face a dilemma, our gut jumps in, hands us an intuition, and we go out and see if we can confirm that intuition, which may be fantastic, or it might be just noise. But turning our attention to it at this point can make it more difficult to see the best solution.

The Bat and Ball Problem

And we can experience this together. So come with me on this. A bat and a ball cost $110 in total. A bat costs $100 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Now, this question is designed to trigger your gut. It should be screaming in your ear, “$10.” Did you feel that?

Now, if you stopped and checked, you realize that can’t quite be right, that if the ball is $10, then the bat would have to be $110, and together it would be $120. And that’s why only 14% of people get this question correct. But let’s see if we can make it a little bit easier by adding a hint. Now, 34% of people get this question right, which is better, right?

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But it’s still not great. We can nudge people in the right direction. But now only 31% of people get the question correct. But what has shocked me is what happens when you give people the right answer. Now, 77% of people get this question correct, which means that more than 20% of people are given the solution, being told that it’s the solution, and are getting this question incorrect. And what researchers conclude is that we fall in love with our intuitive solutions, that our own ideas are great, right? So much so that even if a perfect solution is handed to us on a silver platter afterwards, it can be difficult to accept.

The Story of Wag Dodge

There’s a clue to how this all works in practice from an old wildfire. In 1949, a crew of smokejumpers became caught on a mountainside in Montana above a fast-moving wildfire. And they did what I think any of us would in that situation. They ran. And it became a race for them to reach the top of the hill before the fire caught up with them.

Now, their leader was a fellow named Wag Dodge, and he soon realized that they were going to lose that race. And so he stopped and made an unintuitive decision. He lit a match at his own feet. His idea was that if we burn off the fuel, when the main fire arrives, it’ll burn around us and we’ll be safe. And he called out to the other smokejumpers, to his crew, to come and join him. And they turned and looked at him, confused. And no one did. They couldn’t see what Wag saw. They were blinded by their intuitive reaction to get out of there. Now, Wag survived that fire unharmed, but the others were not as lucky.

Conclusion

Now, hopefully we never face a situation quite like that, but we all do face big decisions under uncertainty where it’s up to us and what we do matters. And what I’ve discovered is that more information may not be the answer, and that a small tweak to the way that we use our intuition can make it much easier to guide us towards better decisions. Instead of having an intuition and looking at the world through it, start by looking to the world and then consulting your intuition.

And so the next time we’re at a boardroom or that kitchen table or in an emergency operations center and we face that big decision, let’s take a breath and start with a size-up. Thank you.