Being confronted with having to deal with a crisis in our working lives can be terrifying.
Humans have evolved to spot threats (even potential ones). And when we feel threatened our brain floods our body with cortisol and adrenaline and switches us into fight or flight (or more accurately, fight, flight, freeze, fawn or flop).
This, plus our personal experiences that have shaped our threat responses throughout our lives, gives all of us unique and hard-to-resist responses to crises.
The way to combat this – a way that emergency services, armed forces and pilots also use – is by taking part in immersive training and simulations.
Our natural response to crises
First, it’s important to acknowledge that we don’t all process traumatic or anxiety-inducing events the same way.
For example, people who have experienced a lot of traumatic events can have under-active, hyperactive or hyper-reactive areas of the brain. This can lead to things like intense fear responses, memory issues, incorrect threat assessments, disassociation, emotional outbursts, problems with concentration, issues with self-awareness and difficulty with decision-making.
For organisations going through a crisis, this means that some employees are going to have a harder time that others, not just with the initial shock of the instigating event, but with the continued pressure to get things right while feeling under attack.
Even people who don’t have any issues with trauma responses will go through an automatic response when confronted with a threat.
- Our amygdala, which detects threats, tells our adrenal glands to release cortisol and adrenaline so we can make a quick escape.
- Our mirror neurons shut down. Narrowing our focus to what we need to survive. We find it much harder to predict what others are thinking and feeling.
- Others go through the same process, and we get emotional contagion (walk into any room full of people going through a crisis simulation at a certain point and you can feel the tension rolling off everyone).
- The amygdala takes control, which isn’t ideal for work – we kind of need the pre-frontal cortex for that (which deals with problem-solving, decision-making and focus). Right now, we don’t want to be methodical or do things by the book, we’re in react mode. We need to survive the threat! (Which is why we sometimes see participants start to get defensive when a crisis simulation has been going for a while, as they’re exhausted and feeling backed into a corner.)
How immersive crisis simulations can combat this process
Crisis training – especially immersive simulations – help to combat our natural responses by exposing us to threats in a safe environment and giving us a way to practise our responses and learn from our failures without the fear of what will happen if we get it wrong.
Emergency services, the military and the aeronautics and astronautics sectors use simulations and drills this way. They run these sims over and over again because the repetition helps participant’s responses become a process that their brains can automatically run through when a real incident occurs.
These simulations also use emotion to lock in learning. Going through a crisis simulation is a completely different experience to reading about what you should do. (This is why flight attendants often give entertaining demonstrations about life jackets and oxygen masks on flights.)
They also give leaders a chance to assess their crisis strategy in action and determine if they have the right people in each crisis team role (sometimes a great manager will not be the ideal person to lead a crisis team, because someone else thrives in that role, while they struggle).
By going through crisis simulations as a team, organisations build individual and team resilience. They often come out of a simulation with a much better understanding of what their coworkers and reports are capable of, and how their role impacts the entire organisation in a way that they didn’t expect.
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Photo by ThisisEngineering on Unsplash
