Tom Gash

Key Lesson # 4 from Decision Science: a New Resource for Police Leaders. This lesson is an excerpt and you can download the full guide here.

Police performance depends on millions of decisions – at the frontline and in the board room. Can the sector strengthen its decision-making muscles by harnessing insights from decision sciences?

Lesson #4: Recognise when you need to think fast, or slow

A decision scientist encounters a knife-wielding attacker. Does she pause to carefully set out and weigh the importance of competing priorities, consult widely on the range of possible approaches to dealing with the situation, calculate probabilities of different outcomes, and create a ‘constrained optimization model’? We hope not. Because the literature from decision science is pretty clear that there are domains where we have to think fast. Equally, there are also plenty of domains where there is no point in thinking things through too much. Unless you opt for that weird font made out of clowns, the font of your internal memos isn’t going to matter too much…

Studies of decision-making tell us that while carefully structured analysis and deliberation supports better decision-making in relation to complex long-term issues, decision-making in time-critical environments depends much more on experience. Gary Klein is a decision scientist who focuses on how professionals make decision in the real world. His work demonstrates that experienced firefighters, pilots and so forth usually have a much greater ability to spot decision-relevant patterns in their immediate environment than non-experts. They sense when situations are routine (fitting a known pattern) and when something is ‘wrong’ (calling for a different response), for example. And they are adept at finding ‘good enough’ solutions to avert disaster by cycling through their past experiences and possible responses in rapid time.

To improve decision-making in time critical context, we should be wary of overly complex and formal processes and rules. Instead, we can consider factors such as:

• Mental state: Fatigue, stress and extremely heightened emotions (fear or anger, for example), have been shown to dramatically undermines human judgement. The current quest for improved officer wellbeing is warranted not just in terms of motivation for officers, and fairness, but also for decision-making performance.
• Training: The only substitute for experience is training that as closely resembles ‘on the job’ realities as possible. The military excel at creating more realistic training scenarios and there are exceptional examples within policing too. West Yorkshire Police and others are using augmented reality for scenes of crime training, for example.
• Rostering/ staffing/ team composition: Workforce planning and rostering often pays some heed to ensuring the right experience mix within teams and geographic areas of policing. However, with a rapid increase in new entrants into policing as part of the government’s drive to recruit 20,000 officers, this is an area that will need far greater attention and sophistication.

Of course, saying that experience matters in time-critical situations, is not to say that it’s the only thing to concentrate on. In general, the evidence suggests that experience often only improves decision-making up to a point (20 years is not always better than 10, for example) and it seems that if there is limited feedback on the quality of decisions, then experience carries many fewer benefits. This is why a big focus at Leapwise is supporting people and organisations to understand the consequences of their decisions – and learning the right lessons from success and failure.

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Key Lesson # 1 from Decision Science: a New Resource for Police Leaders. This lesson is an excerpt and you can download the full guide here.

Police performance depends on millions of decisions – at the frontline and in the board room. Can the sector strengthen its decision-making muscles by harnessing insights from decision sciences?

Key Lesson #1: Know Your Goals and Preferences

Was the 2003 Iraq War a great victory? Saddam Hussain was removed from power in less than a month, which led some to promptly declare the invasion a success.

But this misses the point. The true strategic goals of the invasion should have been (and possibly were at some point) security in the Middle East and the wellbeing of the Iraqi people. And instead of this, the invasion achieved the rise of Al Qaeda and then ISIS, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and the destabilization of Syria and the region more generally.

Neglecting to properly define and keep in mind strategic goals lie at the heart of many failures. Setting one goal gives focus, yet, a sole objective is a rare luxury for any public sector or policing organization. For example, in policing, you must consider the required trade-offs for policies on stop and search –  between the  goal short-term crime control benefits (for example, getting weapons of the street) and the long-term goals of ensuring support from communities we need to report crime, give evidence and so on.

All decisions require clarity on the goals being pursued and clarity on which goals are most important. It is only once these factors are clear, after all, that you can use decision science methods to rigorously assess the optimal options among alternatives (even when outcomes are uncertain)

But the truth is that goal setting is much harder than it sounds. It requires clarifying and being honest about competing goals within policing and then finding ways to thrash out the right balance of priorities (and compromises) for each organization and its unique context. In turn, this means balancing political and practical considerations. And it means finding ways to facilitate complex conversations about values, public priorities (from different groups), and evidence. Our observation is that quite often these conversations are seen as ‘too difficult’ not just for policing but for many public sector bodies. And yet, without them, it is very difficult to achieve the genuine collaboration, shared vision and prioritized objectives that can provide the platform for sound strategic and day-to-day decision-making.
Knowing your goals and preferences is just one of seven key lessons that we’ll be sharing with you – You can access the full article of our feature with a subscription to Police Professional here.

This is a version of an article produced for Police Professional.

You can download the full guide complete with all 7 key lessons for police leaders below.

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The Coronavirus crisis has now firmly set in across the UK. Plans are constantly changing and being updated but the trajectory is now clear. The country will move to lockdown or near-lockdown in progressive stages to contain the spread of infection. Different public services and vital private sector enterprises will focus on alleviating the problems associated with managing the virus and the lock down: the Treasury rolling out income support and other plans to support business continuity; the health system building intensive care bed capacity (the clear bottleneck in the system currently); police and the military planning for a range of lockdown scenarios and potential public order challenges; grocery chains are trying to refine their just-in-time supply chains to get food to people.

Crisis decision-making approaches and their evolution

The decision-making relating to Coronavirus in each of the areas of government and the private sector up to now has – or should have been! – been based on an understanding that the current situation is chaotic. But as knowledge about the virus, its impact and the impact of the counter-measures that government and society has put in place evolve, the nature of decision-making should be changing too. The action bias that is required in response to a crisis should therefore diminish slightly. In parallel, organisations should be starting to realise that while every bit of their organisation is affected by the current crises – they are all affected in different ways.

Business as usual in a crisis

I believe that one of the biggest threats to organisations and society now is failure to ensure effective ongoing decision-making and action in those areas of any organization that are not strictly in crisis mode. Many of us, myself included, have been feeling anxious – and the risk is that this paralyses us. We spend our productive working hours (mine are MUCH reduced now my wife and I are splitting the childcare for two toddlers!) in a state of near-zero productivity. We look on in horror, feeling our work is largely irrelevant to the main fight, and processing emotional personal issues and decisions (sick relatives, whether they can go to the park and get their toddlers to stick to social distancing!).

Yet many of the things we are doing are just as important as they were before the virus struck. That systems upgrade that was going to save hours of nurses or doctors time, the legal contract that would create a new joint venture to create new fire prevention technologies, the appointment of a qualified accountant to ensure you didn’t go bust, are all valuable things to be doing. Some will even save lives as well as create jobs.

How can we ensure we still decide and act appropriately? Here are five ideas that might work for your organization.

1. Tell one of the best people in the leadership team that their main responsibility is to maintain progress on business as usual. Not every organization will need this role, but those that are highly tied up in crisis management and Coronavirus response will. Free up a chunk of their time and let them use it creatively to support effective decision-making and action across the organization – beyond the corona-specific response. What they do will need to vary, and they may need a team to support. They – or maybe your crisis response lead if your organization is not totally ungulfed by Corona response – will then need to help the organization to…
2. Clarify whether your core goals or priorities are affected: Coronavirus is making people face the reality that no plan survives contact with the enemy… but that doesn’t mean you need to abandon your long-term goals. Normally, you will actually need to confirm and continue to communicate the importance of your existing priorities alongside crisis response. Unless the fundamentals of your sector have been changed, this should be a quick exercise that builds redoubled commitment of the leadership team to keep the show on the road, and creates a clear message to communicate to all employees and stakeholders.
3. Refocus teams on areas they can make the biggest difference. Some projects or activities just won’t make sense anymore. Decisively put them on hold – perhaps giving team 1 or 2 days to do a complete status update and knowledge capture so things can be picked up seamlessly later. In other areas, though, perhaps this is a chance to go further and faster. Be ambitious, while recognizing the natural rhythms and dynamics of projects. There’s no point pretending that people will work as mindfully on a recruitment campaign that isn’t going to go live until after the virus unless you’ve got amazing leadership/ culture, or some pretty meaningful incentives in place. If your organization already has good project, programme and portfolio management disciplines in place, then this reprioritization exercise will be relatively easy to do – if not, this reprioritization exercise could provide a template for future good practice!
4. Maintain and sharpen up business as usual meetings. Most organisations have terrible weekly and monthly meetings that are too long and not sufficiently focused on their core purpose. Leapwise helps organisations cull and sharpen these up, freeing up time by delegating decisions, moving information-sharing to technology platforms, building better decision-making behaviour and disciplines and reinvesting time in the most critical decisions for the organization. If you’re in an organization that is fundamentally affected by Coronavirus, then there is definitely a need to cut any unnecessary meetings. However, beware cancelling your critical organizational meetings and processes – particularly if they’re already effective. These meetings are the opportunity to maintain rigour and focus in decision-making and action across the organisation. For example, one of these meetings will provide the forum to agree the reprioritized objectives and action plans of different departments identified through the exercise above.
5. Create a daily rhythm to maintain pace: If your teams haven’t got in place a really quick morning ‘huddle’ then put one in place as a matter of urgency (virtual please!). Working remotely makes this all the more important to help teams stay co-ordinated and connected, ensuring good decisions on what work to prioritise daily and supporting information flows. 20 minutes is usually enough because you should have other channels for wider information sharing (e.g. Slack, messaging). Consider putting a different person in charge of the huddle each week with free reign to do things in a different way – and then pick the approaches that are best for you. 
6. Support managers to lead in uncertainty: Coronavirus creates a real challenge for leaders, as most people aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. See this as an opportunity for every person in your organization to grow and adapt and provide them with support and training on leading effectively in these times.

Organisations that already have a robust decision-making eco-system – good governance, strong meeting management, data-informed decision-making, feedback-loops and learning cultures – will be in a good place to do all these things well. But every organization will need to put some thought into how they maintain momentum in areas that are important but not urgent.

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