The CRISES Mindset for the New Normal

Crises are the new normal.

And the new normal requires a new mindset.

I started officially my professional career back in the 90’s when, as a fresh MBA graduate and a young PhD candidate, I went into teaching marketing and advising companies on strategy and branding. It was then when I experienced my first major economic crisis: the Asian Tigers economic crash of 1997. The crash had devastating effects in South Asian economies influencing the whole word. Few years later the DOT-COM boom made a mess of the newly born digital economy, with hundreds of thousands of IT professionals losing their jobs in the US and elsewhere. Meanwhile, September 11th happened creating a global economic and political crisis, fragments of which we still witness today. The early 2000’s saw also a virus scare (SARS) with some effects on global trade. Later in the decade, 2007 brought the the sub-prime mortgage market which imploded in the US, plunging the word economy into a crisis that spread like a fire. In parts of Europe and elsewhere this crisis is still present today. In addition, Brexit and other political developments, force economies to re-calibrate into a new reality that is both very uncertain and very painful.

Enter 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic followed by an economic crisis probably worse than the last Great Recession. These would be more than enough for the year but 2020 did not stop there: the civil unrest in the US and elsewhere, following the tragic death of George Floyd in the hands of the police, has formed a strong cultural framework for companies’ and individuals’ offline and online presence. This has led global brands to abstain from social media for various reasons, including extreme polarization of online behavior.

The first lesson from all these crises (and of many more which I did not mention here, like the immigration crisis in parts of the world and its geopolitical implications), is the following:

Crises are here to stay.

Crises have become the new normal. The old paradigm of stable, unproblematic, “quiet” periods with foreseeable growth, interrupted only briefly by crisis periods that sooner or later go away, is over. The new normal sees crises, multiple ones, appearing somewhere in the world and expanding regionally or globally fast. These crises can be health-related (pandemics), political, financial or other and they all have significant effects on our economic and social life. There is no “quiet” normal anymore: it’s constant scares, anxiety and high pressure of different intensity and nature depending on the crisis at hand.

The key difference between the new crises-driven normal and the widely promoted VUCA world- volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity- (characterizing the very dynamic, globalized, tech-driven economies of the last decades) is that crises add overwhelming elements of widespread social, economic and physical pain, unrest and suffering that VUCA does not inherently contains. Although modern crises necessarily have VUCA characteristics (plus pain and unrest as mentioned above), VUCA is not necessarily about devastating crises. For example, VUCA is used to explain -largely positive- digital disruptions and process/product innovations.

CRISES: The mindset of survival and growth for times of pain

C is for Creativity

“Necessity is the mother of invention” said Plato (not his exact words but the meaning remains the same). Our brain goes into hyperdrive when faced with difficult challenges that cause extreme negative effects. It is our inner motivation to return to comfort or to create a new one (homeostasis) within a crisis, that leads us to be personally and culturally innovative. This is a very strong insight from science that star neuroscientist Antonio Damasio delivers convincingly in his latest book The Strange Order of Things. In this direction, my audiences and clients always get surprised when I ask them which is the primary emotion for innovation with the right answer being frustration or extreme dissatisfaction. Innovation is born more reliably out of necessity than from choice. Becoming a creative-problem solver is always important but critically more so within crises, when the world is in a dire need of new solutions. This is why myself, Dr Neda Jovanovic Dimitriadis and Dr Jillian Ney have dedicated a whole chapter in our book Advanced Marketing Management on creativity, proposing a multilayered approach for boosting personal, team and organizational creative thinking. Innovation REALLY matters in times of crises: from finding ways to deal better with kids that are schooled from home to manufacturing the vaccine for COVID-19. Creative thinking is what will being about applicable and impactful solutions.  

R is for Resilience

Perseverance in crises comes from the ability to regain strength after incurring a blow. Regardless popular belief, resilience is NOT about avoiding or not feeling/experiencing negative effects: studies in neuroscience have shown that the most resilient animals are not those that have less of whatever goes wrong but that have better resources and capacities to fight it off. Not experiencing negative effects is not necessarily resilience. It can be either ignorance or arrogance (or something more sinister like psychopathy). I am proud of the fact that my team and I have developed a rigorous scientific test, with the use of electroencephalogram, to determine resilience capacity of professionals within companies, already taken by more than 800 managers around the world. For more on this please see my Linkedin article on the subject. The way we respond after receiving bad news for ourselves or for those we love and care about is of paramount importance in crisis situations.

I is for Influence

Leadership shines in crises. This is because our brains are hardwired to look for leaders and positive influence much more when uncertainty and suffering are high than in quiet, predictable, pleasant times. In our book Neuroscience for Leaders, now in its upgraded second edition, myself and Prof. Alexandros Psychogios offer our Brain Adaptive Leadership model to help people use brain sciences to improve the way they think, deal with their emotions, adjust their habits and behaviors, and connect meaningfully with others. The fact that our influence potential increases drastically in crises, when people’s brains starve for info that will help them make sense of the world, means that our responsibility also increases manifold. What info we spread, how we motivate people, how we behave, what objectives we set and what we advocate passionately for, are more powerful in crises and thus heightened accountability is a must. In crises, irresponsible leaders can inflict irreversible damage.

First S is for Synergy

Crises bring us together. We cannot do it alone. It’s not by accident that, anthropologically speaking, humans and other species have developed extreme reactions for members of the group that purposely harm collective efforts when dealing with a crisis. We have all heard how traitors are treated in the battlefield. Freeloaders, cheaters, traitors, deserters and extreme egotists are stigmatized and ostracized fast in crises because our evolution taught us that support ensures survival, especially in tough times. Both at the macro and micro levels, global cooperation and interpersonal collaboration respectively, synergy asks for dynamic relations that benefit the members and the group in multiple levels. In crises, we need to put aside old feuds, self-centered goals and shortsighted efforts, and focus on the Bigger Prize through cooperation and not competition, as Margaret Heffernan explains eloquently in her book. The neuroscience of trust here comes handy for learning how to bond with people and respond together better. When it comes to crises “united we stand, divided we fall”: teamwork becomes more essential than ever before, within and outside organizations.

E is for Empathy

One of the most, if not THE most, quoted concept in the current crises is empathy. And deservedly so. Empathy is not just sympathy and compassion. It’s about understanding, connecting and assisting actively others constantly and tangibly. It has to do with:

• making sure you accept the existence and importance of other people’s viewpoints
• applying the right “listening” mechanisms to understand deeper their states of mind
• opening yourself up to feeling what other people are feeling/experiencing in their own lives
• identifying the best possible ways of intervening to practically help others when needed the most       

I like to talk to companies and professionals about the notion of Strategic Empathy in order to emphasize the fact that empathy is too important to be left to grow organically within crises. Organizations need to take empathy seriously and develop a series of activities, including an Empathy Audit, to apply empathy on strategic, tactical and operational levels. As with resilience, my team and I have developed a neuroscientific test for helping managers and other professionals determine their empathy levels and work towards improving them.

Second S is for Synthesis

This is the most novel and probably the most crucial element in the CRISES mindset. In an early blogpost I wrote in March for Hemofarm Foundation on the pandemic and how to deal with it, I highlighted the importance that tragedy has on meaning. Indeed, it is when things go wrong, and we experience significant losses, that meaning and purpose in life arise. Happy times need not to be meaningful. Why should they be? They can be, and that’s definitely a plus, but they don’t need to be. It is how our brains have learned to deal with existential threats and unbearable emotional pain that meaning comes to alleviate sorrow and grief. Indeed, philosophy and its ways of dealing with tragedy and life in general come to our rescue in crises: to reconcile paradoxes and integrate life events into bigger contextual schemes. Unfortunately, our modern societies have been so emphatically focused on pleasure, the "now" and our egotistic wants that we have forgotten how to deal effectively with existential pressures and intense sadness. Psychologists Lukianoff and Haidt explain some of the reasons of why this happened, especially with younger generations, in their insightful article in the Atlantic The Coddling of the American Mind and in their book of the same title. Crises require philosophers as much as they require doers…. but it’s the former capacity that will guide the latter one into creating a better future for all. 

This crisis will hopefully go away but crises will not. Our future will be separated into periods of low crises and periods of high crises, depending on the complexity and wider impact of each crisis. Indeed, a casual look into the not-so-promising state of world politics, our surprising economic fragilities and the ability for bad things to spread fast, can only support the development and adoption of a CRISES mindset that will help us survive and thrive in constant threatening times. Crises have become the new normal. It's our duty to both current and future generations to respond accordingly!

Dr. Nikolaos Dimitriadis has studied more than 5,000 brains from 25 countries, is the co-author of “Neuroscience for Leaders: A Brain Adaptive Leadership Approach” and “Advanced Marketing Management: Principles, Skills and Tools” and is heading the Neuro Consulting Services at Optimal HR Group, offering cutting edge neuro-research, neuro-training and neuro-advisory.