Muted Alarm
Having worked in project management for twenty years, I’ve become well acquainted with an emotion I refer to as muted alarm. Muted alarm happens when someone points out -- rightly -- a gaping hole in your thinking or plan. It’s an involuntary and instantaneous reaction, which involves your whole body freezing…except your eyes. The eyes widen, but only slightly and for a flash. This is generally followed by a slow nodding of the head, once physical movement becomes possible, and some jaunty statement like: “We’re on it!” Importantly, muted alarm is trigged just by the fact that there is a hole in your plan – not a full understanding of the actual impact of that hole. It could be nothing. It could be everything. In the moment of muted alarm, you only know that it IS.
As we prepared to launch our life on the road, muted alarm became an all too familiar emotion. Gaps in our thinking were (are?!) everywhere. On reflection, I feel like we could be a case study in cognitive biases. There was the endowment effect (garage sale), and Hofstadter's Law (how did this take ALL DAY?); and focusing effect, which I think has been our most common and egregious.
An example:
We were visiting with some friends from Portland after Thanksgiving, when they casually said, “So, tell us about your tires.” Enter muted alarm. We were eating soup - and this may be confabulation - but I am pretty sure spoons were suspended somewhere between bowl and mouth. Both of our friends enjoy snowboarding and at least one goes snow camping (voluntarily!) So, they are well acquainted with driving in the mountain passes in winter. Therefore, it should not have been surprising that they followed up their first question with: ‘Yeah, what kind of chains do you have?” Chains?!?!
Naturally, we hadn’t thought about tires or chains. We were so focused on our future state – Desert! Sunshine! Warmth! – that we neglected to give any thought to the realities of the route that would take us from Seattle, WA to Joshua Tree, CA. This route involves mountain passes with unpredictable and often snowy weather. Most interestingly, I KNEW about these roads. My Aunt in northern California no longer visits my cousin in southern Oregon for the holidays, because the drive over the pass is so bad. My Mom mentions this to us every year at Christmas. This is information THAT I HAD, but somehow left unused in a remote corner of my mind.
After some head nodding at our friends, we were able to muster something like, “Say more. Say more about the chains.” They told us what to get (self-tensioning), to practice in advance (Don’t be the guy on the side of the road in the snow reading the directions!), and to bring along a plastic lid from a Rubbermaid bin to kneel on (super-pro tip to avoid getting wet, dirty knees!)
As it turns out, the actual impact of this hole in our plan was minor and mainly financial. We got new tires for the Vanagon (special order, of course), and chains for both cars (also, special order.) But, in the end, we took the coastal route instead of I-5. There was a winter storm advisory on the day we were to go over the Siskiyou pass and although we had the chains…we really had no desire to use them. Thankfully, in this particular instance, we did not have to worry about the overconfidence effect.
Regardless, the moral of this story is the same. Talk to your friends. They can see things more clearly than you can. (Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true.)