Amanda Ripley has extensively studied anti-fragility and resilience. She is an investigative journalist of three books, including High Conflict, The Smartest Kids in the World and her latest, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. She has reported for The Atlantic, Politico, the Washington Post, Time Magazine and other outlets, and her work has helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.
Amanda joined us to talk about improving the education system, how people can build resilience to survive disasters, and much more.
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Amanda Ripley On Changing Education And Building Resilience
Welcome to the show. Our quote for today is from Nassim Taleb, “The resilient resist shocks and stays the same. The anti-fragile gets better.” Our guest, Amanda Ripley, has extensively studied anti-fragility and resilience. She’s an investigative journalist of three books, including High Conflict, The Smartest Kids in the World, and her latest, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. She has reported for The Atlantic, Politico, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and other outlets, and her work has helped Time win two national magazine awards. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I always like to start a little bit at the beginning with your background. As a child, did you have that journalistic or investigative spark and curiosity at a young age?
Early Curiosity And Conflict Monitoring
It’s funny you say that because I’m figuring it out. It depends on when you ask me the question, I will answer it differently. That’s probably true for everyone. You know how you understand your childhood differently every ten years or so. For me, not an insignificant amount of conflict in my household growing up. What I learned to do, which makes no sense now but at the time felt right, was to monitor conflict and to keep an eye on it like a secret agent. I would listen to my parents fighting. It felt like if I could keep an eye on it and surveil the conflict, then I would be safe, which is magical thinking. As I grew up, I found that I could get paid to keep an eye on conflict and report back, which is what I did as a journalist for a long time.
Were you trying to get to the truth in those things, or were you monitoring them? To me, that would be investigative. I hear these two stories, and which one is true?
I was big on truth. I would then occasionally make the mistake of intervening in their conflict to try to point out that my dad was right and my mom was wrong, which I don’t recommend to any children listening, but I believed I could find the truth.
It sets you free.
Yeah. It sets me free, which is also not true, but anyway.
How did you get into the journalistic profession? I know a lot of people have a big break that gets them in. Was that the case for you, or was it a progression?
It was not a big break. It was a series of lucky breaks that were small but were big in retrospect. I wrote for my college paper. I was like, “This is cool.” I thought this would be fun to do and I thought I wanted to cover politics. I moved to DC after college, but could not get a paying job in journalism. I worked at Starbucks and then I worked as an intern for free at a magazine. I eventually got a paying job covering Congress and figured out in about five seconds that I did not want to do that for various reasons, but it felt like a crowded space.
If you are trying to get to the truth, that’s not the place to go.
Entering Journalism And The Reality Of Reporting
Yeah. A lot of conflict but it felt very performative like not real. I eventually ended up going to New York and working at Time Magazine back when it was truly an incredible privilege to write for Time because we had bureaus all over the world. You could travel and parachute into places, interview people, ask them questions you had no business asking, and they would answer you. It was a very different vibe from journalism now, but that’s how I started down this path.
Let’s talk about journalism today, which may be an oxymoron.
We are talking about disasters, so this is great. This is a nice segue.
We’ll get to that. You hear some story or stories of an investigative journalist that you want to dive in. One of the top things I do, when someone sends me an article that seems like it had the end in mind before it was written, is I click on the link for the journalist bio. I do a quick scan of the last 10 or 20 articles they have written, particularly in the world today. Do they all seem to have the same theme? Do they seem to have a point of view and all this stuff? They are sent to me. In a lot of cases, it is. I would assume in old-school investigative journalism, you have to dive in with an open mind. I’m hearing these things and I’m trying to figure it out. It feels like, today, people know the article they want to write before they even start their investigation.
That’s an interesting litmus test and a way to see, because it’s not, are they writing about the same subject? Then they might have some expertise which is useful. It’s like are they taking the same attitude towards the subject and conclusion every time? Today, journalists, like everyone else, are much more captured by the conflict that we are in politically. They too have made more mistakes and are more beholden to their confirmation bias and other things.
Investigative journalism was always presumed to be exposing corruption and fraud, which is often noble—but sometimes, the problem is just incompetence.
Also, they are rewarded for their opinion in a way that they weren’t in the past. At the same time, I would say investigative journalism in particular always made that mistake. It was in different directions. Ever since I have been in journalism for many years, there was always a presumption that our job was to expose the corruption and fraud of the powerful and of institutions, which sounds noble. Some often are, but sometimes the problem is incompetence. It’s not Watergate.
I saw someone writing an in-depth analysis of the Trump assassination attempt. He said that a conspiracy theory and tons of ineptness can look the same in terms of 100 things going wrong. We don’t know the conclusion on that but it is interesting. People are able to connect dots a lot that don’t exist and people mess a lot of things up or don’t get them right. As you said, a lot of people were unlucky or lucky.
When there’s such pervasive insidious distrust and cynicism which is understandable in a lot of cases and it is ironic. You are right. A lot of what you are seeing out in the world suggests that we have a government that is unbelievably efficient, competent, and secretive and it gets everything right and it’s surprising. Having lived in DC for a long time, it’s human. These are humans and they are usually not evil nor conspiring but they do get things wrong for the reasons that humans get things wrong 99% of the time, which are less sexy and exciting than we might think.
This is super relevant for anyone in what you did, you had to be a critical thinker, and the skillset that we have lost the most in leadership in society is critical thinking. What was your approach or what were some of the techniques for uncovering and telling and getting to the root of complex stories? I have always said in particular that I have more of a leadership role but I also think you have a first story bias. You come and tell me something and I’m like, “Gosh.” I go to the other person and I expect them to admit the whole thing and they tell me a completely different story but I’m already a little bit tainted by the first one if I had heard the second one first. This is complicated. What was your approach to this?
You are saying as a manager or leader, you hear one thing and think like you are going to hear this echoed and then you don’t. Is that what you mean?
Yeah. I don’t hear people talk about it but when there are two sides to a story, whichever story you hear first gets an advantage in your mind.
The Challenge Of Bias In Investigative Journalism
That’s right. I do it differently now than I did. Over the past few years, I have been very focused on human behavior in malignant conflict. In difficult conflict. I now try to stay more open. I don’t always succeed. The nature of it is you have to pitch the idea to your editor, so you have to sell them. Some editors, if you have a relationship with them and they are great editors, will trust you to not know how the story ends and they will trust that you’ll figure it out, and they will even push you to resist coming to a conclusion.
That’s not always how this goes and you are selling the story before you even start reporting it. The nature of how that process works is a little bit upside down, but you are selling one version of this story and then you have to try to adapt and change it as you go and be open to that. I started a company a couple of years ago, a lot of what we do is train journalists to cover conflict differently. A lot of what we do is practice and try to normalize keeping the things in the story that don’t fit so that you don’t fall into that trap. In the past, we all thought readers didn’t want that. Readers wanted simplicity and clarity.
You are like a prosecutor who gets rid of the defense’s objections and keeps going forward.
They just kept hammering, so I would cut the things that didn’t fit.
“I believe this is the story, but I’m going to hold this here.”
in a time of false simplicity, which is what we are in this conflict, complexity is breaking news.
It’s like a noise. I did a story for the Atlantic a few years ago about political prejudice. Arguably, the greatest prejudice we have right now when it comes to things we can measure is towards the partisan other. We created this model with some other folks where we could measure what the level of prejudice would probably be from place to place and we found the least politically prejudiced place in America theoretically. I’m out there reporting and I’m interviewing all these people and I’m interviewing this woman and she starts hammering me with conspiracy theories about George Soros and other things. This doesn’t fit. Every instinct in me is to end the interview because this is now contrary to my thesis.
It’s going to confuse the reader and also make me look dumb and all the things like all the ego things that get involved. At the time, I was doing all this conflict mediation training for my book and other things. One of the people I was following, a conflict expert, was encouraging me to listen to her and get curious about her. I called her back, and we tried again. It was hard to listen to things that I know are false and keep getting curious about where they came from and what else.
About where they came from. I always say you should not want to understand why people believe what they believe, even if you don’t agree with them, particularly if you had the goal of discrediting them. You would want to understand not what they were saying but why they were saying it.
Exactly. That’s true with leading right with managing people. Even though they might be coming out with a bunch of nonsense, I need to know what’s underneath it. What is the understory of that conflict? Otherwise, I’m going to be in nonsense conversations forever with this person and they will take different forms. We ended up keeping that in the story and the story was much better. What I’m getting to here is in a time of false simplicity, which is what we are in this conflict, complexity is breaking news. It’s interesting to audiences in a way that your show is too. You have time and space, and you are well prepared. There’s complexity in the conversation which is different from local TV news norms.
Nuance is important and we have done away with nuance and the “Yes-and” like multiple things can be true. I find it fascinating because there is a group of people who feel like there’s a deep state conspiracy to assassinate Donald Trump and there’s an equal group who feels like Donald Trump did this to himself as a false flag operation. It’s amazing reading both of these narratives at the same time and from the same data.
The Danger Of False Simplicity And Splitting
It’s wild. It makes me wonder how I am doing that in my own life without even noticing. In a time of high anxiety, there’s a term psychologist called splitting which is when humans split the world into good and evil. The more anxiety, the more splitting we do. It’s a very normal response but it’s also dangerous.
You want easy explanations, not nuance. It won’t be exciting for people to learn that there were a ton of boring basic communication breakdowns and bad timing and individuals. That won’t be interesting to people.
Interesting or reassuring in a weird way. If there’s a deep state that’s got this all on lockdown, even though that’s terrifying on the one hand, there’s an orderliness to it like someone to blame. There’s a mastermind. There’s a Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
You’ve reported on a depth of issues and your first book was on education, which is near and dear to my heart and completely broken in my mind. It’s called The Smartest Kids in the World. What were some of the flaws you identified in the education system in that book? What are some of the solutions to those flaws? What are we fundamentally doing wrong?
There’s a bunch of things where in the business world, when you do something and the outcomes are poor, there’s a lot of pressure to change the inputs. Education feels like parenting in the last decade. One of these examples is all the data that we are getting is the outcome is bad, not working, and getting worse, but let’s keep doing the same tactics. I’m surprised by this.
Education System Flaws And The Importance Of Teacher Quality
It’s perfect that we are talking about this right after talking about confirmation bias and having the answer in your head before you start. When I was covering education for the Atlantic, Time Magazine, and other places, I did have a story that pretty quickly developed which was the problem is the recruitment, training, and selection of teachers. It was pretty clear to me from looking at the data which we have too much of arguably that there was so much variance from classroom to classroom even within the same school like more variance than between schools.
In Finland, becoming a teacher is highly prestigious because gaining admission to teacher education programs is extremely difficult.
It was a teacher quality problem.
That’s what it looked like and I think it is, but let me add to that and say that I don’t think that was wrong. I just think it was too simple, looking back at it. This is how I have written all three of my books. I get to a point in the reporting where I have no hope left and I’m like, “I can’t live this way.” I try to find people for a book who have been through something and out the other side, regular people that we can learn from because I feel like there has to be more. There has to be a way. It’s my own way of coping. All these things are about me. Trying to be helpful to others as well.
For The Smartest Kids in the World, I followed three American teenagers who went to public school for a year in countries where the data is off the charts better than the US. Trying to figure out what they noticed and what was important about that. Honestly, I did it from a storytelling point of view. It seemed more interesting and it would help people read a book about this. It kept me honest and kept me open to the idea that my story might be wrong or incomplete because students understand things about schools that adults cannot see. Having them be my eyes and ears in these schools in Korea, Poland, and Finland kept me from collapsing into the simplicity of my teacher quality argument. While that was part of it wasn’t the whole thing. Kids see things in school that I can’t see.
What was an example of something that they saw?
Teenagers in particular are very attuned to what other teenagers are doing, thinking, and caring about, and where the status is in a given school culture or neighborhood. That is hugely important. Kim was one of the kids I followed who came from rural Oklahoma and had never left the country until she went to Finland for a year, which at the time had the best-performing school system in the world by many measures including working smart instead of working forever.
In her high school in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, you walk in and you see a huge trophy case for all the sports. The football is the center. Football is the currency of that and kids pick up on that in a million ways. She got to her school in rural Finland where there are no sports in the school and so there’s capital, currency, and status around other things, but most importantly she felt like the kids were brought into a school like they believed that this mattered for their life in a way that she had not seen in Oklahoma. There was a level of buy-in and then you ask, “Where does the buy-in come from?”
Parents, community, and culture.
Lessons From Global Education Systems
It is a galaxy of things, but some of it can be traced back to teachers. In Finland, becoming a teacher is very prestigious. If you go to a party and you tell people you are a teacher, their eyes are laid up and they want to ask you, “What do you teach in?” It’s extremely difficult to get into teacher education programs in Finland. It’s like getting into MIT or Georgetown in the United States, and that is known. The status aligns with the rhetoric on education, which is not true in the United States.
I know you looked at countries that made massive leaps in improving their education system. What were some of the key changes that made a difference? What were the most important levers?
One consistent pattern was that they made it much harder to get into teacher training programs and they made the training much more practical and rigorous so that you were getting coached all the time in real-time by a strong teacher. You had a year of student-teacher training as opposed to a few months because teaching is one of those dynamic leadership jobs. It’s a lot like a CEO.
You are dealing with social, emotional, and intellectual all at once. Expecting a 22-year-old who majored in Education and only spent a couple of months in a classroom to be good at that and classroom management, which is hard, is setting them up for failure, especially in a classroom with a lot of low-income kids and a lot of diversity. It’s hard to teach at different levels unless you train people well.
It wasn’t about the content or the curriculum or what we were teaching. It was more about the teachers or was it a little bit of both?
It’s a bit of both. This is an area where our lack of coherence as a country and our distrust of the federal government, however understandable that is, leads to a crazy quilt of curricula that is not aligned with what is needed in the world today. Critical thinking, to your point earlier, is what is needed. Can you think critically? Can you learn quickly? Can you take information, manipulate it in your head, and tell a story about it? That’s what we need today.
When you have every little local district in every state coming up with its own norms around what should be taught, you get a lot of old and maybe politicized stuff as opposed to what is needed. There’s a lot there and I’m probably saying too much, but you get the idea. Content matters, teachers matter, parents matter, and culture matters, which is frustrating.
The good news is there are these countries that have dramatically improved the results they get, which you can see for all their kids including their low-income kids. They have done it recently and they are spending less than half of what we are spending per kid. It is possible. There was a lot of hope in these stories that it was possible to do this. I don’t expect the whole US to do that, but I do think individual states could do this if they stay very focused on what matters.
The Role Of Failure And Resilience In Education
We’ll dive into resilience in a little bit, but there’s a point here where it intersects where I’m curious because I have a strong point of view on this. In terms of the role that resilience plays in education and learning, we have screwed up our whole system. At the time in kids’ lives when they could fail, try things, get them wrong, learn that muscle, move on, and then be ready for later in life, we are encouraging perfection in everything, “You can’t get it wrong, you can’t miss it, you can’t get A-minus or your life is over.” When the stakes are lowest. I have found that most of the people that I know are most successful failed their first twenty years.
Yes. I know a lot of people like that.
They got good at that and then the other people who got all A’s and all this stuff and they went out in the real world and it was a little harder and they collapsed. What did you find in terms of resilience in education and learning? I don’t know how we fixed this because it’s both the schools but it’s also the parents and they are encouraging that. It’s moved it away from learning where kids go online and grade shop in college for classes. If you told them they would learn the most and have the biggest improvement in whatever, they’d get a B, and they are like, “I will go take the other class.” That was a long question comment statement, but I’d love to hear your more professional take on it.
That’s part of it and it’s wild because if you think about it there is one part of our culture that is okay with kids failing and with very direct feedback and like falling down and picking yourself up again to an extreme level, and that would be sports.
We are good with merit in sport. The anti-merit crowd is a little disingenuous in that they are great with merit in sports.
I know people talk about how everybody gets a trophy, but when you start looking at and around middle school in America, it starts getting into the elite. You are treating kids like semi-pro athletes. That is another thing I noticed because I didn’t even think about sports. I played soccer all my life. I coached kids’ soccer. I coached my kids’ team. I love sports so I didn’t think about it.
The kids I followed to other countries noticed this right away, and also the kids who came here and were in public school here from very high-performing countries were like, “What is this? You get to miss class to play volleyball. What?” They love it on some level, but they are also baffled. Tom is someone that I followed from rural Pennsylvania who went to a pretty big city called Wroclaw in Poland. Poland had very dramatically improved its education outcomes while spending very little.
One of the things he knows right away is that five was an A in his Polish high school, and every time they took a test, the teacher would read the grades out loud, humiliation, and all kinds of problems. He knew that the entire year, no one ever got a five, not even once. That’s an example of what you are speaking to and it was okay. They didn’t go home and feel like they were dumb. There is a way in which we have treated kids like they are fragile in some ways and then totally not at all in others. It’s like could we take 10% of what we do in sports and apply it to academics?
While there seems to be, especially among upper-income parents, much more coddling of kids, there is also a troubling rise in anxiety, depression, sadness, and loneliness.
It used to be that way. Now, we eliminate advanced classes in town so people don’t feel bad.
All the rich kids get to play travel soccer and travel basketball.
Even in those towns, unfortunately, those decisions disproportionately impact smart poor kids ironically because the rich kids can go to private school or do stuff elsewhere. They lose that ability to stand out, but again, it lowers the bar. The reality is, and I’m sure you’ve seen this data, valedictorians generally underperform in life because it is a compliance-oriented thing to be great at everything.
It’s okay if like, “Amanda seems good at writing. Awesome at writing. Bad at science.” Okay. “Does she like science?” “No.” “It seems like she should focus more on the arts rather than perfunctorily trying to do well in science to check that box.” It seemed backward. There are a lot of parents and parents are hugely responsible for the cultural shift.
The Shift In Parenting And Its Impact On Education
We have always seen this stool of it used to be parent and teacher against the child. Now it’s parent and child against teacher, which makes it hard for any teachers, but it’s complicated. If you forget your cleats and you are embarrassed, I don’t think the parents should drive them to school for you. It’s a missed work. Be embarrassed that day that you don’t have them. It’s not the end of the world.
What’s so interesting is that even while there seems to be, especially among upper-income parents, much more anxiety about this and much more coddling of kids, at the same time, you are seeing this scary increase in anxiety, depression, sadness, and loneliness. It’s not working if we are trying to protect kids psychologically.
Yes. This is my biggest lesson. I don’t know if you’ve read Abigail Shrier’s new book called Bad Therapy, but she has a thing in there around saying like, “If you gave people a drug or whatever, a cure that made them sicker and sicker, you would stop doing it.” In this mental health anxiety world, we have done more interventions, more this, more whatever and our results are worse than ever. Why isn’t anyone looking at it?
It’s heartbreaking. I was looking at some research on antidepressant medication. The evidence is very thin. I’m not saying it doesn’t help some people for some period of time, but it’s not nearly enough to suggest. It’s very similar to exercise for a lot of people, and then I see a lot of my friends, their kids are on antidepressants because they are scared. They are scared their kids are going to attempt suicide. There’s real fear there, but we are not learning quickly enough and adapting based on what we are learning. We need to change what we are doing. I agree and I want to quickly return to the word compliance, which you said is rewarding compliance, and you think about why that is.
The Importance Of Classroom Management In Teaching
I think and, not to be a broken record, but some of that, and I know when I remember my own kid being in public school here in DC, because teachers are not trained in classroom management in most of our education colleges. They need compliance. Who gets rewarded? It’s the kid who is quiet, who does everything perfectly, and who doesn’t create any problems. That is the only way to manage a classroom.
Not that that’s how it works because there are a lot of kids who don’t fit that mold, but if you take the most critical foundational part of teaching, which is classroom management, you have to know how to control and create build relationship quickly with kids and like get their respect and understand how to motivate them. That’s management. That’s hard work and to do it with 30 kids at once.
You go to a standard. There’s a guy named Dave Rendall. He’s a great speaker. He wears these pink shoes and all pink. He says, “My whole life, I was told to sit down and shut up and be quiet.” He was a tall and gregarious outsider. He’s like, “Now I get paid a living to stand up all day, talk, and be loud,” because I would have very obviously said to people that’s what I want to do. It’s not normal, particularly, if we both sit down and sit there all day. That’s not what life is going to be like but it’s a tough situation if you are underresourced.
It’s not even about the number of kids. It’s much more about the training. Doug Lemov who’s a master teacher trainer, wrote this great book Teach Like a Champion, and he trains teachers. He has taught me, by falling around and writing about him, little tricks that you can replicate in your own way. When I was coaching boys’ soccer, I used all these tricks. It saved my life and prevented me from being a horrible draconian jerk with these kids.
You need conflict to grow stronger, to be pushed, and to be challenged—but the type of conflict matters.
This is like leadership training. You need to know how to lead.
Indeed, we are not teaching teachers that. Most of teacher training is philosophical and abstract and all this stuff that’s like the ego of professors as opposed to what matters.
I have a friend who’s so frustrated with the parents and their requests for excuses and accommodations for 80% of the class. It’s statistically off the charts. He decided to go the other direction and raise standards and raise expectations and all of this stuff. He said it’s going unbelievably well in the responsiveness. Rather than lowering all these things, it’s raising them and going the other way.
Shrier pointed out in her book. It’s so interesting that the kids are craving authority or they are not getting in this range of no accountability and no authority and whatever they are looking for. They are joining cults on both sides that are telling them what to do, where to do it, and not to think. These are the ones whose parents never wanted to tell them to do anything or hold them accountable. I’m like, “That’s fascinating.”
Yeah. There’s a lot there.
Any thoughts on that?
The Impact Of Low Trust On Education
This got worse because of the pandemic. We are in a weird zone right now because kids were given a lot of latitude because in the US, many schools were not open when they should have been in my view and in the view of evidence. That comes full circle back to trust. If you are living in a low-trust culture, things get so much harder. School gets harder. Nobody trusts the teachers. Parents feel like they have to be micromanaging.
I remember with my kids’ school, parents were upset if there wasn’t homework in second grade because homework was the only thing they saw as a signal of rigor, but the evidence shows that homework doesn’t lead to learning until later in middle school and high school. There’s all this nonsense and noise that gets generated because there isn’t trust. One of the reasons there isn’t enough trust is because the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.
We talk about education being important but we don’t treat it that way. We don’t treat teaching like the incredibly powerful, difficult, complicated, and demanding job it is. In DC, we pay teachers well now but nobody knows that. It doesn’t match. The prestige of what we say versus what we do, and then kids are sensitive to that. Kids pick up on the fact that this is BS. This is like you saying education is important but I’m spending my math class with my teacher watching ESPN on his phone. Kids are like adults. They don’t want to be played, so they check out too often when there’s hypocrisy in the system.
I could go on this forever but I have too many other topics. You’ve written on conflict. You wrote a book on conflict, ranging from global conflicts, which we have plenty, to interpersonal conflicts, which we also have plenty of in the world today. It seems like a theme in preventing or solving conflict solving is this concept of mutual understanding and reaching out to the other side. I have heard it is a common humanity approach that Dr. King was so successful with. Is this even possible anymore? We talked about a little bit before, even nefariously, that if you are a political operative, you want to understand deeply why they believe that way. What are some methods to do this and is there any hope for this in our Twitterverse?
Yes is the short answer. It’s the same problem I had when I was covering political polarization. I got to a wall where I was like, “What the heck?” I don’t know how to be useful as a journalist when half the country thinks I’m lying almost no matter what I do. Sometimes, they have a point like there are reasons for that distrust, and sometimes it’s been embellished for other people’s gains.
We talk about education as important, but we don’t treat it that way. We don’t recognize teaching as the powerful, difficult, and demanding job it truly is.
Whatever the case, journalism didn’t seem to be functioning the way it was supposed to function. I didn’t want to keep doing that over and over but only more righteously, which is what I saw a lot of my colleagues doing. I did my one trick. I follow people who’ve been through the woods and out the other side. I followed people who have been stuck in poisonous conflict, whether it’s politics, gang violence, or war. I spent time in Colombia because of the civil war there.
The Difference Between Healthy And Malignant Conflict
People who have been stuck in violent or at least soul-crushing conflict and then shifted out of it. What I quickly learned is that the goal is not no conflict. You need conflict to get stronger, to be pushed, to be challenged, but the kind of conflict matters. What they taught me is that high conflict or malignant conflict is the conflict that we are in right now, and that’s a very different ballgame. The normal rules of engagement will not work.
Is that where everything is personal? It’s not a task conflict. It’s not that your idea sucks. It’s you suck because you have this idea.
You’ve said it in fewer words than I would and much better. You make a ton of mistakes in that space, and the research on this is super clear. You lose your peripheral vision. You miss opportunities. It becomes conflict for conflict’s sake and it’s a trap. It goes on and on and you eventually end up harming the thing you went into the fight to protect. It’s diabolical.
Usually, speaking of kids, the people who suffer the most are kids. The good news is there is a path out of that that’s very similar even in very different kinds whether it’s interpersonal conflict, political conflict, or violent conflict, and it often starts with distancing yourself from the conflict entrepreneurs in your world. Turning down the volume on people who inflame conflict for their ends is easier said than done. That’s not easy to do in our moment, but that’s one thing that helps you get a little space from the conflict.
Don’t get into a Twitter fight or a LinkedIn fight. I never saw that work out well.
It doesn’t work. That’s not how you change your mind, unfortunately. What you can end up doing is feeling good for a second but humiliating your opponent which makes them stronger. Humiliation is probably the least appreciated force driving every dysfunctional conflict I have ever seen, and it takes all kinds of forms, but in social media, it’s easy to do humiliation at scale.
If you sense that your team or your organization is in a high conflict zone, what are some practical steps to start to move out of that to more constructive dialogue and problem-solving?
With good conflict, the company I started a couple of years ago, what we have found is we work with a lot of teams in this space and what we have learned is there’s only one antidote to high conflict and dysfunctional conflict in this moment in the time we are living in. That is purposefully cultivating a culture of healthy conflict so that it’s easier to get into healthy good conflict so that it’s not such a big lift so that you use the conflict to get stronger, to get closer.
You might with a significant other. You get into a conflict with them, it doesn’t feel good, you don’t enjoy it, but then you emerge understanding them or yourself a little better and there’s a connection even though you keep disagreeing. That’s what you can get to. I have now seen synagogues, companies, and nonprofits create that culture. It can be done but you can’t avoid the conflict and you also can’t fight it according to your intuition because in high conflict, any intuitive thing you do will probably make the conflict worse. You have to practice different things.
It always also seems like you’d have to reinforce your values like, “In this organization or this team, we don’t say stuff like that. We can talk about these issues but we do not make it personal.” It seems like it’s incumbent upon the leader to reinforce the values of the team and the organization.
Creating A Culture Of Healthy Conflict
Not just reinforce but have clarity around how we want to be in conflict. Part of the onboarding process is super important for this. Tell stories about good conflict, especially when it’s a junior person who has raised an issue in a way that makes the culture stronger. That surfaces something that needed to be surfaced. There needs to be values that have to do with conflict, how we are going to be in conflict, and how we are going to treat each other. Honestly, those guardrails get violated all the time, but at least you can remember and reinforce them and come back to them over and over.
You have to make sure you remind everyone of those. We had a rule for years on our leadership teams and offsites. We had a task conflict culture. We would argue and fight about any issue but there was no personal attack or assault or otherwise, and we had a new executive come into the team. In the middle of a heated thing, they threw an insult out at someone and everyone reacted and they went to them after the meeting and said, “We don’t do that.”
They were pretty surprised because whatever that was, it was normal at their last company, but it was so clear to everyone who had crossed the line. In the fault process, we probably didn’t communicate that as well to that person and we needed to make it clear because they could have said the same thing in a different way, but the way they said it was clear it broke a code.
That lateral peer pressure, did that work?
Almost everyone went up to the facilitator afterward privately and said that they broke a line and that person needed to know that. They were a little surprised by it because I don’t think they were clear. If you come from an environment where people are constantly mixing this stuff, you might not realize that. You might not notice the difference.
On the contrary, you might think that’s a morally good thing. It shows you have a backbone.
We always had this thing like you can criticize the idea but don’t criticize a person.
You need to have these clear rules of engagement and people need to be bought into them and leadership needs to keep modeling, reminding, and reinforcing. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That is the best protection against high conflict.
I’d be remiss if we didn’t get to your newest book. You have very good timing on your topics. I don’t know whether you see them coming and you write into them, but unthinkable is about disaster responses and how people respond well to disasters. Whether they are manmade, physical, or technological, we seem to be living in the golden age of disasters. What are the main commonalities of people who survive disasters and people who don’t?
This is a little confusing because my very first book was The Unthinkable and it was because I was covering a lot of disasters for Time Magazine at the time like terrorism and hurricanes. The same problem. I was like, “What are we going to do?” I then followed people who survived to understand what they learned.
A huge breakthrough for me and for many others to understand that you matter in a disaster. You are not just a victim, and what you do well before the disaster matters, but the experience physically, psychologically, and even socially is very different than people expect. That’s where talking to survivors is helpful and interesting. Long story short, sixteen years later, I have redone the book, updated it, and added the pandemic, social media, and all the things that have happened since. This is a new version of an old one. Sorry for the confusion.
You need clear rules of engagement that everyone buys into, and leadership must consistently model, remind, and reinforce them. That is the best protection against high conflict.
I need to do better research.
The Importance Of Trust In Crisis Response
It’s confusing for people. Looking back at that now, a lot of what I added to the book was about how we build trust where there is none and that wasn’t quite as bad when I wrote it originally. Some of this is who do you have around you? How do you know whom to trust in a low-trust environment? It’s hard to know. If you are going to reduce risk for your neighborhood, family, or company, you need to have some sources that you trust. Not just news but all kinds of things. People on average check with five sources.
You need to build that trust before. This was in my interview with the CEO of Delta Airlines about how they got through the pandemic. They had done all this amazing stuff right before the pandemic for their employees. They put all their names on a plane. They had all of the stuff that they had done before the pandemic. He had that trust going into it. Trying to earn it during the crisis where they had paid out the largest bonus in the history of the company and put every employee’s name on an airplane a month before COVID decimated their business.
That’s a great example. Building those relationships now. I would say for most people who aren’t CEOs of a major company, it’s building those relations. Here’s who’s going to be there in the next major disaster to hit you. It’s going to be your colleagues, neighbors, or family. That’s who it’s going to be because first responders can never be there in time.
It’s going to be regular people, and then the good news is regular people will behave much better than they normally do for a while or longer than you expect. People get very courteous, helpful, and kindhearted, almost to a fault, honestly, and we can talk about that. That’s who matters. For me, the takeaway, among other things, was when there’s a neighborhood block party, say yes. When there’s a company hangout or happy hour, say yes.
Build up what John and Julie Gottman, the marriage experts, called the magic ratio. You need a 5 to 1 ratio, and that’s what that Delta CEO had, which was very fortunate. Five-to-one of positive experiences with each other for every one negative. That’s what you are going for, and we sometimes work with companies to do an audit of their ratio. How many interactions are you having that are fleeting but generally goo, and connective versus negative? You want to have that money in the bank before the disaster strikes.
Hundreds of years ago, surviving the day might have been a win. Assume like we got to find some food and not get malaria. It’s like the Oregon Trail. Things are going to go wrong. When they go right, that’s great. It seems like part of our problem with surviving disasters is that the last several years are all progress. We have assumed that everything is going to go right and then we also stop preparing both emotionally and practically. We stop preparing for things to go wrong.
That’s true. It’s interesting because, on the one hand, we are much more interdependent than we ever were. Hundreds of years ago, all that mattered was your immediate locality. Even with pandemics. There’s a study that came out about how slowly most novel pathogens died out on ships before they reached shore.
There were no airplanes.
It took roughly 15 to 30 days for them to cycle through everybody on the ship. It sucked for you if you were on that ship and got measles but you didn’t tend to bring them to the next port, versus today where you are from here to Japan in a day. On the one hand, people were more focused on their survival and more self-sufficient, and they had different expectations around that, but they were also less vulnerable and dependent on places far away in some ways.
When I looked back at the data for this update, what I found was, on the one hand, it’s amazing and hopeful. We have seen a lot more weather disasters. The frequency has gone up and the cost has gone way up. We all know that we can tell that, but over the past many years, the number of deaths from natural disasters is way down. It’s dropped by two-thirds.
Disasters have become less disastrous and that’s almost entirely because we have gotten better at forecasting that a disaster is coming, and also building codes are very important, and although we could do better. In this country and other rich countries, building codes are a huge game changer, especially for earthquakes and fires. That’s huge. What we have not done at the same time is we are getting worse at building better survivors. Regular people are not part of the plan. It’s all about technology, vaccines, and sprinklers. There’s an expert mindset and experts in every profession always underestimate and dismiss the public.
Building codes save lives, but we’ve neglected building better survivors. Experts focus on technology and infrastructure while underestimating the power of ordinary people.
We have better technology and systems to respond to these things, but not human responses.
Right. At the end of the day, if you don’t have humans in the equation and you don’t realize how unbelievably powerful and effective humans can be with a little bit of help, then it doesn’t matter how good your vaccines are.
If you are going to crawl into the covers and not get out, then there’s nothing you can do to be helpful.
If you don’t believe the vaccine is safe, it doesn’t matter how good it is. It has zero importance or if you don’t trust that the evacuation order is legit, and you stay in place for the hurricane. It’s an interesting mashup, but the bottom line is things will go very differently than you expect. All the people I have interviewed who have been through terrorism attacks, plane crashes, ferry boat sinkings, hurricanes, and wildfires all say the same thing that it was very different than they expected. They didn’t necessarily feel fear, at least at first. What they felt was a profound sense of disbelief that this was happening. Your brain gets creative to convince you that it’s not happening, and you can lose a ton of time that way.
Which stops you on how to react.
It slows you down. Every firefighter has a story of walking into a bar and the smoke is covering the ceiling and everyone is sitting there drinking their beer and he is like, “Guys?” Your brain reverts to everything that’s happened before. You are a pattern recognition machine. If you don’t have a pattern for this, you are going to normalize it until someone gives you a direct command to do otherwise. The first and most important is that denial is very powerful. Luckily, the second phase we all go through is deliberation, which is where you get super social. If a smoke detector went off where you are right now, what would be the first thing you’d do? Are there people around?
Smash it with a hammer because it always goes off in the middle of the night and at the wrong time. First I would be in denial because I have had all the fake ones, but my senses are people around, do I smell anything, or otherwise?
If you are in a hotel lobby or an airport and the smoke detector goes off, you look around and you are like, “What’s everyone else doing?” There were people I interviewed who escaped the Trade Center on 9/11 and some of them had meetings. They’d go into a conference room with strangers to discuss what to do. You get social which is also how other mammals deal with life-or-death situations. A lot depends on the wisdom of your group because you are going to do what the group does.
I have a story about this and maybe there are some advantages to ADD, I think in these moments, hyper-focused and have the ability to process. My family and I were on an island in Australia years ago and the hotel fire alarms went off in the middle of the night. There was smoke. The kids were young, and so we heard it. We could hear everyone yelling.
In my mind, it was a little bit like, I opened the door, the hotel was all externally facing. We were outside. I could see that there was smoke somewhere. I could also see that we were right by the stairs. There was no fire or smoke near us and we were going to be able to get out. I said to everyone, “Put on your shoes. Put on clothes.” This was in a forest. I grabbed the key. I didn’t pack the room. I felt like we had fifteen seconds to make a better decision by putting on all of our stuff. I grabbed the key otherwise. If I couldn’t have seen anything, I probably would have run.
That’s smart. You got some situational awareness and took a breath.
I processed the situation. It took us fifteen seconds. I grabbed the key, we put on our shoes and clothes and ran outside. We got down the stairs. We got down. There was a fire off to the side of the building or something. The upside of that was there were a lot of naked people in line at the front desk for four hours who couldn’t get back up to their room ten minutes later. I have made a lot of bad decisions in my life but I felt like that was one of the good ones.
One of the most common mistakes people make is called negative panic, where they shut down and do nothing.
Talking to my kids, the lesson was you are jarred out of sleep. The panic sometimes also makes you make a bad decision. I remember thinking I was half asleep. I want to assess and fifteen seconds here is not going to be the make or break, and our night ended very differently than what most people’s nights were like.
This is the key. It’s like some people are better at either because of their life experience or training or genetics, better at being able to think in those moments. You took a breath, got some situational awareness, and made a decision. A lot of what I learned from the survivors in the book was how to do that if you are not already trained to do that. There are different words for it. Navy Seals call it combat breathing and finding ways to regulate it because it’s hard to think.
I understand the panic. I try to tell our kids and it sounds good, but it’s not a productive response. It’s a natural response, but I don’t think you make great decisions if you are panicking. As you said, you have to try to slow it down and get control of your senses.
Why People Freeze In Disasters
One of the most common mistakes people make is called negative panic where they do nothing like shut down. You see that a lot on airplanes, on fire, and on the ground, and everybody dies from smoke inhalation, but they are sitting in their seats. It can go in different directions, but quick side note, on 9/11, women were twice as likely to get injured while evacuating the World Trade Center according to a study of all the evacuations.
Why is that? It turns out it was the shoes. Women were, of course, more likely to wear heels. What happens when you have to walk twenty floors? It takes about a minute of floor to get to evacuate a skyscraper. At least it did that day, which is complicated, but they took off their shoes because it hurts to walk in heels for that long. They stepped on glass and all the things like to your point about taking a moment.
Ever since I covered the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I have kept sneakers in my office and now you can wear sneakers all the time, so it’s fine. These little things have become big and it’s silly things, but there were a lot of survivors who tripped over piles of high-heeled shoes in the staircases of the Twin Towers. Things that you would never think about unless you had the training and some realistic simulations or experiences.
More reason to go with function over form. Amanda, where can people learn more about you, your book, and your work?
My website is AmandaRipley.com and if you are interested in the conflict stuff, then check out TheGoodConflict.com, which has a lot of free resources and other information. The Unthinkable is on sale everywhere you can buy books, so check it out.
Amanda, thanks for joining us. Your books cover a wide range of interesting topics. We could have gone on forever, but we’ll have you join us again.
I enjoyed it very much. Thanks for having me.
Everyone, thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d appreciate it if you could leave us a review as it helps new users discover the show. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
