The price of avoiding anxiety.

Accept anxiety. It’s your job. Avoiding it has seen the destruction of countless companies, and two space shuttles. Here’s how:

Nobody likes bad news, problems and work to be done.

So when a team member discovers a problem, even if they swallow the required anxiety to bring it up to their manager, the anxiety-averse manager will do all they can to avoid the news.

They may ignore it, or blame someone, most notably the messenger.

How shooting the messenger cost two space shuttles.

NASA engineer Roger Boisjoly repeatedly flagged the danger that the o-rings would fail.

'I became concerned about safety issues in Nasa after Challenger. I think what happened is that very slowly over the years Nasa's culture of safety became eroded.

'But when I tried to raise my concerns with Nasa's new administrator, I received two reprimands for not going through the proper channels, which discouraged other people from coming forward with their concerns. When it came to an argument between a middle-ranking engineer and the astronauts and administration, guess who won.’

Thus the Challenger exploded. 17 years later, with Don Nelson facing similar resistance, Columbia was lost.

Roger Boisjoly

Stages of anxiety

Much like the stages of grief, a person's efforts to avoid uncomfortable truth can take a familiar path:

Denial: Ignore the problem and make the messenger go away. Close off feedback loops which might tell you otherwise.

Anger: Look as if you are going to fire someone for mentioning it, and really seal yourself off from input.

Bargaining: Use cognitive bias to justify that your idea is still the best. Ignore all contrary evidence.

These sound familiar? Yes, but a good manager will not fear the depression that follows, get on with accepting it, and work from there, minimising blame and maximising communication and trust.

How do we do it?

Take the pain. Your job is to deal with the stress and emotions that may arise from new and uncomfortable information, and make the best impartial decision based on the facts at hand.

Get calm. Let emotions run their course, and THEN decide. This is the mental practice of the ancient Greek Stoics. Learn from the masters!

Trust. Others in their field know more than you do. Many are closer to the customer action. Listen to them.

Take problems on board, treat your people with trust, and listen well.