What would you do in a disaster? 4.5 options and the multiple uses of dandelions. 🌼

I care less.

We're not very good at predicting reality, but it's often the best we can do with the brains we have.

Our brains are projectors, coupled through the body with the environment in an entangled, approximate, constantly changing relationship. It's very hard to directly grasp full reality - it would be overwhelming. That's why we have senses, filters, and boundaries. Our system can only take in so much - unless trained. So evolution has given us heuristics and instinctive reactions including an amygdala that scans for threats and makes you react without thinking.

So what happens when your life is under threat in a disaster?

When I was 11, Algeria experienced a large earthquake one night. I remember running to my parents, and then all of us leaving for shelter elsewhere with family. Decades later, I woke up in the middle of the night in New Zealand - where the terrible 2011 Christchurch earthquake had happened - and another time in Nepal, known for its massive earthquakes. I woke up, realised nothing much was going on, and went back to sleep.

Why were my reactions so different?

Disaster psychology studies human responses in crises, and there are four commonly observed behaviours:

1. Normalcy reaction: We assume disasters are rare. If we hear a strange sound or notice something unusual, we might consider it nothing to worry about. It's why people sometimes take a while to respond to something alarming.

2. Social milling and social conformity: We look around, ask others, see that others aren't doing much, and stay put (or if everyone is running around, perhaps we join in).

3. Fight, flight, freeze: Highly instinctive responses. We either push our way through, run to try to escape, or - if the situation is too overwhelming and we can't see a way out - freeze and become numb or paralysed.

4. Pro-social behaviour: Sometimes something in us moves beyond our own safety to help others. In disasters, people show extraordinary solidarity and altruism, risking their own lives to rescue those who are in harm's way.

4.5. Do nothing: Sometimes problems resolve without intervention - but even then, some adjustment is usually required. In a crisis, doing nothing is rarely wise. So it's half an option…

One thing that makes a difference to survival odds is training.

In a disaster or crisis, you default to two things: your instincts (like those above) and your trained capacities. Training reflects a remarkable human evolutionary ability - to develop new patterns of behaviour and adapt to changing environments.

There's an important distinction worth naming: training for competence versus training for adaptive response. As many scholars have pointed out: in a complex, rapidly changing environment, you don't fail because you're competent, but because you might be too competent at the old way - it's The Success Trap.

Competence - like skills you demonstrate in a medical or coaching professional exam - are a specific behaviour under defined conditions. When X happens, do Y.

Adaptive response is the ability to draw on existing skills, recombine them, repurpose them, and develop new responses as situations evolve. When you don't know what to do, try X+Y+Z then revise, amplify, or abandon. In the VUCA world we now live in (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), we're being stretched to respond beyond the competence and skills we know. And it's uncomfortable - especially if your identity is built on being an expert with answers.

But despair not. You can still train new abilities that have been dormant.

Adaptive capacity develops through at least three trainable mechanisms:

1. Survival skills: Our basic capacity to respond to threats and sustain ourselves. Today that might mean learning to swim, basic first aid, or how to forage - there is surprisingly plenty in nature if you know where to look, as I discovered on a foraging walk last year. Dandelion salad,coffee and sugar are a thing. A foraging day might make for a fantastic team away day…

2. Context-specific skills (often relational skills): If you know how to read the terrain, you can navigate it more safely. A sailor who reads weather patterns or stars can cross the sea. Similarly, we can develop context-specific skills for modern crises - learning how to read a room, navigate organisational conflict, gather information through formal and informal networks, create space for agreement and dissent at the one moment and centralised command at another, and match previously dormant capacities to emerging needs. Approaches based on these principles have been tested and incorporated into European pandemic management guidance.

3. Perceptual skills (sensing reality with just-enough thinking): Our brains aren't reproducing reality - they're in a continuous feedback loop of projecting reality, testing those projections against experience, and adjusting. This is the domain of deep training and mastery, but also meditation, where we become more aware of the basic hardware of our system. Developing this capacity across domains significantly increases your ability to learn, adapt, and support others - because you can perceive more deeply and respond more wisely. You learn to differentiate between projecting and sensing, and discern between intuition and reactive fear or fantasy. As a result decision-making is less agonising.

Why does this matter?

This year's heatwave in the UK, wildfires tearing through Southern France, and floods in Ghana, and extreme weather events increasing in frequency and intensity across the world, are a reminder that our environment is changing. Global institutions are changing. Societies are changing. Technological change is accelerating.

If you accept that profound change is happening, that a response is required, and that you still have time to prepare and perhaps prevent crises rather than simply react - what would you do now?

Would you increase your survival skills?

Develop your context-specific skills and learn to communicate in ways that build cooperation rather than aggression?

Pay closer attention to how your choices shape the environment around you?

Or focus on perceptual skills - understanding how your mind constructs reality, improving your ability to sense patterns, test assumptions against feedback, and support others through uncertainty?

The world doesn't just need better answers but people who are willing to move through the unknown without being overwhelmed by fear of failure, attachment to success, or analysis paralysis.

Amina

P.S. We are no longer in business as usual. If you or your team are navigating uncertainty, change, or conflict and feel chaotic or stuck, reach out to explore how I can support you to move beyond relying on competence and into adaptive connection and coherence. Book a call here.