The Crisis Trap: How Crises Trap Us in Our Solutions

No matter what form they take, crises set traps for us. Such pressing situations challenge our safe, stable, and predictable worlds, and draw us urgently into our tried-and-true solutions. No matter if the crisis is our own or that of another needing help, our best efforts at resolution often turn back on themselves.

Trapped in our own solutions!

Source: Image by SajuDivakar from Pixabay

Plotting a New Path

In an initial post titled, The Tipping Point in Crisis Intervention: A Call for a Change, a process-based approach was recommended, advocating embracing crises as tipping points for transformative change. In this post, we will visit what the best minds offer on the crisis trap and point the direction toward freeing ourselves and others from these invariable traps. Successive posts in this series will lay out how the best evidence on resolving crises, across all forms, follow similar, often initially counterintuitive-seeming paths out of each different crisis trap.

Solution-Generated Problems

In two earlier posts titled, When Our Solutions Become the Problem, and Nine Dots: A Key to Psychological Problems, the basics of how we typically trap ourselves in what seems to be logical, tried-and-true solutions were explained. Similarly, as any form of crisis arises, however, these same solution forces are redoubled and often escalate the very crises we urgently need resolved. Turning to a set of perspectives on these traps may help.

Crises as Existential Traps

Much has been written and said about our shared illusions of our assumed safe, stable, and predictable worlds. Most existential philosophies point to the fallacy of assuming we have a hammer lock on reality and on what the next best thing is to do in preserving safety and stability. Most crises in any form directly challenge this illusion. At these times, we are commonly drawn into a set of self-defeating cycles. Touching on some convergent research conclusions should help us paint the best picture of the invariable crisis traps.

The Paradox of Thinking Differently

Years ago, Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California, put forward the seminal ideas of first and second-order change and first and second-order reality (Watzlawick, et al., 1974). In a nutshell, these ideas boiled down to the points that we most often get trapped in our set ways we assume we know the way things are (first-order realities), and how to act and react within that reality (first-order change). Following that view, we are confronted with paradoxical choices if we encounter crises calling for us to step outside how we view things (initiating a step into second-order realities) and thus taking different steps for resolution, which would have been viewed as paradoxical or counterintuitive from our original views (or initiating a second-order change).

The Threat-Rigidity Cycle

Also, in classic research on how organizations confront crises, a related set of ideas was put forward and called “the threat-rigidity hypotheses.” This hypothesis was illustrated in such examples as the demise of potentially superior recording options as a result of rigid reactions to companies offering new alternatives and in other examples too numerous to cover here. In essence, the finding was that upon confronting a crisis for an organization, rather than looking for flexible and creative reactions, the organizations turned inward to rigid attempts to manage risks using centralized and formerly tried-and-true rules of operation. This is nearly a mirror reflection of the concepts of first and second-order changes noted above. When rigid yet ineffective reactions are repeated over and again, downward spirals begin.

Thinking Fast and Slow

More recently, Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and the 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on decision-making under risk (Kahneman & Tversky, 2013). This type of decision-making is exactly what confronts us all when we are faced with a crisis. In essence, Kahneman explained how we tend to build an eventually unchallenged worldview in given domains and then stick to it in crises and under perceived risk despite facts suggesting other, more successful choices.

Tried-and True Dominates in Crises

Thus, under perceived threat in a crisis, we are most likely to respond in overlearned ways despite their ineffectiveness. However, accurate intuition is also effective in most circumstances, and that is why the ingrained beliefs and related actions and choices persist as tried-and-true. Once patterns are ingrained, they are hard to break. The solutions are often counterintuitive or paradoxical from the original now-automatic assumptions.

Driving on Ice and Fighting Fires

For those who have learned to drive on ice, an example of learning a paradoxical solution is overlearning the counterintuitive actions to turn into a spin and not press on the brake, rather than impulsively trying to stop and turn out of the spin. Forest firefighters are now taught to set "escape fires" to save themselves—the ultimate paradox of setting fires to escape fires!

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Embracing Tipping Points

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell (2006) made the case across a wide array of examples of how one seemingly small and innocuous trend can create a groundswell of response, similar to the infectious disease model of the spread of a pandemic. As we will see in future posts, suicidal thoughts, for example, can cascade into a series of actions and reactions in the lives of those involved to eventually confirm the intent to die. These are "vicious cycles." Taking a counterintuitive small step can similarly create a tipping point for a new and positive "virtuous cycle."

Escaping Most Traps Is Often Illogical

By embracing crises as tipping points for often counterintuitive yet effective change, the literature on effective approaches to crises confirms that courageous choices often lead to transformational life changes. A prime example is the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. Crisis traps repeat across most crises, yet embracing those crises as tipping points for creative change inevitably leads to what we might term re-solutions, and positive outcomes. Future posts will show that all evidence-based approaches to crisis intervention essentially help make sense of such paradoxical escapes from these crisis traps.