Talk Notes: "Fight, Flight, or Freeze - Releasing Organizational Trauma" by Matt Stratton
Tags: techtalks
Published: 2021-03-31 21:11:48

✨ **What is this post about**: As a part of my professional growth, I make time to watch conference talks on Ruby, Rails, JS, React, tech writing, and tech trivia. Previously, I'd just watch them but now I will take and publish notes for future reference.

✨ **Talk:** [Fight, Flight, or Freeze - Releasing Organizational Trauma](https://youtu.be/Z-_p0YGCGCw) by [Matt Stratton](https://twitter.com/mattstratton)

✨ **One-sentence summary**: Applying personal trauma treatment methods to organizations and teams can prevent us from revisiting the same fight, flight, or freeze responses in the future.

✨ **Impression**: Interesting and applicable to the teams, especially now that there's so much post-pandemic change happening. 

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## Table of contents:
- [Vocab I looked up](#vocab-i-looked-up)
- [Trauma](#trauma)
- [Trauma in the organizational context](#trauma-in-the-organizational-context)
- [Remedy to trauma in the organization](#remedy-to-trauma-in-the-organization)
- [Cognitive distortions](#cognitive-distortions)
- [Trivia](#trivia)
- [Read more](#read-more-my-own-list) <- my own list


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## Vocab I looked up:
- [sympathetic nervous system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_nervous_system): "The autonomic nervous system functions to regulate the body's unconscious actions. The sympathetic nervous system's primary process is to stimulate the body's **fight or flight** response. It is, however, constantly active at a basic level to maintain homeostasis."
- [parasympathetic nervous system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasympathetic_nervous_system): "The autonomic nervous system is responsible for regulating the body's unconscious actions. The parasympathetic system is responsible for stimulation of **"rest-and-digest" or "feed and breed"** activities that occur when the body is at rest, especially after eating, including sexual arousal, salivation, lacrimation (tears), urination, digestion, and defecation."
- [prefrontal cortex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex): "In mammalian brain anatomy, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the cerebral cortex which covers the front part of the frontal lobe. (...) Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's will to live, personality, and the functions of the prefrontal cortex. This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as **planning, decision making, short-term memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language**."


## Trauma:
- **Zebra analogy:** 
  - there's a zebra who's just nibbling on grass as there are no predators around (the so-called *rest and digest* state); 
  - all of a sudden, the zebra spots a predator; the response is fast -> *fight or flight*: heart rate increases, breathing increases, cortisol and adrenaline are released, the pupils dilate, any non-essential functions (like digestion) come to a stop; the nervous system prepares the zebra to run for its life;
  - if the zebra gets caught, the nervous system gets overwhelmed and has no further solutions; the zebra plays dead (freeze); this is where we consider the infliction of trauma; afterwards, the zebra gets up and "shakes it off" (literally) and gets back to the resting state; 
- Humans are not zebras - **we have a prefrontal cortex**, which "lower mammals" (such as zebras) don't
 - this is where decisions happen, where we can evaluate good&bad, understand consequences; 
  - the downside is that we tend to replay traumatic scenarios and our sympathetic nervous system reacts to it exactly as an actual threat would;
  - this is also why we like pattern-recognition; some situations may seem like signals of past experiences to happen again; 
- A healthy nervous system is alternating between the activation and the rest&digest phases; 
- Un-discharged Traumatic Stress manifests as: 
  - **being stuck "ON":** panic, anxiety, hyperactivity, inability to relax, restlessness, digestive problems, hypervigilance;
  - **being stuck "OFF":** depression, lethargy, more digestive problems, chronic fatigue, disconnection, pain; 
- **Trauma is nuanced:**
  - trauma occurs when your nervous system is overwhelmed, when your solution to a threat does not work; 
  - trauma can result from real or perceived threats;
  - subjective and relative;

## Trauma in the organizational context
- Usually, as teams we also experience alternating states of activation and rest&digest stages; 
- If the organizations are in the "fight or flight" mode:
  - **fight:** they are hyper-aware of threats, which takes energy away from being able to move forward and innovate; this can be reflected in how the leadership approaches outages, e.g. wartime language;
  - **flight:** paralysis, too much safety considerations;

## Remedy to trauma in the organization
- **Identify your organization's window of tolerance**: 
  - understand when your team or your company becomes dysregulated; think about these examples -- are we stuck ON, or stuck OFF?
  - resilient organizations are not traumatized by routine threats to their mission or business; non-resilient organizations are readily overwhelmed and often subject to the symptoms of overreaction, shutdown, and lack of regulated effort; 
- **Regulate**: 
  - train ourselves to react in a specific way when some of the traumatic experiences happen to our organization; 
  - look into the contributing factors that cause the trauma;
  - **game days: let's create an association between the outages and incidents and a safe place, no big deal; they need to be low-stress; the goal is not to practice under pressure;** the goal is not to practice problem-solving but to practice our response to stress and create a psycho-physiological response of calm; there needs to be structure and the experience needs to be guided;
  - **"Failure Friday"** (Planned failure injection) prepare us for approaching the stressful situation with calm;
- **Processing failure**: there needs to be time to talk about it, share, and process; **the post-mortems should not be write-only because they don't help anyone;**

## Cognitive distortions
- perspectives with bias, irrational thoughts and beliefs that we unknowingly reinforce over time; 
- there are 16 different types of cognitive distortions, for instance:
  - **polarized thinking** (all-or-nothing thinking), everything is great or terrible, perfection or failure;
  - **overgeneralization**, a single instance becomes an overall pattern;
  - **mental filter**, seeing only the negative and eliminating all positives about a person, a team, or a system;
  - **fortune-telling**, if we only know enough, we can predict the future; predictions are not facts;
  - **control fallacies**: inaccurate exaggerated perception of control (no control/victim or total control) over our surroundings


## Trivia:
- We need to take off our shoes at the airport checks because on 22 Dec 2001, [Richard Reid tried to ignite explosives in his shoe](https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2014-02-20/airline-terror-warning-shoe-bomb-tsa);
- The bigger the organization, the less likely they are to share their post-mortems across teams; 
- "We have a saying in medicine that when you hear hoofbeats, the first thing that should come to mind is a horse, not a zebra. This too cute by half phrase has killed so many zebras." [Jennifer Brea](https://twitter.com/jenbrea/status/1029240052428099585?s=20)
- "There are apparently 600,000 wild horses and 750,000 wild zebras. I think whether you think horses or zebras when you hear hoofbeats is entirely a function of how (geo/ego)centric is your point of view. Also, it could be a giraffe." [Jennifer Brea](https://twitter.com/jenbrea/status/1193979941697642496?s=20)


## Read more (my own list):
- [10 Cognitive Distortions](https://www.verywellmind.com/ten-cognitive-distortions-identified-in-cbt-22412)
- [Shopify: 9 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Post-Mortem Meetings](https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/9-tips-for-getting-the-most-out-of-post-mortem-meetings)
- [Dr. Peter Levine](https://www.somaticexperiencing.com/about-peter) and [somatic experiencing therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_experiencing)