Readiness
Readiness constitutes the sixth management principle leading to safe behavior. At the employee level, readiness is understood as the ability to respond adequately to risks and challenges from the environment while maintaining the ability to recover from effort. Humanity exists thanks to a delicate balance between conserving energy on one hand and being prepared for action when necessary on the other. This is a dynamic equilibrium influenced in part by immediate circumstances. Management plays a significant role in creating conditions conducive to this balance. This message is about what readiness exactly entails and how it can be managed at an organizational level.
What is readiness?
We feel an increase in the degree of readiness as soon as we need to act. We experience a change in our physical sensation as our muscles tighten somewhat. In common parlance, we have an expression for this, “being on edge due to stress.” For this tightening, we need more fuel and thus blood, especially in the arms and legs. To achieve this, the body increases blood pressure and heart rate and enriches the blood with extra oxygen and sugars. Even brain cells literally communicate faster with each other to respond more effectively to circumstances. Senses become sharpened. Adrenaline and cortisol are important hormones that adjust about 100 balances for this.
Why not always maintain a high state of readiness?
One may wonder why humans do not operate at such a high level of readiness by default. After all, alertness increases, and the risk of delayed responses in the face of imminent danger decreases. The answer has several aspects. What is most apparent is the energy costs. High readiness costs at least 30% more energy. Humans are like a business: if it has to spend 30% more to do better from time to time, it won’t survive long. Additionally, the brain has separate systems for action and rest. Our resting system (default mode network) only comes into play when there are few stimuli and a certain level of calmness prevails. The resting system helps process experiences, store important information, learn, control, and plan. The resting system is equally crucial for safe operations.
The resting system in the MT
The functioning of the resting system (or the lack thereof) is best demonstrated in a management team meeting with many complex topics that need to be addressed under reasonable time pressure. If this happens systematically, it will be discovered that decisions are sometimes insufficiently thought out, and one must backtrack because critical information was not considered in the assessment.
