Understanding Crisis Through Their Eyes: The Power Of Active Listening In True Communication [00:00]
Michael Baker :
We have to realize that our crisis, what we consider a crisis is different than what they might consider a crisis. We might look at that and go, that’s nothing. That’s just, that’s grade school stuff. But to them it’s the end of the world. It’s like life changing stuff. It’s like decisions between life and death kind of stuff.
And that amazes me sometimes to hear that, but I believe that it is in their mind. We pride ourselves on having all these ways to communicate, but they’re not really, they’re ways of sending messages back and forth, but I consider communication when you’re talking about active listening.
So I think in any situation, any kind of crisis, you know, like I said if you assume that people are telling you the truth when they’re talking to you, and that whatever they’re going through in life is crisis to them, then you need to get to the root of why that is a crisis, that’s the way you fix it. You don’t deal with what’s sitting there right in front of you.
You go backward and find out what caused it in the first place and deal with that part, and that’s how you fix it. So I have always, no matter how trivial things might seem to me in the back of my mind thinking, why would you wanna kill yourself over that? Why? And then I’m thinking it doesn’t really matter to me what my opinion is about.
It’s, I wanna know why they wanna do, and I wanna know all the steps that got them to where they’re at right now. I think that’s a key to being successful. And just about every negotiation. Our crisis, what we consider a crisis is different than what they might consider a crisis. We might look at that and go, that’s nothing.
That’s just, that’s grade school stuff. But to them it’s the end of the world. It’s like life changing stuff. It’s like decisions between life and death kind of stuff. And that amazes me sometimes to hear that, but I believe that it is in their mind. That thing I think is really important to be aware of all those differences.
Just, and it’s no different than, our parents generations and everything. They’re all different. We’re all different. We need to realize that, you know that. But more so now, so that things are a lot different. I think communications is not, we pride ourselves on having all these ways of communicate, but they’re not really.
I mean there are ways of sending messages back and forth, but I consider communication when you’re talking about active listening you don’t do that through text messages, so you try to, but you can’t be accurate sometimes.
Flexibility Over Protocol: Navigating Complex Crises with Patience, Creativity, and Human-Centered Solutions [02:01]
Kenneth Dekleva :
When I was director of mental health, one of the psychiatrists in the field had to deal with a very dangerous, difficult hostage negotiation where people had escaped from a violent situation and they were terrified. While they were too frightened to go back to the home, the apartment where the crime where they were victimized. So the regional psychiatrist for that area called me. I was in DC and said, I wanna help these people and until they get a hotel or something.
I have, I’m single, I have a large apartment. They could stay with me for two or three days. Again, normally you wouldn’t do this ’cause there are boundary issues. But I trusted my colleague’s judgment and I told them that I trust your judgment that you’re doing the right thing for the victim and for the patient.
That worked out okay. They were able to do that until they got into a hotel where they felt safe and then got different housing where they felt safe. So doing the right thing sometimes means. Working around bureaucratic rules. I worked on a situation at one embassy where the most important thing for these victims is to reconnect when appropriate with family members to let them know they’re safe.
This is the pre-cellphone era I’m talking about now. So we took care of a released hostage and used an embassy apartment, which was empty. And we plugged the phone in. We got them a phone so they could call home using the embassy switchboard. And one of the telephone people then said well, when the person was repatriated a few days later said they didn’t pay their bill. That sort of thing.
So I had to say, let’s not worry about the $10 phone bill here. We took care of the hostage to the victim and did the right thing. So doing the right thing is critically important. Always. You have to have immense patience. Usually when we fail at this. It’s because we’re in too much of a hurry.
So sometimes you have to slow it down. And I know Gary Noesner talked about this in his podcast and in his famous book, Stalling for Time. Once the person is talking to you, time is your friend. So you use that to slow things down and get the patient in. In my case where I was a physician, it was a doctor patient role to get them to do the right thing in terms of their healthcare, when they were in a country which had no healthcare.
We had to get them to definitive care. You have to wait. I had another colleague where we had to often medically evacuate very sick people back to the United States for definitive care ’cause they were in a place that had no resources. No hospitals, no clinic, no American or Western standard of care, and the person refused was in their apartment.
My colleagues spent three days bartering, negotiating with the person who is very psychotic to get them to agree to come back with an escort family member to get help. So we have to be very creative and flexible in this kind of work and professional negotiators who deal with the most difficult cases need a high degree of flexibility in their work. So rigid protocols and guidelines don’t always work in difficult cases. It’s very hard because you have different agencies, different offices, different bureaus in a large government bureaucracy, and they all have their role. Plus they had several lawyers in the room. So you can imagine that you have to be a good listener.
You have to be attuned to the power dynamics in the room as to who the decision maker is, because that’s who you really want to influence. And I was able to use my expertise, but importantly, you have to stay in your lane. If you get outside of your area of expertise and stretch your expertise, you’re gonna run into problems with that.
So as the medical person in that room, I was able to talk to the planners. What would we do to medically support a hostage who was being held in a place where there’s no embassy nearby and no resources. It was akin to what happened in war zones during the war on terror. Yeah, process dynamics are critical and as a psychiatrist, one of my jobs in the State Department and my colleagues that are doing this job now do the same thing.
We advise senior leadership in the State Department or in the embassies on how people are coping, adapting to these type of crisis situations, whether it’s a kidnapping hostage situation a suicide at the embassy. These are rare events, thank God a war, political violence, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, and we try to understand the human processes
And psychological processes that are going on so you can mitigate the stress and help people find their own natural, what they call resilience to move forward in these processes. One of the things I learned in my leadership role is that there are a lot of stakeholders in complex negotiations like that.
I had a case in a country that I can’t talk about, but I can tell you when I went over to have the meeting, there were about 40 people in the room from different bureaus, offices and agencies that all had some kind of stake. I was the medical person. So the complexity and the higher order effects of complex diplomatic and hostage negotiations are really dramatic and profound, but they’re quiet and behind the scenes.
Many of these cases never make the news and they’re not supposed to. Others were on the front page of the newspaper when the hostage got returned. The most challenging thing was dealing with the patients who we evaluated because we had to help them with their, once they were out of a hostage situation, you had to deal with the patients or victim psychology, which is many of them wanted to stay in the country where they had been kidnapped and the risks were way too high.
So you really work on skills to persuade them that might not be the best thing or in some cases where they had been criminal victims, they would have to go back to testify. So my work as a forensic psychiatrist was very helpful in helping them understand those processes, especially in a country where they’d been victimized in the courtroom.
You don’t want the victim to be secondarily traumatized. What’s called secondary traumatization? So in one case of a diplomat’s wife who had been held at gunpoint in my region, I persuaded them they were gonna leave the country ’cause their assignment was up. But I said, you should not go back into that courtroom. That’s not a safe place in that country ’cause they don’t have rule of law.
You can testify in camera from an office. In the Department of Justice or the FBI or the Department of State, you can testify in camera back to that country. They can beam the video back and I think that’s what ended up happening.
