Breaking rules and following your gut can avert disaster

We all have gut feel, also referred to as the sixth sense or intuition, but most of us often lack the courage to follow it in deeds. But there are also institutional barriers to using it.

Organisations — both public and private sector — have created rules, often punitive, that sit like a huge banner at their entrances: abandon intuition all ye who enter here.

Yet sixth sense can in some instances make all the difference in the world. Of course, one’s gut feel may be off the mark too, resulting in disaster. But two cases in 1983, perhaps the most intense period of the Cold War, illustrate the benefits of following one’s instincts. They involved US and Soviet officers whose intuitive decisions averted what could have been the start of a war and the use of nuclear weapons.

In late September 1983, Col Stanislav Petrov followed his gut feel that the early warning of five incoming Minuteman intercontinental missiles from American bases was a technical glitch in the Soviet Union’s satellite systems. The incident happened soon after the Soviets had shot down a South Korean passenger airliner that had strayed into its space.

Petrov was working in a secret bunker, south of Moscow, from where the Soviets received signals from its satellites over the US.

“I said the chances were 50-50 that the warnings were real,” he would later tell Time magazine. “But I didn’t want to be the one responsible for starting a war.” Petrov reportedly told his superiors the alarm was false, something that took six months of investigation to confirm. It turned out the Soviet satellites had been confused by the sun’s reflection in cloud.

“I had a funny feeling in my gut,” a Washington Post article quoted Petrov as saying. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.” Yet, typical of the political system, Petrov’s Soviet bosses weren’t pleased with his exposure of the errors in the country’s defence systems.

Just over a month after the Petrov incident, the USSR put its forces on high alert, with helicopters moving nuclear weapons from storage to launching pads in response to a Nato military exercise, Able Archer 83, which the Soviets read as the alliance preparing for a nuclear strike. Lt-Gen Leonard H Perroots, the US air force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence in West Germany, decided not to respond to the Soviets’ elevated military alert.

A report on the incident by the US presidency noted that Perroots and other officers had “acted correctly out of instinct, not informed guidance”. Nat Jones, who published a book on Able Archer in 2016, told the New York Times in February after Perroots’ death that he “acted on his gut to de-escalate, rather than escalate, the nuclear tension and likely ended the last paroxysm of the Cold War”.

As these two incidents illustrate, intuition has value, especially in situations calling for a quick decision when there is no time to verify information. However, organisations have become so laden with rules and policies that have made gut feel not worth the risk.

This is an old problem. American political scientist Victor Thompson warned in 1965 that an institutional culture that punishes people for making mistakes and wrongdoing creates a situation where people “may hesitate to advise an organisation to take a particular action” even when they have good reason to believe “the probabilities for a satisfactory outcome are good”.

Three American researchers on organisational design noted in a 2018 article that fear of punishment was most pronounced in the public sector, a phenomenon that has become a big issue in SA too. The public sector was more formalised, with more rules. It also had more red tape, rules that require compliance but don’t achieve the organisation’s objective for creating those rules in the first place.

“If one works in an environment in which rules are more extensive and perhaps more salient, then bending the rules might, indeed, be more likely to be a cudgel used against the organisation’s more venturesome and unorthodox workers.” Such an environment of “excessive adherence to formal rules” often induces fear and insecurity among workers “and, in turn, pathological managerial behaviours”.

Ask any civil servant — the good, not corrupt ones — about the chilling effect of a forensic investigation of decisions they took.

Yet sticking to the rule book when circumstances point in a different direction means the public service never addresses societal problems — it merely complies with rules.