IN NEED OF A CRITICAL FRIEND

Emerging from his personal review of both the Manchester Arena Inquiry and the Dame Louise Casey review in the UEFA cup final in 2021, Nick Aldworth concluded that decision-makers would have benefited from critical friendship.

I’ve often wondered what history would look like if each failure we human beings have been responsible for had been approached differently. What if Captain Smith had slowed the Titanic, just a little bit. What if people had run from Grenfell Tower at the first sign of fire, and what if the gates at Parliament had been closed on 22 March 2017.

Many of us carry enormous levels of risk in our day-to-day jobs, so how great would it be to have a trusted voice helping you on that journey, a metaphorical sat-nav suggesting alternative, possibly improved, routes. This is the heart of what critical friendship provides. Like sat-navs, critical-friends don’t judge you if you don’t listen to them, and they remain independent of your decision-making, or the route you take.

A critical friend can be defined as:
“a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward.The friend is an advocate for the success of that work”

Decision making dilemmas
Dynamic decision-making can be challenging, often because of multiple, sometimes conflicting, pressures. It’s why thinking about problems before they arise, and developing resilient and stress-tested contingency plans, is so important. Structure, policies, and procedures, take pressure off dynamic decision making, and sometimes negate the need for it at all. However, the reality that emerges from our thinking, is often very different to what we had intended, or considered to be possible. In his novel about the Vietnam war, Tim O’Brien’s character refers to this by saying ‘everything was such a damned nice idea, when it was an idea.’

Critical friendship works best in this ‘development’ stage of decision-making, when we have time to get things right, but it is becoming more widely used in dynamic decision-making. It is not uncommon to now have a lawyer present in national security operations, providing a ready view of legality in sometimes ambiguous situations.

Critical friendship is a different process to feedback, collaborative thinking, and testing and exercising. Key to this is the fact that a critical friend shouldn’t have any ownership of the decisions being made, nor should they be subject to influence of, or from, the person they are working with. Critical friendship only works when there is complete independence and trust.

Most people have a vested interest in the decisions they make, the plans they develop or the practices they maintain. For example, implementing a new practice might mean more work for them or increased reward, either way, there is an inherent risk of both conscious and sub-conscious bias influencing thinking.

We make decisions, often drawing on deep wells of experience and knowledge, and hopefully, they never go wrong. One of the biggest challenges to developing effective thinking is to balance the influence that personal emotions and past experiences have on decision-making. The fact that things don’t go wrong, is assumed to mean success, and organisations that ‘always do it this way’ are potentially guilty of not accounting for changing environments or parameters. The gap between success and failure can be very small and sometimes driven by subjectivity that we don’t always see coming.

An individual’s review of decisions often only comes from things that haven’t gone well and are then subject to hindsight, either through late reflection by the individuals involved, or the formality of an inquiry or inquest. Those that have been following the Manchester Arena Inquiry will have seen how uncomfortable that learning can be for those involved in it. But with hindsight, we also see genuine, missed opportunities, some of which appear to have been so glaringly obvious that it becomes inexplicable as to why a different course wasn’t chosen.

So, why does that happen? In a word, ego. When we make a decision, or write a plan, we are projecting a part of our ego; we are saying, “I’m confident that I’ve got this right, I know what I’m doing’.

Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix said “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success”.

What he’s saying is that his ego told him he was a sound decision maker because he’d got it right in the past and, as a result, missed warnings when things weren’t as they should be.

How critical friends help
There are 3 main approaches to critical friendship:

One: The dynamic conscience
This is the person who will sit on your shoulder when you are managing an ongoing challenge. They will probe your conscience on a range of subjects, which could include legal, health and safety, human-rights, staff welfare, resilience and recovery, or any other selection of pre-agreed criteria.They will often be subject matter experts, but don’t ever reject the value of a generalist view from ‘the person on the Clapham bus’. Often, we all have an innate sense of right and wrong, that we sometimes lose when we are in the ‘hot-seat’ and the ‘what would the public think of this’ question is a valuable one to ask.

Two – The hydra conscience
Greatest value is probably achieved by asking a critical friend to review the development of procedures, plans and policies. A critical friend is the fresh set of eyes, the extra brain, who will confidentially review your pre-decision-making thinking. Like a proof-reader, critical friends will often spot issues that the author has become blind to and will bring perspectives that the decision-maker doesn’t have. In this context, critical friendship is not the same as exercising and testing, but that might be an activity to which a friend contributes. A friend’s contribution can be made throughout the development process not just when a policy, procedure or practice has been drafted. The critical eye at an early stage will prevent extra work later on.

Three – The mirror conscience
Looking backwards to move forwards is still something we should all practice but ‘honest’ self-reflection is incredibly difficult to do, again because our ego often draws us to our successes and not our failures. Few people are as open to review as Neil Basu, the former head of CT Policing who, when given the Anderson and ISC reports in 2017, said: ‘It’s humbling as the leader of an organisation to be shown how many things you could do better’. However, critical friendship isn’t the same as review, or even debriefing, although they might be component parts of a wider process. Critical friendship is the section where you sit with the recipient of information and challenge them about what they’re going to do with it.

collaboration - the difference
Critical friendship is not the same as collaboration, it is not the same as consultation and it is not a substitute for teamwork.Critical friendship is simply an opportunity to set your ego aside and ask someone you trust, and who has ‘no skin in the game’, what other routes are available to me. It is an opportunity to use a moral compass to show you the way and develop a maturity of decision making that will provide confidence to all involved in an activity.