How Structured Thinking Supports Compassion in Moments of Crisis

When a person requires medical attention or when a natural disaster strikes a community, it's compassion and kindness that often make the biggest direct impact. 

However, neither behavior will produce much of a result without the benefit of structured thinking. It's through organization that emergency responsiveness is efficient, predictable, or even possible.

In this article, we take a look at how compassion is efficient or effective only when supported by critical thinking.

Overview

Naturally, everything that a nurse, a paramedic, a police officer, and so on does is the byproduct of training and standardized processes and procedures. 

From the outside, these preparatory processes are invisible. We don't see all of the work that goes into becoming a community helper. 

We simply feel the byproduct of it. There are several different categories of training, all of which are relevant to how we experience emergency or disaster response. 

This includes:

• Triage: Triage concepts are most commonly associated with hospital environments, but really it's a process that all emergency responders use in some way. They identify the risk-to-reward proposition of any action and prioritize behaviors that will have the biggest and most immediate impact. In many disaster situations, it is impossible to do everything at once. Instead, responders are left with the enormously difficult task of prioritizing who to help first. It's through critical, organized thinking that they're able to do so efficiently, helping the most people possible in the bargain.
• Coolness Under Pressure: It's also through organized thinking and careful training that first responders are able to approach difficult situations with calm clarity. Simply being able to feel as though you've been in a difficult situation before is often enough to help you make the right choices when the cards are down.
• Repeatability: Finally, organized thinking and the systemization of emergency response processes allow behaviors to be repeatable. This is the same basic principle that organizations all over the world use. Repeatability of behaviors is what makes it possible for a McDonald's store to generate three million dollars a year in revenue while being managed by a teenager. It's also what allows paramedics to be efficient regardless of where they've been called. Emergency response scenarios are admittedly more dynamic than fast food environments, but the principle is actually the same. Organized thinking requires first responders to be able to repeat the same process over and over again regardless of what kind of situation they find themselves in.

It's hard to think in terms of systems, organization, or clarity in moments of great pressure, but through training, first responders develop the skills they need to be effective no matter what is going on.

The Skills That Make Organized Thinking Possible

Organized thinking is really just a blanket term for a series of soft skills that can be valuable in nearly any professional application, even those not involving disaster response. These include:

• Communication: It's important in any professional environment to be able to communicate clearly. This means saying what you need to say efficiently, but it also means listening to the input of others and treating them in a way that makes it clear you've been listening.
• Task Prioritization: We already described the value of task prioritization to a certain extent when describing the triage approach that is often used in emergency response. But even when things are relatively normal, it's still important to be able to prioritize tasks. For example, a nurse working on a hospital floor may have 20 patients to check in on. They need to be able to identify what the most important tasks are at any given moment, because the unpredictability of their environment means that they might be constantly interrupted in a workplace where you never know exactly what you'll be able to accomplish on any given shift. But it's important to make sure that you're using the time you do have as effectively as possible.
• Time Management: Time management is slightly different than task prioritization. It means being as efficient and effective as possible when you are on the job.

While many people feel that soft skills are unlearnable, you can develop many of these abilities through work and repetition.

Developing Valuable Professional Soft Skills

Prioritization and time management in nursing can be developed first and foremost through repetition. The more often you practice a skill, the better you will get at it. This is as true of the physical acts of nursing as it is of the mental features of the job. It's not necessarily easy to develop soft skills, but that's not the same thing as saying it has to be hard either. The more work you put into the process, the better at it you'll ultimately become.

Nursing schools will teach time management, but it's also something you develop on the job through real shifts.

The more often you're responsible for making on-the-fly changes or managing limited amounts of time in a high-stress environment, the better you'll become at it. 

One of the lowest-lift ways to improve your time management in a professional context is to look for small instances of wasted time—things that you could easily clean up. For example, do you find towards the end of your shift that you're reaching for distractions? It's not necessarily bad or inappropriate to detour in moments of fatigue or stress, even for your phone, as long as you're not doing so at the expense of a patient's needs.

However, there is an actual psychological effect to distraction that can have a bigger impact on your ability to learn. It's called context switching.

When our brain moves from one task to a radically different one, it takes time for our focus to reset. 

This means that any time you reach for your phone in a quiet moment, you're actually setting your focus level back by about 30 minutes. 

Instead of reaching for distractions, take momentary lulls in the action as an opportunity to focus on a breathing exercise or a moment of mindfulness. This can keep you mentally engaged and better prepared for high levels of time management and task prioritization.

Conclusion

Probably you don’t become a nurse because you are passionate about task prioritization or time management. Maybe you’re even the type of busy person who doesn’t have the bandwidth for terms like “context switching.”

That’s ok. 

Perfection in healthcare, as in so many other areas of life, is unattainable. The goal, instead, is incremental progress. Get in the habit of productive, structured thinking. With time and repetition, it will help you develop valuable skills that improve your performance and help patients.