Fear Fatigue

The cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes published a report in December 2021 on the topic of fear fatigue. The report stated that nearly 80 percent of survey respondents reported some level of fear fatigue within their organization. The report defines fear fatigue as “the demotivation to follow recommended protective behaviors, emerging gradually over time and affected by a number of emotions, experiences, and perceptions. Fear fatigue can often lead to employees’ negligent behavior, such as opening an email attachment without properly scrutinizing the sender or neglecting to turn on a VPN while using public Wi-Fi.”¹

In other words, as a suitable bookend to how this book started, digital transformation is not only being threatened by peoples’ fear of the technologies and their implications, but after two years of dealing with an unpredictable and uncontrollable pandemic, they have become exhausted – simply tired of fear itself, and no longer willing to cooperate.

In a bitterly ironic twist, this report came out just as the Omicron Covid variant was being discovered in alarming numbers all around the world, leading to yet another holiday season filled with isolation, confusion, and gloom.

The body and mind can only take so much fear, after which it shuts down. With too much energy being given over to the fight, instinct calls back its troops to focus on more basic survival.

Imposter Syndrome and FUD

In the world of cybersecurity, where the professionals responsible for successfully implementing digital transformation work, fear is everywhere.

Many of these professionals suffer from imposter syndrome , in which they truly feel they know no more about cyber-related threats and problems than any lay person, and that their calm bedside manner is just a fraudulent mask. This feeling is common among specialists in many industries, including medicine. It is a trust-based concern, specifically in not being able to have trust in oneself as competent. Paired with budget restrictions and the added layer of complexity that work-from-home presents, it is no surprise that burnout and career change are common among InfoSec types.

Bicycle Face, described in Chapter 8, was a form of emotional blackmail originally intended to force women back inside their homes, but which, as mentioned, can also be seen as the underpinnings of most advertising campaigns for consumer goods of any type. This concept had its own bookend, in the form of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a tech sector marketing strategy often shortened to the acronym FUD. It’s a cocktail of negative emotions deployed to sell software solutions to IT departments, and it serves as a great way to compensate for a product’s lack of clear, incontrovertible superiority. Rather than demonstrate how much better a product is, it becomes easier to instill a nagging doubt that if you do not buy this product, your company will fail, or that you, the cybersecurity specialist, will fail personally.

...it is easy to see that the second one will command more of your mind’s attention. Make no mistake, when you see that commercial on TV or online, showing off a new model of car or laundry detergent, the tone of the commercial may say you will be happy with this product, but the underlying message is always that you will be unhappy without it.

When does fear become so overwhelming that we shrug our shoulders and ignore it? Does that not contradict all of the instincts and reactions we have seen thus far?

We observed this pattern emerge during the Covid pandemic. At first, many communities rallied, cheering the first responders, and most doing their part to stay home and support the cause. But with each successive resurgence of the virus, people’s fortitude and faith began to fail. There was fatigue, but there was also fear fatigue – getting tired not only of the disease, but of the fear of the disease. Fatalism and defiance took over. Experts became scapegoats, and were reviled and threatened. People started to assert their individual rights over the common tribal good, and the warnings of the scientists fell on deaf and hostile ears.

Can Anything Be Done?

There is much that can be done, and, as I have mentioned, the best antidote to fear is facts. The best cure for the unknown is the known. The best way to eliminate a fear is to fix what is causing it.

As we have seen, fear is not passive. Someone who feels fear on any level is unlikely to ignore it and carry on. Without a strong countermeasure, the fear will amplify, resonating internally against other thoughts and emotions, while resonating externally through the natural frequencies of human society.

Those who are in charge of leading people through a digital transformation must be careful to establish a drip feed of reinforcement, delivering vision and facts in advance, focusing on small wins, and supplying appropriate amounts of emotional support, primarily through two-way communication (listening and talking). For projects that involve change, we cannot keep everyone in a state of blind compliance up until the moment of the “big reveal.” Humans need vision. They need victories, celebrations, and sustenance regularly throughout the transition.

Listen and Talk

Worried people need to be heard. People undergoing a transformation in their lives arrive at ideas and thoughts along the way. If those thoughts are left alone to brood internally, they can turn negative and even more fearful. But when they are allowed to be spoken, especially in live dialog, a remarkable catharsis occurs. As people hear themselves speak their worries, they get to relax their hold on these worries, knowing they are now in the safe care of another person. By relaxing this hold, our minds find more processing space to work through the problem even further. It’s like a self-cure. This is the essence of good counselling, as you would expect from a therapist, counselor, or psychologist. There is great power in letting someone talk out their problems. Allowing people to feed back their thoughts and ideas, and to work through what they currently have in their mind not only can provide additional solutions sooner, it might also alter the trajectory of the change process for the better.

The Five-Why Analysis

Sometimes people are not fully aware of where their fear really comes from. For example, the connection between not wanting to use a password manager and the ultimate fear of losing one’s job and livelihood might not be an obvious one. It may be much further down in deeper, colder water.

Here, we can take a page from the history of quality management in manufacturing. When something goes wrong with a process, it’s important to fix it, but just fixing a surface level problem does not make it go away. It’s like painting over a rusted support beam. It doesn’t make the beam any stronger, in fact it makes the problem worse by covering it up.

One of the best ways to determine a root cause of a problem is to perform a root cause analysis , and one of the most effective techniques for digging down to a root cause is to ask the question “why?” five or more times. This, unsurprisingly, is called a five-why analysis. It is extremely helpful in ensuring people don’t get hung up on Band-Aid solutions when a deeper cure is needed.

This is a technique developed by Taiichi Ohno, one of the founders of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s, which is still used in management and production today – it’s a philosophy of manufacturing, quality control, people management, and continuous improvement (kaizen) that still stands as one of the best collections of “doing things well” that has ever been catalogued in the past one hundred years.³ The textbook example of a five-why analysis reads like this:

Q1. Why did the robot stop?

A1. The circuit has overloaded, causing a fuse to blow.

Q2. Why is the circuit overloaded?

A2. There was insufficient lubrication on the bearings, so they locked up.

Q3. Why was there insufficient lubrication on the bearings?

A3. The oil pump on the robot is not circulating sufficient oil.

Q4. Why is the pump not circulating sufficient oil?

A4. The pump intake is clogged with metal shavings.

Q5. Why is the intake clogged with metal shavings?

A5. Because there is no filter on the pump.

This example shows that the problem with the industrial robot was not a blown fuse. That was merely a symptom. To keep replacing the fuse would simply guarantee more breakdowns.

A psychologist, social worker, therapist, or even an astute vendor might respond to a statement by a patient or client with a similar type of question. Asking “how did that make you feel?” or “why do you think this happened?” can lead to another question and still another, which becomes a technique for digging down to the true source of the problem.

There are detractors of the five-why process of course, but much of the pushback is based on the idea that exactly five questions is not enough. They suggest that formalizing the process into five questions tempts people to think the solution is always exactly five steps away. They challenge the validity of the leading question, suggesting that it immediately obfuscates other lines of inquiry by leading investigators down a single path of inquiry while leaving others behind.⁴

These are valid objections. The five-why analysis is a tool and, like all tools, it depends on how it is used. The goal behind the five-why technique is to find a root cause and, in some cases, that means it is not the sole root cause. It might also indicate that more than five questions are needed.

But the goal of the process has greater benefit in getting people to know that they need to dig deeper, and not rely on a surface level judgment based on the first problem they see. It is not helpful to stop at the first answer because that by itself won’t solve the problem. With Ohno’s robot example above, you can replace fuses for as long as you want, but the problem will persist.

With every issue, there is always something deeper circling around, and it almost always comes back to fear.

So let’s take a second look at the website company’s internal phishing story from Chapter 1 by using some of these whys. Why did people react so badly to the email? On the surface, they may have objected to having been caught red-handed in a sting. Why? It made them look foolish – they got duped. But that’s not far enough. Go deeper. Ask more. Why would that cause such outrage? Making a dumb mistake makes a person appear incompetent or bad at their job, especially if they work in cybersecurity – and yes, security specialists do fall for phishing scams. That’s true, but go deeper.

Being bad at your job can get you fired or at least held back from promotion. Why would that be a concern? Go deeper. Fear about your job is connected, as straight as a laser beam, back to where you live. It hits your mortgage or rent, and the bills you have to pay. It’s what keeps you awake at night. Your livelihood and your life depend on this job, and any mistakes you make, any time the boss thinks you’re not working hard enough, these become ideas that point toward the ultimate fear: a fear of death. If not immediate biological death, then the death of that livelihood.

According to a 2019 study by Charles Schwab, 59 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.⁵ Beyond this brutal reality lies homelessness and ruin. That’s almost three out of every five people. If your team is 50 people strong, then 30 of those people, in a candid moment, are likely to have that look in their eyes that Quint did, back on the Orca.

The people who criticized the website company’s IT security team for sending the phishing email thought it was a cruel thing to do. But the intensity of the anger was likely not aimed at the training exercise per se, but at what the repercussions of failing this test could lead to for any of them and any one of us.

Like the fast replicating brooms that quickly overwhelmed Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the phishing test, intended to solve a problem, can easily lead to multitudes of further problems, such as genuine messages going unread and sliding under the blanket excuse “I thought it was a phishing test.”

But by shifting the blame from the end users who get duped to the people who designed, maintained, and approved the email infrastructure, or even the email culture, the same fear factor exists, and can be potentially unearthed as a possible root cause of the problem:

Q1. Why are people failing phishing tests?

A1. They click on email links too fast.

Q2. Why do they click on email links too fast?

A2. They have too many emails to deal with and other work to do as well.

Q3. Why do they have too many emails to deal with?

A3. Most communication is still done by email.

Q4. Why is most communication still being done by email?

A4. Because that’s how we’ve always done it.

Q5. Why is this still how we’ve always done it?

The answer to question 5 could go a number of ways. It could reveal a reluctance amongst staff or management to change to a new system. Or maybe it’s budget issues. Or time issues. Or leadership issues. Or the consensus that there’s no time available for retraining. Or maybe there’s no interest from senior management about making such a seemingly costly change. Whichever one (or more) of these points emerges as the reason for adhering to an overloaded email culture, at the base of it is fear: the fear of making the change, of initiating the change, or even understanding the change.

Make It Tangible

Whereas fight-or-flight fear is of a high-energy, adrenaline-based variety, much of the fear we live with is like mold. Fear and mold both like dark, damp places. Your brain is, in terms of its physical structure, a dark and damp place. The five-why analysis works so well because it is an exercise in making ideas and contributing facts tangible. Tangibility is a powerful antidote to fear. It is bleach, dryness, and light. Not everything needs to be framed in just five “why?” questions, but every problem needs to be brought out into the open and placed on a dry, tangible surface like a whiteboard, easel paper, or computer screen.

When thoughts and ideas are placed on a physical surface, (including braille and voice-to-text for the visually impaired), your mind gets a chance to vet them once again – to take them in afresh, and this allows for further processing and creative thought to happen.

Any time there is a worry or crisis that is creating fear, it helps to lay out all of the items, facts, and potential actions on a surface. Don’t worry about what order they are in. Dispense with that fear of linear thinking described in Chapter 10. Get the issues and the what-ifs up there on a tangible surface to dissolve analysis paralysis and replace it with actionable items.

If other people need to be brought in, involve them in this brainstorming action too, whether they are in the same room or virtual, the positive effect is the same.

When trying to explain difficult concepts to people who may not be subject matter experts in your field, consider presenting issues in more visual formats. Most people will relate to a line chart or pie chart much more readily than a table of numbers. They will be more receptive when they feel they are neither being talked down to, nor over their heads, and everyone relates better to stories and case studies than theory.

Making problems, facts, and possible solutions tangible on a writing surface gives people something to hold on to intellectually and emotionally. The restaurant menu calendar technique described in Chapter 10 is an example of a tangible tool that helps others understand and even appreciate your availability and non-availability, especially when they can perceive it visually.

Mountains Have More Than One Face

When people fear something, they will seek to avoid encountering it, which leads to procrastination, direct avoidance, pushback, even sabotage. I have mentioned numerous times throughout this book that the best antidote to fear is facts – giving people the knowledge to balance out and then exceed the weight of fear.

But fear can make people blind to everything except the situation immediately in front of them. This, too, might be as a result of the fight-or-flight-based need to escape immediate danger, but it can also substantially delay or threaten its resolution.

Part of successful change management, and therefore of fear management, is to re-instill a sense of continuity that in turn delivers better perspective. This can be done by giving people an awareness that there is another side to this mountain and there is a road beyond. It may require that you set out the steps, the plan, or simply the perspective – to help them move toward this future, but giving them the factual awareness of other, better events that exist beyond the immediate threat helps put that threat into perspective, ideally bringing it down to a manageable size.

As an example, a manager who is dreading having a difficult conversation with an employee may procrastinate on the appointment because the fear of an uncontrollable or unpredictable situation is overwhelming. It looms like a dark shadow for days or even weeks, affecting mood, focus, and productivity along the way. In addition to the techniques described in this book already about the conversation itself, it will be helpful for the manager and the employee to remember that this meeting is finite. It will be over in thirty minutes or maybe an hour. There are other things to get done that day. There is more “day” to follow. There needs to be a higher-level perspective over the difficult task itself and its place in the day, in order to free the mind of its paralysis.

A simple and relatively mild example of this that I like to share with anyone who needs to hear it is the parable of the person who sought out advice from a mentor on whether to return to school to complete a degree that had been put on hold for family obligations. “It’s three more years of study to complete this degree,” the person says, “and I’m already 47. What should I do?” to which the mentor asked in reply, “well, how old will you be in three years if you don’t take this degree?”

I like that story because the fear, though mild, threatens the person’s opportunities for advancement due to a self-imposed stigma of age. The mentor’s perspective, from the other side of the mountain, provides the necessary facts that neutralize the fear and deliver a balanced perspective.

The Job Insecurity Paradox

A real estate agent and a travel agent are standing in the “12 items or less” line at a supermarket. Next to them, where the other express line used to be, there is now a large scanning machine, resembling the ones you send your carry-on luggage, shoes, and laptops through at the airport: a conveyor belt on the bottom, and a tunnel through which all items must pass before emerging on the other side. ⁶

This supermarket scanner does not use x-rays. It uses lasers, weigh scales, and photo-recognition technology to identify every item placed on its belt, removing the need to scan barcodes, and speeding up the checkout process.

The estate agent and the pharmacist regard this new machine with scorn, sharing a few words about how it’s just more jobs being taken away. The supermarket employee who oversees the machine, helping customers with their questions, and occasionally unjamming the conveyor, just smiles.

As an employee of the supermarket, the cashier is taking micro-courses in coding and diagnostics to work as the conveyor’s “mechanic,” and is also taking free courses online after work to be able to seek out better work in the software field.

Some may see this scenario as looking through rose colored glasses, assuming that coding and other high-tech jobs are only available to those who can spare the time and the money to take full-time education. But that’s where digital transformation comes full circle, in that the courses required to learn these skills are now much more available online, often for free, to be taken as and when possible. Plus the relevance of these courses to the immediate situation (“how do I help code a grocery scanner?”) make the learning actually stick. Furthermore, the company that provides the scanners to the supermarket, embracing the as-a-service philosophy would likely also be open to training and maintaining supermarket staff as part of the vendor–customer relationship.

The threats and opportunities posed by advancing digital technologies apply to a wide spectrum of the workforce, as the authors of a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article⁷ point out. They observed the type of value jobholders delivered to end customers (either retail or internal) and the skills they used to deliver it, and then identified four paths of evolution for jobs: disruption, displacement, deconstruction, and durability.

Certain manual professions like plumbing and electrical work seem somewhat less endangered by digital transformation since the value of the work is based both in motor skills, abstract thinking (problem assessment and solving), and a good amount of experience. These are classified as durable . However, these jobs too benefit from a range of digital transformation innovations, including online invoicing and AR- or VR-enhanced visualizations of their designs or fixes.

Real estate agents and travel agents, among others, are seeing much of their current work being moved into the same bracket as telephone operators and toll takers. They indeed have become displaced , requiring modifications and upgrades to their skillsets. These skillsets will involve becoming more of a trusted advisor – assisting clients in their house-buying or travel plans, through knowledge and wisdom gained from experience.

The cashier in the supermarket who now oversees the scanner is an example of someone whose first job was a victim of disruption , in that the skill delivered to the customer (cashing out the groceries) still exists but has been disrupted by technology. But this job can also be seen as an example of deconstruction , in which “the core skill set remains safe, even while the current form of its delivery is threatened.” The cashier still exists to assist shoppers in paying for their groceries, but this is now done by overseeing and maintaining the scanner. The machine requires at least two employees to oversee it – one to watch the machine, and the other to watch for shoplifters and to help customers who may be having trouble with the machine. And added to these two is an area manager who oversees this entire checkout process. So, in sum, three jobs where there used to be one.

These types of studies, along with the examples delivered throughout this book, show how much of the danger to an individual’s long-term career prospects has its roots in simple change resistance. Many will turn their backs on change and the opportunities it brings, out of fear and resentment.

Stubbornly holding on to the past tends to alienate the professional even further from employment opportunities. I am reminded of the vocal and extremely counterproductive reactions that were displayed the world over by professional taxicab drivers, who took to the streets and slowed traffic in urban centers all over the world to protest the existence of decentralized ridesharing programs like Uber and Lyft.

It is easy to understand the fear they feel about seeing their jobs taken away by new technology, but the knee-jerk reaction to flood the streets with their cars, further snarling traffic and annoying their customer base, is an example of the sabotage end of the change resistance continuum. It would have been better for a taxicab company to seek to outdo Uber and Lyft with its own cloud-based form of customer-responsive travel, or for the cab drivers themselves to consider joining a crowd-sourced transportation company.

The authors of the Sloan-MIT study leave us with a final message that suggests that “understanding core skills and value form as the key units of analysis will help jobholders of all types respond to workforce changes.”⁹

Not only will jobs change, but the way they are delivered will change too. Understanding this key fact is a vital survival skill for individuals and companies alike.