Imagining grim stories to reduce redundant deliberation in critical incident decision-making

Redundant deliberation is a cognitively demanding form of inertia in which a decision-maker fails to gain any additional advantage by thinking about a problem compared to the risk of failing to act and deal with the problem. It most commonly occurs where there is no standard operating procedure (to help provide guidance) or where experience is lacking. This article argues that training interventions, including ‘grim storytelling’, must focus on supporting decision-makers’ ability to imagine rare, high-impact events, and construct ‘least–worst’ scenarios to help them anticipate, prevent, mitigate, adapt to and recover from such threats.