Dr. Emrick's Publications
We have all lived the unlucky moment: the call freezes when the CEO joins,
coffee lands on a white shirt before the big pitch, traffic stalls on the way
to an interview. People nod and say, "Murphy's Law." Yet much of what
we label "irony" grows from regular features of attention, memory,
and control. When pressure rises, a mind trying not to think of a mistake often
drifts toward it, and a memory system that highlights peaks and endings turns a
single wobble into the headline. Leaders can use this machinery to redesign
work and soften the sting of "of course it happened today." Three
forces tend to converge right when the stakes are high. First, a heavy
cognitive load makes mental control brittle. Second, a dip in perceived control
pushes people to connect dots that do not belong together. Third, memory tends
to favor intense moments and finales, while downplaying the quiet middle.
Together, these produce the feeling of cosmic timing when a plain stumble
happens in a bright spotlight. Start with control of thought. Psychologist
Daniel Wegner described a two-part system: an intentional process that tries to
keep an unwanted thought away and a background monitor that scans for the very
thing you hope to avoid. Under tight deadlines, split attention, and large
audiences, the monitor grows louder as the intentional process weakens. The
result is the opposite of your goal. Telling yourself, "Do not miss step
three," or telling a team, "Do not mess this up," pulls
attention toward the potential error. Research across decades shows not only a
later rebound of suppressed thoughts, but immediate amplification when mental
load increases. The same conditions that define high-stakes work are the ones
that make ironic slips more likely.
Perceived control layers on top. When people
feel less in control, they try to regain footing by spotting order in noise.
Experiments have shown that a brief loss of control makes participants more
likely to "see" images in visual static, infer hidden plots in data,
and link unrelated events. In office life, a few minor hassles can lower
perceived control and prime the mind to join separate events into a chain. A
printer jam before the board meeting and challenging questions from investors
later that day begin to look connected, even when they are not. The pairing
feels like irony; in truth, it is a story built to restore a sense of mastery. Memory
then finishes the job. We recall what is vivid and quick to retrieve. That one
mic failure in front of 500 people becomes the mental yardstick for "how
often this happens," while scores of smooth talks fade. Our summaries of
long episodes add a powerful bias: the peak–end rule. When we look back, we
weigh the most intense moment and the ending far more than the middle. A
months-long project that mostly went well, but ended in a frantic release, will
be remembered as frantic. Manage the finale, manage the memory. A tilt toward
negative information further loads the scales. One visible miss earns more
rehearsal and retelling than ten quiet wins that preceded it.
Statistics add yet another layer. People
expect a handful of big moments to behave like a long-run average. Focus only
on launches, board meetings, and live demos, and you will see clusters of bad
breaks that feel suspicious. In large possibility spaces, coincidences and
clumps are common. Many episodes of "terrible timing" are not
messages from the universe; they are how randomness looks when we sample only
headline events. Counterfactual thinking sharpens the sting. After outcomes,
the mind easily generates "what if" alternatives. Near-misses,
"one more rehearsal would have done it," create a painful contrast
that makes the timing feel targeted. Counterfactuals help experts learn, but
they also inflate the feeling that misfortune chose the one moment that
mattered. So is irony real, or is memory playing tricks? In daily leadership,
most "irony" is the seam where control threats, heavy load, and
memory shortcuts meet. The feeling is real; the story can shift. Anticipate
these forces, and you can both reduce actual errors and change how they are
remembered.
A short playbook helps. Design for load, not
for hope. Treat peak pressure as a cognitive-load issue. Replace "do not
forget" with checklists that put the following action in the world rather
than in working memory. For live moments, assign roles that partition
attention, including a designated person who can call a pause without stigma, engineer
endings on purpose. Close sprints and launches with a brief, steady ritual that
consolidates wins and ties up loose ends; over time, endings reshape team
memory and risk appetite. Restore grounded control after setbacks. Use
structured debriefs to separate signal from noise, identify controllable
elements, and select one to three near-term levers. Widen the sample your team
remembers. Keep a light log of uneventful successes, clean releases, calm
client calls, and review it monthly to counter the availability pull of one
loud failure. Add a simple gratitude cadence. Not saccharine, just regular
notes of specific positive episodes and their causes to dilute selective
rehearsal of negatives. Aim counterfactuals at systems, not selves. Ask, "What
is the smallest change that would have prevented this?" and turn that
answer into a pre-commitment or checklist step.
Together, these moves lower the numerator, factual
errors under load, and change the denominator, which gets rehearsed and retold.
People will still feel the sting when something goes sideways on the one day it
mattered most. They will also recover faster, because they can name the
pattern, fix the process, and move on without myths about cursed projects or
unlucky people. That is how evidence-minded leaders turn the drama of bad
timing into steadier timing.
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