On Being Lost

Have you ever been lost in the bush? It’s an interesting experience. And the longer you are lost, especially in a really remote place, the higher the stress becomes. What would you do in that situation?

It turns out you and I are pretty predictable. Dr. Robert J. Koester wrote a book called ‘Lost Person Behaviour’. Over years of research, he found that it’s pretty easy to predict what people will do. So much so that there is now predictive search and rescue software that more often than not points to exactly where the lost person will be.

Interestingly, lost people rarely, if ever, look back. And they move faster and faster. So, we don’t know where we are going, but we rush to get there and rarely stop to work out how to back track if needed. People start off walking a short way into the bush to look at something and are found miles from where they started. Turns out we get more and more committed to the path ahead of us, and keep updating the story we are telling ourselves, so we feel we are making logical and sensible decisions.

A similar pattern emerges when we have put effort, finances, time or other investment into something and it becomes apparent that it’s not going to work out how we hoped. We tend to keep pursuing the project even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we should pull out. It happens when pilots push in through bad weather, investors hold a clearly declining stock, a project team sticks with a project long after it’s lost, and an investigator misses evidence because they are locked into their original theory.

Bottom line is it’s hard for people to change their mind even when changing it is the most sensible thing to do. Have you ever trapped yourself like that, or seen people do it? I’d love to hear some of your examples.

Next week, we’ll look at some ways to counter this very human problem.