PROTECT DUTY
Emerging from his personal review of both the Manchester Arena Inquiry and the Dame Louise Casey review into the UEFA cup final in 2021, Nick Aldworth concluded that decision-makers would have benefited from critical friendship.
IN NEED OF A CRITICAL FRIEND I
’ve often wondered what history would look like if each failure we human beings have been responsible for had been approached differently. What if Captain Smith had slowed the Titanic, just a little bit? What if the gates at Parliament had been closed on 22 March 2017? Many of us carry enormous levels of risk in our day-to-day jobs, so how great would it be to have a trusted voice helping you on that journey, a metaphorical sat-nav suggesting alternative, possibly improved, routes. This is the heart of what critical friendship provides. Like sat-navs, critical friends don’t judge you if you don’t listen to them, and they remain independent of your decisionmaking, or the route you take.
A critical friend can be defined as: “a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.” DECISION MAKING DILEMMAS Dynamic decision-making can be challenging, often because of multiple, sometimes conflicting, pressures. It’s why thinking about problems before they arise, and developing resilient and stress-tested contingency plans, is so important.
Structure, policies, and procedures, take pressure off dynamic decision making, and sometimes negate the need for it at all. However, the reality that emerges from our thinking, is often very different to what we had intended, or considered to be possible. In his novel about the Vietnam war, Tim O’Brien’s character refers to this by saying ‘everything was such a damned nice idea, when it was an idea.’ Critical friendship works best in this ‘development’ stage of decisionmaking, when we have time to get things right, but it is becoming more widely used in dynamic decisionmaking. It is not uncommon to now have a lawyer present in national security operations, E
ISSUE 51 | COUNTER TERROR BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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