Medina was also among those who early on, noticed indicators that COVID-19 was going to be a major disruptor. In this age of rampant disinformation, she tells us that the power of social media can also work to our advantage, if we know where to look. Being able to identify what information is important can mean the difference between being ahead of the news, or just following it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: You started writing about this pandemic in January. It was on your radar early. Tell us why it pinged and how you've been sorting through all the information that's coming at you.
Medina: I did start paying attention to the pandemic in January. In fact, I remember on January 16th being at a conference in Minneapolis and there were attendees there from Seattle and I actually had the thought, “Seattle is going to be one of the first places this virus lands in the US,” and I was a little nervous.
The Cipher Brief: What was your source for the information that concerned you back then?
Medina: My main way of getting information right now is through social media. Twitter is probably my primary mechanism, and I follow an extremely wide range of people. I don't think the traditional news media is really going to be ahead of stories. They tend to follow stories, and it's important to pay attention to what I like to think of as the stubble that comes across social media, those very early indicators of something going on.
So, as soon as China closed down Wuhan, I was like ‘whoa’, because the Chinese Communist Party is all about economic growth and prosperity for its people and I had a hard time understanding why the Chinese government would close down a city the size of Chicago. I actually had the benefit of having been to Wuhan, so I could visualize what that was. What came into play was one of my primary heuristic devices for understanding what's going on in the world and that's that actions reveal intentions and motivations.
Carmen Medina, Former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence
Oftentimes we don't know why a particular actor is doing something, but you can often work backwards from the action to determine the intentions or motivations. For the Chinese Communist Party to close down a major city like that told me they were really scared of this virus.
The Cipher Brief: You get most of your news from Twitter, and Twitter is like a megaphone given to everyone with an opinion – not expertise - and it's so easy in this age of disinformation to manipulate people. How do you sort through the noise and make sure that you're not spending a lot of time analyzing or thinking through things that may not even be true? Where do you start?
Medina: Yes, there's a lot of disinformation, but noise in itself is valuable. So, sometimes I can get a clue as to what might be going on by what people don't say or by outlandish things that people say. I can think of examples in terms of the pandemic in January. There was a lot of crazy reporting from places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, and also from people purporting to be citizens of China, residents of Wuhan telling us what was going on.
I spent a lot of time looking at that and making my own judgments about whether or not I thought it was real. But the fact that there was this much churn going on, particularly in a society like China that prides itself on controlling the flow of information and what its citizens say, that was another indicator to me that whatever was going on was extremely serious.
There were all sorts of interesting rumors going around about whether Xi had been seen in the last two weeks and what particular leaders were on the outs because they handled it badly and all of that played into how I was thinking about the seriousness of the virus. I remember I ordered N95 masks, the hardware kind, in mid-February. That's how convinced I was that this was going to be really serious. But false information has its own quality and you can infer things from the volume and nature of false information as well.
The Cipher Brief: So, Twitter isn't really the end of your thinking process, it's just the beginning.
Medina: Right.
The Cipher Brief: You’ve written before in The Cipher Brief about ways of thinking through things that help us understand information better. You’ve written about confirmation bias and cognitive traps. What are some of the most common cognitive traps and how do we know when we're falling into them?
Medina: Sadly, most of us don't know when we're falling into our cognitive traps. Let me frame that discussion by talking about how we use information to make decisions. First, we have information and we try to gather as much of that as we can to frame our problem. But I don't know of any problem where we have complete information, and there's always this area of uncertainty, and that's where our biases play a huge role.
If we don't think in a disciplined way about uncertainty, then our biases, our ideology, our values will just lead us to assume what we want that uncertainty to become based on our values. I think the US has really suffered from that in terms of its response to this pandemic. We wanted economic growth. We were very critical of what China was doing to lock down its population. We didn't want that, and so, our confirmation bias was that there won't be a disease significant enough that will make us lockdown our economy or lockdown our people.
Because that was our bias, we've been very slow to move away from it, in my opinion. I think we have to be much smarter about dealing with uncertainty when we look at situations and unpack that uncertainty as objectively as we can so that we can avoid confirmation bias.
The Cipher Brief: I think we see a lot of what you have just described playing out in the politics of the day as well and it's important to be able to identify that information. You do write in The Cipher Brief, though, that worst case scenarios are always considered unlikely.
Medina: Absolutely.
The Cipher Brief: Why is that, and how did that impact the way the US responded when COVID-19 was becoming a real thing?
Medina: That was a huge cognitive bias, and this is something that I experienced as an analyst and a manager of analysis at the CIA. When you told someone there might be a bad outcome, we tended to say that this is the worst-case scenario. What we did not realize is that the policy maker, and in fact I think the average human being, tends to equate worst case with unlikely.
We have an optimistic bias about our own lives –– bad things are not going to happen to me –– and we have an optimistic bias about our own countries. If you're a policy maker, you have an optimistic bias about the decisions and policies that you're pursuing, so when you hear this worst-case scenario, you dismiss it as unlikely.
This is not my idea, but I got this from a colleague who told me that he completely stopped using the phrase “worst-case scenario,” and now he only talks about the most dangerous scenario, which is, I think, a better turn of phrase to get people to think about it more seriously. Worst case is dismissed because we tend to assume that it won't happen to us, we're too smart a policymaker to fall into that trap, and yet the worst case does happen.
It's kind of an ironic thing that, really, what government is for, is to deal with low-probability, high-impact events, but what we've learned through this crisis is that most governments are pretty bad at that. And this makes me think about all the scenario planning that was done to get ready for the pandemic. We've been worrying about this pandemic or the possibility of a virus like this for 30 years because AIDS in a way was a very serious pandemic.
So, there's been a lot of gaming done to prepare governments and public health agencies for how to respond. Gaming and scenarios are ways of creating boundaries around uncertainty. But what I've learned from people who were involved in these games is that, for example, they didn't know of a single game where the average American citizen was a player.
Carmen Medina, Former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence
Everybody just assumes that the elites are going to be driving the decision-making and nobody tried to imagine how the average citizen would react to the pandemic. That was a huge mistake. I also understand that scenarios and simulations didn't do a very good job of thinking about the economic impact. It's one thing to say that you're going to lock down a country for four weeks, but if you don't think what that means to real people and economic activity, you're really not considering a scenario to the fullest extent.
The Cipher Brief: Decision-making shouldn't just sit with people you elect. It has to start with your own ability to make decisions and sometimes, we're so overwhelmed by information that we can fall into decision paralysis. How do you work through those situations?
Medina: Well, the first thing you need to be clear about when you're trying to make a decision is what kind of problem you're dealing with. There's a tool that I've used my entire career called the Cynefin framework that I find really useful in determining what kind of problem I’m dealing with. What I find stunning is that so many people aren't familiar with the Cynefin framework.
Basically, what it posits is that there are four kinds of problems you can face. It can be an obvious or a simple one. Or it can be complicated. It can also be complex or chaotic. If you have a simple or complicated problem, then getting on top of all the information is going to provide you eventually with the right answer.
But oftentimes, the problems that are really difficult that policymakers and CEOs earn their salaries to solve, are the complex and chaotic ones. And the complex and chaotic ones are not bounded by information. The cause and effect in a complex or chaotic problem is not linear in nature. There are all sorts of externalities that are very difficult for you to even become aware of and those are the ones we're relying too much on; information can actually lead you to make a wrong decision. In a complex situation, it’s better for you to test lots of small options and then learn and grow and solidify around the option that's working the best rather than starting off at the beginning, convinced that you know what you're going to do.
Another thing I would say about information paralysis and decision-making is that any decision is better than no decision. I know that's an extreme statement, but if you have a competent organization with a competent staff, and this is particularly true if you have a complex situation, beginning to take some steps lubricates the process. You start getting feedback and you get better as you go along.
That's actually what's happened with the pandemic. We've gotten better at treating it, for example, as we've gone along, but if you, in an organization, make no decision, if you're the CEO and you have information paralysis, then you create hardening of the arteries. The staff doesn't know what to do, the organization makes no adjustments and then you're really in a problematic situation.
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