By Daniel Haight, President of Darkhorse Emergency
In the fall of 1983, Cold War tensions were at their peak. On September 1st, a Korean Airlines passenger flight strayed into Soviet airspace. The Soviets believed it was a spy plane and shot it down, killing everyone on board. One of the
passengers was a US congressman from Georgia, Larry McDonald, noted for his strong anti-communist views.
I liked Daniel Haight's comments about the events of 1983. In my Military Intelligence class, the students often pick the Able Archer 83 incident for a case study. There, the Russians and their minions in the GDR suffered from “ideology perception” (relates to “confirmation bias”), which refers to how the Russians and GDR, by looking at reality through their communist ideological prism, took what they heard and, more specifically, what they observed about the exercise; because of this, they either chose not to undertake any reality-check actions (or did not have the mechanism to do so) and assumed the worst. Leaders in the fire service can suffer from confirmation bias, too, in their decision-making, especially in strategic planning. Focusing on the belief that "everyone loves the firemen", for example, may lead districts to think all is well and every bond issue or lid lift will automatically be approved by the voters so revenue shortfalls will never occur, a dangerous assumption
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