Oversteering
Yesterday, while I was on holiday in Istria, Croatia, a man suddenly collapsed in the restaurant where we were having dinner.
He lost consciousness twice. During the second collapse he was completely unconscious. Within seconds, people around him began to panic. His partner immediately reached for a glass of water. She was convinced that the heat was to blame and that he simply had not been drinking enough. In her mind, the explanation was already settled. He was dehydrated, and the obvious solution was to make him drink.
I stopped her.
An unconscious person cannot safely swallow. Trying to force water into someone in that state can cause them to choke and block their airway. In trying to solve what she believed was the problem, she was on the verge of creating a far more dangerous one.
Not because a man had fainted.
But because of what almost happened afterwards.
What struck me was not that she wanted to help. Of course she did. It was how quickly she had moved from observation to certainty. She no longer saw an unconscious man whose condition was unknown. She saw someone suffering from dehydration, and every action that followed flowed naturally from that conclusion.
She may have been right.
Or she may have been completely wrong. Perhaps it was dehydration. Perhaps it was a heart rhythm problem. Perhaps his blood pressure had suddenly collapsed. Perhaps it was something else entirely.
None of us knew.
But certainty had arrived long before understanding.
I think that is where oversteering begins.
We often imagine that our mistakes come from acting too quickly. I am no longer sure that this is true.
I think they often begin a moment earlier, when we become convinced that we already know what is happening.
Once we have settled on an explanation, we stop responding to reality itself. We begin responding to our own interpretation of reality.
The closest analogy is probably driving.
Anyone who has watched dashcam videos has seen it countless times. A driver loses traction, the car begins to slide, and for a brief moment the situation is unstable but still recoverable. Then panic takes over. The steering wheel is turned sharply in the opposite direction. The tyres suddenly grip again, the car shoots across the road, and what could have been a small skid turns into a serious collision.
The crash is often not caused by the first movement.
It is caused by the overcorrection.
Life is full of the same pattern.
A child struggles at school, and suddenly everyone wants to intervene. More pressure. More tutoring. More punishment. More therapy. Every adult feels compelled to act before anyone has properly understood what the problem actually is.
A relationship goes through a difficult period, and one partner insists on having the conversation that is supposed to solve everything in a single evening.
A client misses one appointment, and the institution begins escalating its response until the person disappears completely.
In every case, the original problem may have been serious.
But it was not necessarily fatal.
What turns difficulty into disaster is often our inability to tolerate uncertainty.
We want an explanation.
And once we have one, we want to correct it immediately.
We become so determined to compensate for what we think went wrong yesterday that we create a new problem today.
That is oversteering.
It is not simply reacting too strongly.
It is becoming so confident in our diagnosis that we rush towards a solution before we have earned the right to be certain.
Restraint is much harder than intervention.
Doing less often requires more judgement than doing more.
Sometimes wisdom does not consist in finding the perfect solution. Sometimes it consists in preventing the situation from becoming worse while we are still trying to understand it.
With the man in the restaurant, the priorities were remarkably simple. Lay him down. Make sure he is breathing. Call an ambulance. Give him space.
Do not force water into an unconscious man.
None of these actions are dramatic.
None of them make us feel like heroes.
But they keep the situation manageable.
I increasingly suspect that this principle extends far beyond first aid.
Whether we are raising children, helping clients, leading organisations or navigating our own lives, our first responsibility is often not to solve everything.
It is to avoid creating a second problem while dealing with the first.
There is a powerful temptation to believe that decisive action is the same thing as good judgement.
It is not.
Sometimes the wisest response is almost invisible.
It is the discipline to pause.
To observe.
To admit that we do not yet know.
To resist the urge to wrench the steering wheel simply because doing something feels better than waiting.
Life will always confront us with unexpected obstacles.
The challenge is not to pretend that nothing has gone wrong.
The challenge is to keep the situation steerable.
Because once we oversteer, we may no longer be dealing with the original problem.
We may be dealing with the wreckage of our own reaction.