Last year I got on a hotel elevator in Toronto with three men: a staff member and two others. I hesitated before getting on but thought better of it. There was a staff member. It was a nice hotel. But I did something that should have clued me in. I hit the button for the wrong floor.

The staff member got off on the fifth floor. I had 14 more to go. The doors closed. I felt the large man behind me grab my backpack. “Why are you wearing this cockblock?”

I did what every woman does in that situation. I made myself small. I tried to ignore him. 8 more floors. He persisted. “What’s in there?” The doors opened. His friend dragged him off. I went to the wrong floor, walked down the stairs to my room and cried. I got lucky. But the clues were there. I hesitated. I had a “feeling.” I pushed the button for the wrong floor. Why?

Fear is not a gut feeling. Fear is your brain delivering critical information derived from countless cues that have added up to one conclusion. Stop. Get out. Run.

But sometimes fear isn’t life or death. Often, it’s code smell. It’s a bad feeling before a deploy. There are endless dark alleys in our codebases. This talk will explore fear, instinct and denial. We’ll focus on our two brains — what Daniel Kahneman describes as System 1 and System 2. And we’ll look at how we can start to view “feelings” as pre-incident indicators.