A team of U.S. soldiers fixing local infrastructure in rural Afghanistan identified a water source for a village that was a hike for women who were the primary water carriers. So the team drilled a well closer to the village thinking that would lead to reduced time and effort to get the water, and extra time to do other chores. Seemed logical to the male soldiers. That was how they would have felt about lugging water to the village.

Surprise! The women didn’t think that way. Turns out that fetching water from the distant water source gave them opportunity to get away from the village, and men. It gave them time to talk among themselves, share news of family and friends, and to reinforce and sustain friendships that were critical in uncertain times that have been the status quo in rural Afghanistan for decades. This is just an example of a slew of disconnects that occurred as our counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan played out. Much of this disconnect can be traced back to the impact of our social and cultural bias on our behaviors, and on how we confront and solve problems or face future uncertainty.

To understand better the difficulty of trying to debug our biases, it is important to look at how we think and solve problems that confront us. From early days as humans, our brains have built mental schemas, or “models” that manage the vast amount and range of information we daily take in about people, events and interactions. All that information would overwhelm us unless our minds had built a shorthand way of contending with the flood of data. Models are built and reinforced by our thinking process and experience growing up and living as adults in familiar environments and interacting with the same folks every day. These models guide how we think and act, and influence which information is kept and discarded.

Over time, humans have become efficient, or perhaps lazy, thinkers — you decide. But no matter the label, if we face circumstances, problems or others different from ourselves, our minds do their best to cram that information through these existing mental models. In a way, our minds are “wired” to approach life experiences just as if they were the same as those we grew up with and continue to experience.

When it comes to the unfamiliar, these models may not serve us well, impeding engagement of difference critical to helping individuals and communities to overcome adversity. In a crisis, the last thing you want is tradition and “how we have always done things” to be the only guide to figuring out how to survive, let alone grow stronger. Think of diversity as a Swiss army knife with every kind of blade or implement one would need in the wilderness. Or at home trying to detach a wire from an electrical outlet while your spouse decides that the crisis isn’t a loss of power, but the fact that in 5 seconds, you will be fried beyond crisp. Your spouse wants a second opinion from one who didn’t get a D in high school physics. Somewhere in that muddle of uncertainty, tool or perspective, or both, will confront and resolve the crisis, or someone will end up zapped by a surge of current.

Let’s be clear. Our mental models come from years of socialization from family and friends, neighbors, schoolmates, church, athletic teams and other communities. If you are alive and breathing, chances are your models have played an important role in that longevity, especially if life continues to serve up similar problems or situations already solved or reconciled in the past. But what makes these models “models” is their resistance to change. Comfort lies in the predictability of the familiar. For most of our waking days, that reliance on our models, whether conscious or not, gets us from waking up to finally falling asleep 16 hours later.

Enter a crisis of a social or cultural complexity: an Ebola virus in West Africa or an opioid crisis in a host of U.S. communities that have different triggers but little concern for class, status, ethnicity, gender, age or where one lives — urban, rural or in between. There are commonalities of the epidemic that apply across the country. But each community must also look for unique triggers and populations affected, as well as engaging across those same populations and others for effective responses. We have to be able to manage the impact of our models when searching for answers from a diversity of sources, approaches and pathways. If we want a full spectrum of options to solve a problem, especially one that involves different experience, triggers and pathways, we must turn down the comfort gain on our models. We have to think differently, or be prepared to walk around with singed eyebrows.

That is the next topic of this column — thinking differently.

Robert Greene Sands is an anthropologist and CEO of the nonprofit Pamlico Rose Institute for Sustainable Communities located in Washington.