Professor Charles Handy, famous management guru and philosopher, has just died, aged 92:
- He was an HR and organisation specialist, on a par with Peter Drucker
- He first rose within Shell and later founded the London Business School
- His first book, ‘Understanding Organizations‘, was published in 1976 and is now regarded as a classic
- Thumbing through its pages only the other day, I chanced on the following boxed clip about group-think by American psychologist, Professor Irving Janis
- This is a concern whenever a group of people, formal committees of ‘experts’ in particular, meet to understand important issues and then seek ways and means to resolve them
- A consensus view of experts can emerge, backed up by data deemed to be ‘the best we’ve got’, only for other heavyweight experts to express doubt on their conclusions, even contradict them, accusing them of falling into the many traps of group-think
- Such issues as ‘Climate Change’ and the ‘Productivity Puzzle’ said to be afflicting G7 nations come to mind
- Hence you may find some of Janis’s following views interesting
Group-Think:
- “How could we have been so stupid?” asked President John F Kennedy, after he and a group of close advisers had blundered into the Bay of Pigs invasion.
- Stupidity was certainly not the explanation.
- The group who made the decision was one of the greatest collections of intellectual talent in the history of American government.
- Irving Janis described the blunder as a result of ‘group-think’.
- Group-think occurs when too high a price is placed on the harmony and morale of the group, so that loyalty to the group’s previous policies, or to the groups’s consensus, overrides the conscience of each member.
- ‘Concurrence-seeking’ drives out the realistic appraisal of alternatives.
- No bickering or conflict is allowed to spoil the cosy ‘we-feeling’ of the group.
- Thus it is that even the cleverest, most high-minded and well-intentioned of people can get a blind spot.
- Janis identifies eight symptoms:
- Invulnerability – Cohesive groups become over-optimistic and can take extraordinary risks without realising the dangers, mainly because there is no discordant voice.
- Rationale – Cohesive groups are quick to find rationalisations to explain away evidence that does not fit their policies.
- Morality – There is a tendency to be blind to the moral or ethical implications of a policy – ‘How could so many good men be wicked?’ is the feeling.
- Stereotypes – Victims of group-think quickly get into the habit of stereotyping their enemies or other people and do not notice discordant evidence.
- Pressure – If anyone starts to voice doubts the group exerts subtle pressure to keep him quiet – he is allowed to express doubts but not to press them.
- Self-censorship – Members of the group are careful not to discuss their feelings or their doubts outside the group, in order not to disturb the group cosiness.
- Unanimity – Unanimity is important so, once a decision has been reached, any divergent views are carefully screened out in people’s minds.
- Mindguards – Victims of group-think set themselves up as bodyguards to the decision – ‘He needs all the support we can give him’ – the doctrine of collective responsibility is invoked to stifle dissent outside the group.
- The result of group-think is that the group looks at too few alternatives, is insensitive to the risks in its favourite strategy, finds it hard to rethink a strategy that is failing and becomes very selective in the sort of facts it sees and asks for.
- Group-think is unfortunately most rife at the top and centre of organisations where the need for ‘keeping things close’ seems more important.
- Such groups must actively encourage self-criticism, the search for more alternatives, the introduction of outside ideas and evaluation wherever possible, and a positive response to conflicting evidence.
- One way of avoiding group-think in the boardroom is the growing use of non-executive directors, for small groups can get too cohesive to be effective.
- President Kennedy learnt his lesson.
- The Cuban Missile Crisis was handled differently, with a more diffuse group, more outside ideas, more testing of alternatives and more sensitivity to conflicting data.
-
P.S.
- Following is the classic example of group-think – as described by ‘coreknowledge.com’
Geocentric v Heliocentric theories?
- Whether all the planets and the Sun revolved around Earth or Earth revolved around the Sun became a heated controversy during the Renaissance.
- Until the 1500s, the most influential theory on the movement of the planets was that of Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer who lived in the 100s AD.
- He claimed that Earth was stationary and at the centre of the Universe, and that all the planets and the stars revolved around it.
- This view was generally accepted by Christians because it put Earth, God’s “greatest creation,” at the centre of the universe, which was considered unmoving and perfect, and also because it seemed to accurately describe what we see in the skies every day – when the Sun “rises” and “sets” each day, it certainly seems like the Sun is moving and Earth is standing still.
- Even before astronomical telescopes were invented, Nicolaus Copernicus used mathematics to try to prove or disprove the Ptolemaic theory.
- Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, could not prove the truth of Ptolemy’s theory.
- In fact, Copernicus argued that the geocentric theory (which held that Earth was at the centre) was actually less likely than the heliocentric theory (which held that the Sun was at the centre).
- At the request of Pope Clement VII, he published his findings in 1543, but his book raised little controversy.
- Some 50 years after Copernicus published his findings, in 1609, the Italian inventor Galileo heard about a telescope that had been invented in the Netherlands.
- Galileo built a telescope of his own and began to study the heavens.
- He quickly made a series of important discoveries.
- He discovered that the surface of the moon was not flat but pockmarked with craters.
- He also observed that there were many more stars in the sky than could be seen with the naked eye.
- Finally, he observed several of the moons of Jupiter and noticed that these moons appeared to be orbiting Jupiter.
- If that were true, then it must mean that not everything in the universe was going around Earth.
- Eventually, Galileo came to the same conclusion as Copernicus – the Sun, not Earth, was at the centre of the Universe.
- In 1632, Galileo published a book in support of the heliocentric theory.
- Copernicus had previously written in support of the heliocentric theory, but he had been moderate in his claims.
- Galileo was bolder.
- Although his book was written in the form of a dialogue, in which each speaker gets a chance to state his case, he gave the strongest arguments to the spokesman for the heliocentric views, and he put some of the then-Pope’s own views into the mouth of the book’s most rigid geocentric believer.
- Also, his book appeared at a time when Europe was involved in religious wars between Protestants and Catholics.
- At this time, the Catholic Church was very sensitive to any questioning of its authority, having been stung by the questioning of Luther and other Protestants.
- For all of these reasons, Galileo’s book created an uproar among other scholars and the Church’s hierarchy for questioning both the ancients’ view of the world and, seemingly, the Church’s teachings.
- Galileo insisted his ideas were not necessarily in conflict with religious truth.
- He said his work investigated “how the heavens go,” whereas the Church taught “how to go to heaven.”
- He was summoned before the Inquisition, a Roman Catholic court organised to detect and defeat heretical ideas, and told to recant his views or be punished.
- He chose to recant.
- Supposedly, as he left the court after having recanted, Galileo murmured to himself, “But Earth does move.”