The last decade has seen a new interest in a phenomenon which was last heard of some 50 years ago – with a short article by Irving Janis in 1971 paving the way for a full length book Victims of Groupthink (1972) which looked at such escapades as the Bay of Pigs to explore how leadership groups come to a consensus which labels any dissenter as a hostile voice.
Janis refined his analysis in 1991 with an analysis of the Challenger disaster And this was taken up in 1997 by Beyond Groupthink – political group dynamics and foreign policy-making (t’Hart et al)
Janis
studied a number of historical fiascoes
in American foreign policy, notably the lack of preparedness for the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), the escalation of the war in
Korea (1950), the failed U.S.-sponsored landing of anti-Castro rebels
in the Bay of Pigs (1961), and the escalation of U.S. involvement in
the war in Vietnam under President Johnson (1964–68). Each of these
episodes went badly: the policymakers did not achieve their major
goals, massive violence and many casualties resulted, and the
government suffered a serious loss of domestic and international
prestige.
Based on his detailed investigation of these episodes, Janis suggested that in each of them, the major decisions that shaped the course of events were reached after insufficient and unsystematic thinking and discussion. To bring this out more clearly, he contrasted them with two cases of policy success where policies had been developed in a more rigorous process (the making of the 1947 Marshall plan and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis). Specifically, Janis argued that in each of the failure cases, the decision-making process had been distorted by what he called groupthink: a tendency toward premature and extreme concurrence-seeking within a cohesive policy-making group under stress.
But it’s the last decade which has seen a development of the concept – with some 4 key publications, starting with The Silo Effect Gillian Tett (2015) who can be seen in this presentation, initially about the global financial crisis. Mastering silos is a constant battle, because the world around us is
constantly changing, pulling us in two directions. We need specialist, expert
teams to function in a complex world. But we also need to have a joined-up,
flexible vision of life. Mastering silos requires us to walk a narrow line
between these two contradictory goals. It is hard.
So how do we deal with this challenge? One place to start is to recognize
that silos exist and to think clearly about their effects. And I believe that a discipline that can help us to frame the analysis and debate is anthropology. This is not a field that normally springs to mind when people think about silos. On the contrary, when people have written about silos, they have usually done so by drawing on two bodies of research: management consultants, who offer advice on how institutions can organize themselves better; or psychologists, who study how our minds work. However, silos are fundamentally a cultural phenomenon. ey arise because social groups and organizations have particular conventions about how to classify the world.
Sometimes these classification systems are explicitly defined. New York’s
City Hall has official, formal structures that stipulate how each department
and team is organized and sits in relation to each other, in a hierarchy.
However, the conventions that we use to classify the world are often not
officially defined or spelled out. Instead, they arise out of a dense set of rules, traditions, and conventions that we have absorbed from our surroundings, often in an unthinking way. Many of the really important patterns we use to classify the world, in other words, are inherited from our culture. ey exist at the borders of conscious thought and instinct. ey seem natural to us, in the same way our culture appears “normal.” So much so, that we rarely even notice them at all, or even think about the fact that we have formal and informal classification systems that shape how we respond to the world.
But it was the US/UK Iraq War which brought home to most people the dangers of Groupthink – with an Independent Commission asked by Gordon Brown in 2009 to explore the lessons of the disaster, Lord Chilcot produced no less than 12 volumesof some 3,200 pages, reporting in 2016. This is its Executive Summary – at
150 pages.Learning from the Chilcot ReportPiers Robinson(2017) is a good
detailed analysis of the report.Hardly surprisingly, the UK Ministry of Defence – one of the perpetrators of the disaster, was keen to learn lessons and duly produced in 2017 TheGoodOperationRebel Ideas – the power of diverse thinking Matthew Syd (2019) makes an important point
We need to think of human performance not from the standpoint of the individual but from the standpoint of the group. From this more rounded perspective, we’ll see that diversity is the critical ingredient driving what we might term collective intelligence.
There are, of course, many types of diversity. Differences in gender, race, age and religion are sometimes classified under the heading ‘demographic diversity’ (or ‘identity diversity’). We will be focusing not upon demographic diversity, but cognitive diversity. That’s to say, differences in perspective, insights, experiences and thinking styles.
There is often (but not always) an overlap between these two concepts. People from different backgrounds, with different experiences, often think about problems in different ways. We will analyse the precise relationship later in the book.
Cognitive diversity was not so important a few hundred years ago, because the problems we faced tended to be linear, or simple, or separable, or all three. A physicist who can accurately predict the position of the moon doesn’t need a different opinion to help her do her job. She is already bang on the money. Any other opinion is false. This goes back to our common-sense intuition. Thinking differently is a distraction. With complex problems, however, this logic flips. Groups that contain diverse views have a huge, often decisive, advantage.
The final book worth mentioning is Groupthink – a study in self-delusion by Chris Booker (2020) which is a bit of a right-wing knockabout.
