Healthy Skepticism Library item: 799

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Goldstein N.
Important Leadership Lessons from Outer Space Exploration
Inside Influence Report 2005 Feb

Full text:

In trying to understand how these disasters came about, consider the following exchange between a Columbia disaster investigator and the chairwoman of the mission management team:

Investigator: “As a manager, how do you seek out dissenting opinions?”

Chairwoman: “Well, when I hear about them…”

Investigator: “By their very nature you may not have heard about them…what techniques do you use to get them?”

The chairwoman didn’t have an answer (Langewiesche, 2003, p. 82).

In the case of the Columbia, managers ignored requests from lower-level staff to ask the Department of Defense to use its spy satellites to photograph potentially damaged areas of the shuttle, and in the case of the Challenger, managers ignored warnings from the engineers that the cold weather on the day of the launch might caused the O-rings to fail. What factors can lead to such poor decision-making?

Examining real world decision-making failures such as Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, social psychologist Irving Janis (1972, 1983) developed a theory for how groups come to make poor decisions, known as groupthink. Groupthink is a kind of group thinking style in which there is a greater need among members of the group to get along and agree with one another than to seek out and critically assess alternative viewpoints and ideas. Groupthink has many antecedent factors, including a desire for group cohesiveness, isolation from outside influences, and directive leaders who make their opinions known-factors that are present at various levels of management in many businesses. These factors often lead to a perceived pressure from others to conform to the leader’s viewpoint, a perceived need to self-censor opposing views and keep the leaders shielded from such views, perceptions that members completely agree with one another, and perceptions of those outside the group as inferior. The end result is a defective discussion and decision-making process, often characterized by an incomplete survey of alternative ideas, a biased information search process, and failure to assess the risks of the alternative favored by the group’s leaders (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2005).

What kinds of steps can we take to avoid such inferior decision-making? Group decision-making can be improved by promoting criticism and skepticism of all viewpoints, especially the leading viewpoint favored by the group’s leaders. If it is possible, the group should be asked for their thoughts before the leader makes it known which position he or she favors. Importantly, even after a decision has been made, the group should reconvene to discuss any doubts they may still have about the decision. Further, it is important to bring in outside experts, who will be less biased in their assessments of ideas.

Unfortunately, we can’t change the outcomes of colossal decision-making failures and national tragedies that have already occurred. But we can learn from them.