Prior to Steve Baker’s exit from the Conservative party MPs roster in the UK’s July election, he was asked by a reporter about his plans post-politics. His immediate response was a desire to pursue skydiving, motorcycling, and quick-paced catamaran sailing. However, there was an additional project in his mind. Baker planned to offer businesses guidance to bypass the harmful effects of groupthink.
In partnership with Paul Dolan, a behavioural science professor from the London School of Economics, Baker launched a consultancy known as The Provocation People. Their objective is to encourage useful intra-company disagreements. The venture’s core ethos is depicted by the alliance of Baker, an adamant critic of the EU, and Dolan, who leans towards the UK remaining in the EU, yet hasn’t yet cast a vote for the Tories.
As the former Royal Air Force engineer explained, they have been met with puzzlement by their friends. Despite perceived opposites, their shared libertarian tendencies brought them together to express their mutual scepticism about Covid lockdowns. This sparked their collaboration on a newspaper piece denouncing the concept of vaccine passports.
Groupthink, pinpointed as the cause of numerous corporate catastrophes, such as the Volkswagen emissions scandal to Swissair’s failure and Lehman Brothers’ downfall, has been scrutinised for more than five decades. With his groupthink theory, the late American research psychologist Irving Janis sought to comprehend how intelligent groups can make severely misguided choices. Janis’ research, intended to understand international policy errors like the US’s unexpected Pearl Harbour and flawed Bay of Pigs invasions, has proven useful in the business sector. The theory shed light on the detrimental effects of consensus, going beyond military and touching corporate entities as well.
“[Does participation in Citizens’ Assemblies actually empower the common people or merely foster more progressive collective consensus? Opens in new window]
Indeed, numerous corporate meltdowns have been attributed to the issue, ranging from Volkswagen’s dieselgate debacle to Swissair’s downfall in Switzerland and the Lehman Brothers bank crash. Nevertheless, collective consensus continues to endure. The likes of Baker and Dolan are just the most recent additions in the plethora of consultants who haven’t managed to solve this puzzle yet.
Several contributing factors to this are well established. Enhanced decision-making processes can consume precious time that individuals simply do not have and managing a team of people with uniform beliefs is typically found to be easier. I imagine some leaders would rather not have their personal views questioned by a high degree of intellectual diversity. This belief of mine was buoyed by a recent conversation with a head of a business with numerous employees, who stated that he ensured senior management were aware that he was open to changing his stance if they suggested a more promising proposition than the one he had been advocating.
There remain numerous motivations to strive towards rectifying the issue of groupthink, as evident in the work Shocks, Crises and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk by Paul Swartz and Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, the economists. The past few years have witnessed various red herrings, such as unfounded fears that Covid was going to trigger a fresh depression or the presumption that new digital economy front-runners like Zoom would facilitate disproportionate increases in productivity.
Businesses who took these theories to heart stood to risk jeopardy, which is why the authors champion “economic eclecticism”, or a mentality free from any singular theory or viewpoint that insists upon a unique solution to risk evaluation.
In view of this, I queried Baker about the potential type of collective consensus he believed his Conservative Party was falling prey to as they battled with yet another leadership contest following their catastrophic electoral defeat.
“Impatience”, he responded, asserting that seeking immediate solutions to intricate, deep-rooted socio-economic issues underlined the fiasco of Liz Truss’s fleeting leadership.
Could Dolan and he be victims of their own groupthink? Upon contemplation, Baker admitted the possibility that they are both gripped by an erroneous conviction that many individuals need to escape the shackles of groupthink.
“It is possible that there exist businesses that have masterfully aced adversarial collaboration”, he stated, “I have witnessed little proof though.” – The Financial Times Limited 2024 copyright.”
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