Sometimes people have taken Ecstacy and become quite hot. This is not extraordinary but sometimes they have also suffered a dysfunction of their bodily feedback so they can’t sense when they’re too cold or had too much water. This is a fairly small proportion of all ecstacy users but it has happened. And they have had tap-water by the gallon. Since tap-water has a lower salt content than existing fluids in the body, this causes swelling of tissue. This is fine when it’s your arm or something but guess how much space your brain has to swell? Yes: None! So these people have had pressure on their brain build up and supress their breathing so they die.
We normally attribute this to ecstacy and you aren’t well placed to complain about this; you took a bunch of MDMA and your body malfunctioned… How is that that not in line with projections? But technically these people died from tap-water poisoning. So we can’t say that tap-water is 100% safe, merely 99,9999% safe. Nothing is 100% safe. So can we find a handful of examples of people suffering severe allergic reactions to a Covid-19 vaccine? Sure we can. Vaccines aren’t approved if there are 0 side-effects, merely if the expected side-effects are eclipsed by the positive effects. So finding a handful of examples of Y where we see negative outcomes, we can’t assume that Y is bad. We can’t assume Y is good either, we actually have to use our brains a bit and think farther than the reach of our nose.
So what is groupthink? I would define it as a phenomenon where a group agrees on an idea and see this idea as integral to what they’re doing and reject contradicting evidence. And I can cite several instances of this not working out so well:
Sometimes planes crash and lots of people die.
Sometimes a bridge collapses and some people die.
Sometimes an organization tries to switch to new software for medical use and it doesn’t go so well.
But as established earlier, we can’t extrapolate from those situations and conclude that groupthink as a whole is bad. So is groupthink good? Well, I don’t think that’s entirely correct but it’s kind of complicated.
Most organizations in the world foster groupthink, but using different words:
You need to be a team player. Some people are just poindexters who try to make a mountain out of a mole-hill. We all have to pull things in the same direction!
And this isn’t entirely wrong. Show me the company that has persisted for decades without underscoring how people need to be team players or that has people in authority highlighting issues as blockers that need to be fixed before things can progress! Organizations effectively rely on groupthink as a steamroller that smooths out bumps in the road.
Now for an aside: the Challenger accident. If you weren’t around at the time, the Challenger was a space shuttle used by the US in the 80’s and it exploded during launch, killing all aboard. It wasn’t great… The issue came from something as weird as an O-ring used to make sure the many segments of a solid rocket booster didn’t leak. With the solid rocket boosters containing – yes, you got it – solid rocket fuel this task of maintaining a seal was kind of important. The contractor Morton-Thiokol said to NASA before the launch:
Hey, these O-rings don’t handle freezing temperatures too well and these boosters have gone through some sub-zero temperatures. We should dismantle the boosters and replace the O-rings.
NASA said that if the contractor insisted on scrubbing the launch, NASA wouldn’t do business with them again. Morton-Thiokol withdrew their complaint, the shuttle took off and a handful of people died. Now, why would you spend so much money of safety and quality control and then threaten contractors who raise safety-concerns with losing NASA as a customer? Surely you could just not spend all that money on quality to begin with, right? But I wonder how many other contractors brought similar concerns to NASA, NASA told them to withdraw their objections or lose NASA as a customer and then nothing bad happened? It’s all well and good to imagine how this one instance of incompetence was the only problem, but these were senior managers in NASA. They were not promoted by accident. It’s a bit naive to think that they operated this way behind the organization’s back in one out-of-character moment.
Okey, so where are we? Well, we can find some clear examples where groupthink has been pretty terrible but we’ve also seen that groupthink isn’t some insidious force that worms its way into organizations to bring them down, rather organizations foster groupthink in the pretty sensible pursuit of team-work. So can we foster team-work without going over into groupthink? I don’t think that’s realistic for most situations. Most organizations want some measure of groupthink as a battering ram to get rid of obstacles. They don’t want things to get out of hand to where the group ignores reality and the organization suffers a massive debacle that costs them hundreds of millions of dollars, but they do want some groupthink… And I think this is a bigger problem than people recognize: it’s not clear ahead of time when an organization is thundering ahead in spite of small issues and when they are ignoring reality as a whole. It might sound straight forward to separate those two things but look back in time and show me where people have some Oracle-level precognition when there is trouble afoot.
My recommendation would be that if you do things that aren’t life-critical, you should just try to achieve whatever is expected of you. If you mess up, chalk it up to $100 million learning experience and move on. If you do things that are life-critical: err on the side of caution. Because if you mess up, you would be lucky to continue operating as an organization after that. But this is in my view an intractable problem. Like how we accept that computational complexity O(n)=n² is not going to scale well. We realize that isn’t some problem to be solved as is. We recognize that rather than somehow make O(n)=n² fine and dandy, we need to figure out how to do the same task with O(n)=log(n) (well, hopefully). So where does promoting team-work veer over into groupthink and where does groupthink veer into “we’re about to fail massively but we’re just going to ignore that”? There are no clear answers, no fixed tests. No neat questionnaires that you can have people fill out to tell you if you about to have a big problem. You kind of have to play with fire and figuring out when things have gone too far is hard.
But as it stands the Region of Västra-Götaland is treating the Millennium failure as “oops, all berries” which doesn’t bode well if they are going to right that ship. Blaming civil servants for engaging in groupthink in a staggering manner and trying to pass all blame of on them is not convincing.