Standing on stage in front of a captive audience, a technology icon pulled a new device out of his pocket. It was so much smaller than competing products that no one in the room could believe his eyes. The founder’s flair for theatrical product launches wasn’t the only source of his fame. He was known for his singular creative vision, a passion for blending science and art, an obsession with design and quality, and a deep disdain for market research. “We give people products they do not even know they want,” he remarked after introducing a revolutionary gadget that helped to popularize the selfie.
The man urged people to think different. He led his company to greatness and redefined multiple industries, only to be unceremoniously forced out by his own board of directors, and then watch the empire he created start to crumble before his eyes.
As much as this story seems to describe Steve Jobs, the visionary was actually one of Jobs’s heroes: Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Today, Land is best remembered for inventing the instant camera, which gave rise to an entire generation of amateur photographers—and enabled Ansel Adams to take his famous landscape photographs, Andy Warhol to make his celebrity portraits, and NASA astronauts to capture the sun. But Land was responsible for something bigger: the polarizing light filter that’s still used in billions of products, from sunglasses and digital watches to pocket calculators and 3-D movie glasses. He also played a vital role in conceiving and designing the U-2 spy plane for President Dwight Eisenhower, which changed the course of the Cold War. In total, Land amassed 535 patents, more than any American before him other than Thomas Edison. In 1985, just a few months before getting kicked out of Apple, Steve Jobs shared his admiration for Land, “one of the great inventors of our time. . . . The man is a national treasure.”
Land may have been a great original, but he failed to instill those attributes in his company’s culture. In an ironic twist, Polaroid was one of the companies that pioneered the digital camera, yet ultimately went bankrupt because of it. As early as 1981, the company was making major strides in electronic imaging. By the end of the decade, Polaroid’s digital sensors could capture quadruple the resolution of competitors’ products. A high-quality prototype of a digital camera was ready in 1992, but the electronic-imaging team could not convince their colleagues to launch it until 1996. Despite earning awards for technical excellence, Polaroid’s product floundered, as by then more than forty competitors had released their own digital cameras.
Polaroid fell due to a faulty assumption. Within the company, there was widespread agreement that customers would always want hard copies of pictures, and key decision makers failed to question this assumption. It was a classic case of groupthink—the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent. Groupthink is the enemy of originality; people feel pressured to conform to the dominant, default views instead of championing diversity of thought.
In a famous analysis, Yale psychologist Irving Janis identified groupthink as the culprit behind numerous American foreign-policy disasters, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War. According to Janis, groupthink occurs when people “are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group,” and their “strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”
Before the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles wrote a memo opposing the idea of sending Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro, but was dismissed for being fatalistic. A number of President John F. Kennedy’s advisers, in fact, had reservations about the invasion: Some were silenced by group members, and others chose not to speak up. In the meeting on the final decision, only a lone rebel voiced opposition. The president called for a straw poll, a majority voted in favor of the proposal, and the conversation quickly shifted to tactical decisions about its execution.
Janis argued that members of the Kennedy administration were concerned about “being too harsh” and destroying the “cozy, ‘we-feeling’ atmosphere.” Insiders who were present at the discussions shared the view that it was this sort of cohesion that promoted groupthink. As Bill Moyers, who handled correspondence between Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, recalls:
Men who handled national security affairs became too close, too personally fond of each other. They tended to conduct the affairs of state as if they were a gentlemen’s club. . . . If you are very close . . . you are less inclined, in a debating sense, to drive your opponent to the wall and you very often permit a viewpoint to be expressed and to go unchallenged except in a peripheral way.
When a group becomes that cohesive, it develops a strong culture—people share the same values and norms, and believe in them intensely. And there’s a fine line between having a strong culture and operating like a cult.
For nearly half a century, leaders, policymakers, and journalists have accepted the Janis theory of groupthink: Cohesion is dangerous, and strong cultures are deadly. To solve problems and make wise decisions, groups need original ideas and dissenting views, so we need to make sure that their members don’t get too chummy. Had Kennedy’s advisers not been so tight-knit, they could have welcomed minority opinions, prevented groupthink, and avoided the Bay of Pigs disaster altogether.
There’s just one tiny problem with the cohesion theory: It isn’t true.
When Janis completed his analysis in 1973, it was too early for him to have access to classified documents and memoirs concerning the Bay of Pigs incident. These critical sources of information reveal that the key decision was not made by one small, cohesive group. Richard Neustadt, a political scientist and presidential adviser, explained that Kennedy held “a series of ad hoc meetings with a small but shifting set of top advisers.” Subsequent studies have also demonstrated that cohesion takes time to develop: A group without stable membership has no opportunity to form a sense of closeness and camaraderie. University of Toronto researcher Glen Whyte points out that in the year after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy led a cohesive group of mostly the same advisers to an effective resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. We now know that the consensus to launch the Cuban invasion “was not the result of a desire to maintain the group’s cohesiveness or esprit de corps,” explains Stanford psychologist Roderick Kramer.
Cohesion doesn’t cause groupthink anywhere else, either. There was another fatal flaw in Janis’s analysis: He studied mostly cohesive groups making bad choices. How do we know that it was actually cohesion—and not the fact that they all ate cereal for breakfast or wore shoes with laces—that drove dysfunctional decisions? To draw an accurate conclusion about cohesion, he needed to compare bad and good decisions, and then determine whether cohesive groups were more likely to fall victim to groupthink.
When researchers examined successful and failed strategic decisions in top management teams at seven Fortune 500 companies, they discovered that cohesive groups weren’t more likely to seek agreement and dismiss divergent opinions. In fact, in many cases, cohesive groups tended to make better business decisions. The same was true in politics. In a comprehensive review, researchers Sally Riggs Fuller and Ray Aldag write, “There is no empirical support. . . . Cohesiveness, supposedly the critical trigger in the groupthink phenomenon, has simply not been found to play a consistent role.” They observe that “the benefits of group cohesion” include “enhanced communication,” and members of cohesive groups “are likely to be secure enough in their roles to challenge one another.” After carefully combing through the data, Whyte concludes that “cohesiveness should be deleted from the groupthink model.”
~~Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World -by- Adam Grant
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