Have you ever found yourself sitting in a project planning meeting where everyone around the table is discussing completion dates they know can't be met, yet no one ever says so? Or have you ever spent hours trying to work out some technical aspect of a design, even though you know another aspect of the design has a serious flaw that isn't being addressed? Unfortunately, these surreal experiences are familiar to most engineers, and they take place more often than many of us would like to admit.
How does this happen? How do engineers, who pride ourselves on our rationality and individualism, get caught up in a collective denial of reality? Most importantly, how do we live up to our professional responsibility to speak out?
Groupthink is a concept that was introduced by William H. Whyte in a 1952 Fortune magazine article and later developed by the psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970s and 1980s. It refers to the tendency to suspend independent critical thinking in favor of group consensus. The result is poor decision making.
The loss of the space shuttle Challenger and the lives of its crew, and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew 17 years later, are often given as examples of engineering groupthink. More recently, the stubborn insistence by the truck and engine manufacturer Navistar that its diesel emission reduction strategy would eventually work, despite evidence to the contrary, cost that company hundreds of millions of dollars and cost more than 700 people their jobs.
In all of these examples, it's probably fair to say the denial of reality was more on the part of managers than engineers. But why weren't engineers successful in winning their managers over to the side of reality?
The insidious thing about groupthink is that it builds on some of the best aspects of our character, including our ability to work together toward common goals and our unwillingness to give up in the face of a challenge. Despite the stereotype of engineers as solitary misanthropes, teamwork is central to the engineering profession. Engineers often have deep loyalty to their teammates. This is a good thing, but loyalty should never mean self-censorship of criticism. Engineers also often have a tendency to believe they can solve any problem with hard work and ingenuity. This can sometimes lead to ever-increasing expenditures of effort toward a difficult task without questioning the value of the task itself.
The first rule in Dale Carnegie's well-known book How to Win Friends and Influence People is "Don't criticize, condemn, or complain." It's certainly true that negativity rarely leads to popularity, but it can sometimes play an important role in making good decisions.
During my senior design project in engineering school, one of my classmates distinguished herself by criticizing nearly every group decision and constantly complaining about the hopeless state of our project. Needless to say, the rest of the group found this behavior annoying. As the semester progressed, however, I realized that it was important to take her criticisms seriously. If they were wrong, explaining why they were wrong increased our own understanding. If they were right, they helped keep us from going in the wrong direction.
Of course, I'm not suggesting it's good to be a chronic complainer, but such people shouldn't always be written off. Engineers should not let the fear of being perceived as negative, stepping out of line, standing alone, or even being wrong override their professional judgment. As Richard Feynman pointed out in his appendix to the Challenger report, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Keep that in mind the next time a project leader asks you for a positive piece of information to help him sell a project to his managers.
IT certainly can be a fatal problem if all of the group agrees that some incorrect choice is the correct one. This was a very big problem in some companies where the senior members decisions were never challenged. It is also a problem in companies where the person in charge will challenge the skills of all who offer alternative ideas.
My method for handling things that don't seem to be correct is to ask for a more detailed explanation, since I don't completely understand how the proposed plan will work. If there is an explanation as a result, the error may become obvious to the one offering the explanation, or, if my understanding was incorrect, it is corrected. The benefit of this approach is that most of the time it does not place the other party in a defensive position, since it is not seen as a challenge.
For those times when unrealistic completion times are chosen, I generally ask about the details of how the required assets and resources will be made available. On many occasions it becomes clear that some aspect of the project has been overlooked and left out. So pointing out the additional efforts required will tend to make the completion time estimates more rational. But sometimes the completion time is not based on reality, but simply on whims of those running the show, in which case rational thinking is useless.
I think some of the responses to this article are becoming "groupthink". There isn't usually just one problem but many. Yes, most of us think we can solve any problem. And maybe some of us can (not just engineering problems). But sometimes we get the question wrong. If there are multiple problems and we identify one, such as groupthink, then we are already on our way to at least partial failure.
Most of the time the "leaders" are simply bureaucrats, or even worse, engineers that have become bureaucrats. Even independent engineers have been conditioned over the years to give in to these leaders for survival. I think it's gotten worse over the years. We need to become the new leaders without becoming part of the problem. That is the next challenge for engineers whether they go into the field or not. I believe we are the best thinkers. And group thinking is not bad as long as you know why and what you are thinking, both the pros and the cons.
I had to attend meetings and participate in group activies that were designed to impress upon us how a group will invariably make better decisions than an individual. Now you're saying that could be wrong?
Next you'll be saying it was a waste when we were forced to read "Who moved my cheese?" and write a report on it (expecting it to be praise for the book and the management that had the foresight to make us read it).
Not to mention the required reading of "Faster, Better, Cheaper" about the Mars Pathfinder mission, where we learned that it was expected to fire 10% of your staff so you could achieve your goals. Although it seemed the next two missions were failures and made the success of the first a statistical fluke...BUT I WAS EXPECTED TO EMBRACE THAT MANTRA!
Golly. Now you're saying I was right all along... :-)
I think one of the issues is that Engineers typically work at solving a single problem rather than developing an entire project. With Navistar, the Engineers were solving each problem as it occurred , rather than looking at the entire project and seeing that it was never going to succeed.
I think that was a smart person. Of course, it takes a lot as a manager to allow people to make mistakes. they can be costly. They will delay the end result. But you are right because they can be turned into a positive.
I've worked at a company where unreasonable deadlines were set knowing that the team would fail with the idea that they would finish faster with an aggressive target that could not be met than with a realistic one that could be met. I left that company. Basically for silly policies like that. I think giving people a reasonable target with a nice pat on the back will get better results.
I think there's a lot to be said for creating a healthy environment that will allow for a little friction while working on projects. Sometimes managment can create groupthink by shutting down those that don't tow the line.
Great article, Dave. I used to know a high-level executive who often said "I like positive people." I suppose that's true of all of us, but in his case, he really meant, "Dont disagree with me." Not surpisingly, his meetings were always filled with positive comments, even when he was clearly wrong.
When troubleshooting, it is necessary to make a lot of mistakes. There are many times that trial and error is all that you have. Some of the smartest people that I know learned from past mistakes to make new designs better.
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