Posts Tagged ‘GroupThink’

Pros and cons of Consensus

Posted: June 24, 2011 in Ethical decision-making
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1876 cover of Robert's Rules of Order , a book...

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Factories paying below-living-wage conditions and with poor working conditions don’t spontaneously appear; someone decides to establish them and disregard what kind of lives their workers will have to lead.

As a defender of worker engagement and of tripartite labour relations, I find consensus decision-making naturally appealing. Certainly whenever the workers or even a third party gets a say, the result is just about always better than if they don’t.

So, why doesn’t everyone do this? Are there costs of trying to please everybody? What are they?

The collaborators who have produced the Wikipedia page on Consensus decision-making have done a great job at explaining its purpose, benefits, drawbacks and alternatives (as one would hope, since Wikipedia is itself consensus-based!)

Consensus differs most strongly from hierarchy, or top-down decision-making. It also differs from parliamentary procedure (or in the USA, Robert’s Rules of Order) which are designed to obtain majority support for proposals. Consensus decision-making strives to avoid having ‘losing’ stakeholders. You might say it places the continued functioning of the forum or organisation above any single decision-making outcome.

Practically speaking consensus rules may not require absolute unanimity but simple supermajority to avoid situations like the UN Security Council where five historically powerful nations retain unfettered use of a veto.

The main problems of the consensus approach identified by the Wiki editors are:

  • Preservation of the status quo through inaction gives one side of debate a built-in advantage.
  • “Squeaky wheels”: The most difficult stakeholders are carefully attended to while the most agreeable are ignored. This rewards people for disagreeing and might incline them to do so out of simple self-interest, bogging down the process.
  • Abilene paradox: To reach a solution everyone agrees with, the group may end up adopting a position no individual member desired.

So consensus is not a panacea but you be the judge, it might still be a better approach than unfettered managerial prerogative. Ask the people who work in and run co-operatives what they think.

“The form doesn’t have a box for fair labor conditions”

Posted: June 10, 2011 in Responsible business
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D'Iberville, MS, November 24, 2005 -- A FE...

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The whole sustainability / fair trade issue would be so different if it were a question that has to be addressed. Instead it often has to be shoehorned in to the agenda.

Imagine if this weren’t the case. A couple of weeks ago I moved house and our electricity supplier offered 100% renewable energy as an option; all I had to do was tick a box. Too easy.

The word for this problem is schemas. We all have schemas. When you get presented with the same problem over and over, you start to take mental short cuts. You ‘know what to expect’ so you don’t give it your complete attention. Driving a car is a clear example, but we can have schemas for more abstract matters, such as a familiar-sounding customer enquiry.

Schemas are fine for many situations. The requirements of driving a car don’t change from year to year. However the business world is dynamic and evolving and there is always going to be emergent information which will be missed by a person who is following a mental script.

Worse, the pressure to produce measurably better results means that you don’t get paid to think of considerations other than what is right before you. Especially considerations that might add costs, like the work conditions under which goods are made, and whether the people who make them can afford to live on what they are paid.

It’s even worse when the process is all mapped out for you in procedures and flowcharts and, yes, tick-a-box forms.

(I think that goes beyond ethics – organisations that do not or can not respond to change have a strategy problem and are headed for an eventual crisis)

What to do about it? For one thing, ‘outsiders’ are more likely to see flaws in an organisation’s approach. Either ask for outside advice or, if you are in a position to influence hiring decisions, ensure employees come from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds and don’t share identical outlooks.

At the very least lobby for a metaphorical “Any other comments?” field! - for the option to add unexpected information. How many meetings have you attended lately that still have General Business or Open Forum as an agenda item? Event organisers don’t like them – they are hard to plan around, don’t seem to have a purpose and you never know if some nutter might hijack the microphone. However you never know what good ideas were never raised because there “wasn’t time”.

Related posts:

When the team gets it wrong – Part 2

Posted: March 4, 2011 in Ethical decision-making
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In an earlier post I talked about ‘GroupThink’, the phenomemon in which teams make bad decisions when they value cohesiveness and ‘not rocking the boat’ too highly and fail to fully explore the options available.

It’s relevant to many of the labour rights problems reported on this site as they are usually known about but brushed aside at boardroom level, be it at a sourcing company or the direct employer. This is not because executives have horns growing out of their heads, it’s because they do not wish to question what everyone else seems to be going along with.

The people who eventually speak up and pressure those boards to make better decisions are usually outsiders like NGOs or journalists, which is much harder than doing so from the inside.

It is so much easier if good decision-making processes are established from the beginning.

Here are seven easy steps to prevent GroupThink arising in groups, as recommended by Irving Janis.

Also, it’s the end of the week so, if you have another couple of minutes, here’s a video of GroupThink definitely NOT happening! -

When the team gets it wrong

Posted: February 18, 2011 in Ethical decision-making
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Ethical failings in the corporate world are nothing new. Labour rights abuses by suppliers are one small part of a firmanent of corporate misdeeds. Financial fraud. Short-cuts on product safety. Price fixing. Environmental disregard. Onshore labour rights shortfalls. The public hears about these things when they go horribly wrong, but they bubble away in the background constantly.

More often than not, problems are known to more than one person in a company. They are caused not by anti-heroic behaviour but by group behaviour.

Earlier we looked at diffusion of responsibility. Another phenomenon is GroupThink. It’s defined on Wikipedia as:

a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimise conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analysing and evaluating ideas.

It is one of two negative consequences of group cohesion (the other is group polarisation, that is the tendency for groups to adopt more extreme positions than their individual members would).

Groupthink has been a factor in some astonishingly bad military decisions including the Vietnam and second Iraq wars.

Group coherence / team-mindedness is highly valued in organisations as it produces tangible results. Reports get done on time, sales figures improve, meetings run smoothly. No one is concerned as to whether it’s possible to get carried away with group cohesion (“or at least, no one worth speaking of” -Douglas Adams) until it causes a major problems. Even then the group may not recognise their own behaviour as the cause.

The good news is, the risk of GroupThink arising in an organisation can be mitigated. This in turn reduces the likelihood of decisions being made too rashly and without due consideration of the effects they will have on people outside the room.

Irving Janis, who coined the expression, says that there are two antecedent causes: (1) a provocative situational context and (2) structural faults in the organisation. Not much can be done to avoid the first, but the second can be remedied.

Janis considers the major structural problems as:

  • Insulation
  • Lack of a tradition of impartial leadership
  • Lack of norms requiring methodological procedures
  • Homogeneity of members’ social background / ideology

Another psychologist Clark McCauley devised a similar list, except he uses the term ’directive leadership’ in place of points two and three.

Picture: Dana Ellyn, danaellyn.com

So this is the unlikely place for a heroic employee to maintain high standards of ethics: by subtly questioning accepted wisdom.

For a person with a responsibility for hiring, this is one reason to find new employees with differing backgrounds.

For a person with managerial responsibility, the key is to find means of encouraging dissenting viewpoints to be heard without fear of retribution or isolation. One method is to always appoint a “Devil’s Advocate” in decision making, whose job it is to explore contrarian views (and to make sure the role gets rotated).

For an individual inside an organisation, the key is to be constructively deviant, to put forward alternate interpretations or suggestions in a manner that is clearly intended to be helpful and not merely as a smart-alec.