CHAPTER 5
Would You Get on the Bus to Abilene?
WHAT IF WE all decide to get on the bus to Abilene?
That was the odd question that confronted a generation of U.S. Army officers after they sat through a management training video. In the video, a family sits on their porch on a hot summer day. One after another, members of the family say, “I’m bored” and “I’m bored too.” In an effort to stave off the torpor, the family heads to the bus station. They wind up finding seats on a bus to Abilene. When they finally get there, somebody says, “You know, I didn’t really want to go to Abilene.” And then the next person says, “I didn’t want to go; I thought you wanted to go,” and so on around the group. It becomes abundantly clear that no one in the family wanted to go to Abilene.
For the officers who watched it, some forced to endure it several times, the story served as a succinct and memorable warning about group decision making. A group of reasonable people can make a senseless, unreasonable decision. A group can unanimously support a decision that no individual member of the group would have supported alone. A group is not just the addition of all its members’ capabilities; sometimes it represents a division into something less than what a single member could accomplish.
The training video story lingered in those officers’ memories and would pop back into mind any time they saw a group careening toward a bad decision. In fact, they merely had to say the words “I think we’re all getting on the bus to Abilene here” to get their colleagues to slow down.
Now, there is a reason that the gleaming conference tables where very important decisions are made are surrounded by many chairs. The reason is: We believe bigger is better. We have been taught that bigger is better. No one ever told us that the way to solve something is to put fewer people on the case.
But a group suffers from the same limitations that we face as individuals. If an individual tends to focus on a problem and not the solution, a group displays the exact same trait. In fact, the group dynamic can be far worse, as it solidifies a collective focus on a particular aspect of the problem and makes that problem all the more disruptive.
Frederick Brooks memorably warned the computer industry, “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” That reality applies to any aspect of work or life. You don’t find a solution by throwing people at the problem. What you find with more people are more problems.
* * *
WHEN SHE WAS in high school, Katherine Bomkamp spent many hours in places like the waiting area of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. While her father, a disabled veteran, was receiving treatment, Katherine would talk to the injured service members who were waiting nearby for their doctor’s appointments.
She asked them how they were. She wasn’t looking for them to say “fine”; she really wanted to know. She asked them about their injuries, their rehabilitation, what they were going through, what they needed help with. While almost everyone else shied away from asking about their pain, Katherine was direct.
You had to be strong to ask those questions and accept the answers without flinching. The soldiers she met were just back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the injuries they had suffered were often devastating. She was supportive and caring and probably did more good than she could imagine merely by letting the soldiers tell her the truth about their struggles.
It was heartbreaking and touching at the same time. But after hearing the same concern from several soldiers, Katherine wanted to do something more than lend a sympathetic ear. She wondered what she could do that would really make a difference for the soldiers who had lost limbs in the war. These soldiers kept telling her the same thing: One of the most painful, frightening, and disorienting problems they experienced was phantom limb pain. “When they told me their stories, that just kept coming up,” Katherine said.
Our brains are wired to control our limbs. Even when the limb is lost, the brain continues to do its job, sending out signals telling the missing limb what to do. In the jumble of misfired signals, the brain creates very real pain trying to connect with a limb that no longer exists.
The soldiers told her that the doctors’ answer to phantom limb pain was to prescribe pills—powerful antipsychotics and barbiturates. Judging from what the soldiers told her and everything she read about the subject later, it was obvious to Katherine that even if the pills helped with the phantom limb pain, they were causing their own terrible side effects. Antipsychotics left many soldiers impotent and lethargic and dealing with a host of other new issues, while the barbiturates’ main effect on soldiers was to get them hooked on barbiturates.
“These soldiers lost part of their bodies for us,” Katherine said. “And instead of helping them, they were being given pills that just created new problems for them.”
The basic logic of it didn’t make sense to Katherine. A soldier who lost a leg didn’t need a pill that changed the way his brain related to his whole body—he needed a treatment that was targeted to his actual injury.
Katherine wondered how such an important and terrible affliction could be addressed with such a weak response. She thought that there had to be a better solution. A solution that doesn’t hurt more than it helps. Why hadn’t the doctors at Walter Reed and every other military hospital come up with something better? Where were the university researchers? Where were the medical device companies? Where is the know-how of a military with two million soldiers? Why haven’t they thought of something better when the soldiers to whom we owe so much needed science to come through for them? Of course, all these institutions knew a great deal about the problem of phantom limb pain. But inside the problem they didn’t see a solution.
Katherine could not understand why all these giant organizations were failing when it came to this, but she decided she would just have to take phantom limb pain on by herself. She was a high school student with no special knowledge of or interest in science or medicine or orthotics. But she cared about those injured warriors she met, and she believed there was a better answer. And so when her classmates were busying themselves with model volcanoes and hamsters in a maze, Katherine’s project for her high school science fair was treating phantom limb pain.
Katherine’s approach was centered on one key idea: distraction. “If I could somehow interrupt the body’s communication with the missing limb, distract it from the effort to control the limb, then maybe I could make the pain go away,” she thought.
With distraction as the goal, Katherine quickly settled on the power of heat to attract the brain’s attention. She wondered if a heated prosthetic would make the brain focus on responding to the heat instead of sending signals to the absent limb.
She jury-rigged an example with store-bought supplies and briefly tested it with some soldiers she had met at the army hospital. They were thrilled she was trying to help them. She was thrilled when the feedback was positive.
Committed to taking her idea as far as she possibly could, she asked professors at a local college to help her create her own crash course in electrical engineering. And with that, she was off and running trying to build a full prototype of her heated prosthetic.
Armed with working knowledge of how to create a safe and durable heating element, she needed a real prosthetic to work with to see if she could successfully work her insight into the design of an existing device. She found a directory of prosthetic companies and called them one by one. Could they provide her with a leg she could use for testing? Were they interested in working with her? Before she could describe the work she had done, the courses she had taken, her theory, her initial results or any of that, she was met with immediate dismissal. They heard a girl who wasn’t in the industry and wasn’t even out of high school, and they didn’t need to hear any more. “A lot of people hung up on me,” Katherine said. They told her, “This won’t work, you’re just a kid, don’t waste my time.”
When she finally found a company willing to listen, she was on her way. From high school and now into college, Katherine has continued to work on her device. Testing continues to go well, and she has a patent pending. Her current version even allows the user to control the temperature of the prosthetic with a smartphone.
Her work has brought her personal rewards. She started a company to build the device. She was the youngest person ever invited to speak at the Royal Society of Medicine’s Innovations Summit in London. And yes, she won the science fair. And she is grateful for all of it. But more importantly, she’s building a product to help those soldiers she met at Walter Reed.
It stung that so many prosthetic companies immediately wrote her off. But she takes it as a major life lesson that she didn’t listen to them. “When a big company tells you no, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong,” Katherine now tells her fellow students in an entrepreneurship program. “It may mean you’re so right they can’t even see it.”
* * *
WHEN ROBERT REICH became the U.S. Secretary of Labor, he took over a department with seventeen thousand employees, a budget of ten billion dollars, and responsibilities for ensuring workplace safety, providing job training to the underskilled, and enforcing wage and benefit rules and all manner of other workplace laws. As if mastering the sheer size of the place was not daunting enough, there was the political climate to contend with, including no shortage of internal and external challenges to the department’s mission. It was, in short, a difficult assignment. And it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that Reich’s previous job was as a professor, where he spent his time teaching and squirreled away in his office writing studies on the Japanese economy. He came to the office, then, with a lot of theories about the labor market and not a whit of experience running the Labor Department or anything at all, for that matter.
To compensate for the enormity of the task at hand, cabinet secretaries are provided a large personal staff whose entire job is to help the secretary do his job. The first few months were a whirlwind for Reich. He was navigating through his own department, reaching out to major constituencies the department serves, speaking at events across the country, and fighting a seemingly endless battle to win the support of his own president for budget items he considered essential.
In the midst of it all, Reich was struck by the fact that nobody had ever once asked him how he wanted to spend his day, where he wanted to go, with whom he wanted to speak. How exactly, he wondered, did all these speaking engagements and other commitments that filled his day make it onto his daily schedule?
Reich hit the intercom and summoned his assistants. “How do you know what to put on my schedule?” he asked.
They were taken aback. They assumed he knew. But they patiently explained it to him anyway. “We have you do and see what you’d choose if you had time to examine all the options yourself—sifting through all the phone calls, letters, memos, and meeting invitations,” one assistant told him.
His team assumed Reich would immediately see the logic in this. A cabinet secretary can’t very well spend all his time deciding how to spend his time. That would be absurd.
But Reich was still puzzled. How could they possibly know what he would choose to do?
They answered with the perfect Washington insider response, “Don’t worry, we know.”
Reich trusted his team. He believed they all shared his core values and all very much belonged working in the Department of Labor. But he was flabbergasted that his team had built a bubble around him.
“They transmit to me through the bubble only those letters, phone calls, memoranda, people, meetings, and events which they believe someone like me ought to have,” he later recounted. “But if I see and hear only what ‘someone like me’ should see and hear, no original or out-of-the-ordinary thought will ever permeate the bubble. I’ll never be surprised or shocked. I’ll never be forced to rethink or reevaluate anything. I’ll just lumber along, blissfully ignorant of what I really need to see and hear—which are things that don’t merely confirm my preconceptions about the world.”
His team was unimpressed by his concerns. The five guardians of his bubble told him that the bubble protected him from people who would waste his time, harass him, and otherwise serve him no good purpose.
The problem his team was addressing made perfect sense to them. They were guardians of his time, and they intended to ensure that his limited time was focused on the right tasks. But Reich saw the consequences of their plan clearly. If his time was always spent doing things that were pleasing to him, he would never accomplish much of anything or solve anything because he would never get his hands dirty. That attitude, that commitment to see to it that only good things came his way, would be admirable if they were parenting a two-year-old, Reich told them, but they were serving the Department of Labor.
While Katherine Bomkamp had to fend off a group that offered only reflexive rejection of her ideas, Robert Reich faced the opposite issue. His group offered him only reflexive praise. Either way, it was a closed loop that cut off information and shut down the path to potential new answers.
Reich understood he could not offer any real leadership in an echo chamber, so he instituted a new rule.
He told his team that instead of reading only the mail that was complimentary, from now on he wanted to see the “mean, ass-kicking letters” too. He also wanted direct access to Department of Labor employee complaints. He wanted to be informed of bad news in real time and wanted to hold a series of open meetings at which people the department served could ask anything they wanted of him. And he wanted to see business leaders and business organizations on his schedule every week. They would almost certainly tell Reich he was wrong, but he wanted to hear it, and wanted to see if he could change a few minds.
* * *
YOU COME UP the stairs and see a group of eight people milling around in the hallway, waiting. You stand among them for a minute.
The researcher comes through, unlocks the door, and asks everyone to take a seat. There are exactly enough seats for the people in the room. Quickly, the only seat left open to you is the second one from the back.
The researcher explains the task. This is a study of visual perception, he says. Everyone in the group will be looking at the same things and will be responding aloud to all questions.
There will be, the researcher explained, two placards at the front of the room. On the left will be a single line. On the right, three lines, numbered 1, 2, and 3. If the sample line was 8 inches long, the comparison lines on the right might be 6.25, 8, and 6.75 inches. One by one, each person will be asked which of the three lines on the right is the same length as the line on the left.
The researcher then leads your group through an example. It all appears to be very easy.
After the example, the researcher puts up a new set of cards. Each person gives an answer, the researcher writes it down, and the process is repeated until everyone has answered. Each time the person in the first chair answers first, the second chair answers second, and so on, until you, seated in the seventh chair, answer seventh. It’s all very straightforward.
But after three rounds of this, something’s not quite right. It looks like Line 2 matches the line on the left. But the person in the first chair says, “Line one.” He says it crisply, firmly. He’s wrong, obviously, but nobody seems to notice. No one glares at him. The researcher doesn’t even react.
And then the person in the second chair says, “Line one.” Again, no one flinches.
Without hesitation, the third person says, “Line one.” And the fourth. And the fifth. And the sixth.
And now it’s your turn. It’s Line 2 that’s the same length. Isn’t it? But why did everybody else say Line 1? Is it some kind of illusion? Are you looking at this from a funny angle? Or maybe they are? Is it your eyes? Are they seeing more clearly than you? They all said Line 1. They couldn’t all be wrong? Right?
You pause. You smile that uncomfortable, “I don’t know what to do” smile. You hold your face in your hand for a moment. You look around. You furrow your brow. Is there an answer you’re missing? Do you say what you think or what everybody else thinks? Are they going to be annoyed at you if you give a different answer? Is the researcher going to think you are the only one who can’t do this right? Are you ruining the study?
And then, like three out of four people put in this exact situation, you sputter out: “Line one.” You intentionally pick the wrong answer. You pick it because everybody else did. You refused what you saw in favor of what everybody said they saw.
And that is exactly what Solomon Asch wanted to know when he designed the study.1 Would you state “a simple and clear matter of fact?” Or would you conform to the rest of the group and actually choose to be wrong?
What you didn’t know was that everyone else in the group was told to give the same wrong answer. It was not a matter of perception or angles or eyesight. They were intentionally giving the wrong answer to see what you would do.
Asch built his study around a simple, definitive fact to underscore the scope of group conformity’s power. Not only would we falter against a group’s questionable opinions or arguably wrong assertions; we are stymied by a group united behind a demonstrably wrong basic fact.
That three out of four subjects in Asch’s study gave in at least once to the group’s wrong answer is illuminating. Just as striking are the comments Asch’s subjects made when he asked them what was going through their minds as they gave wrong answers.
Many expressed pure deference to the group. “They must have been objectively correct if eight out of nine disagreed with me,” one told Asch.
Others thought that the group was clearly wrong, but they lacked the confidence in themselves to stand firm. “I was sure they were wrong but not sure I was right,” one subject said. Another said, “Either these guys were crazy or I was—I hadn’t made up my mind which.”
One of the most startling responses suggested that the subject thought the rest of the group was being tricked; he was disappointed in himself for not being tricked, too. “Perhaps it was an optical illusion which the others had grasped and I hadn’t,” he said, “At that point it seemed defective not to have the illusion they had.”
Ultimately, these subjects wanted to fit in, even though the group was inherently temporary, the setting absurdly unnatural, and the others clearly wrong. They wanted this so desperately that they willed themselves to try to see what others saw. One subject told of the struggle he felt between wanting to be honest, wanting to seem smart, and wanting to fit in. “I like to be one of the boys, so to speak,” he said, “so I was trying to see their lines as correct but succeeded only slightly, because there was always my line.”
Ultimately it really didn’t matter if subjects saw the group as right or wrong, because the group was more powerful than reality. As one person put it, “If they are wrong, then I’ll be wrong, too.”
What Asch showed is that adding people to the process made the obvious inaccessible. It made the simple painful. Alone, everyone would have identified the matching line and given the correct answer. In a group, the correct answer was sometimes elusive but almost always beside the point. What groups do best—as the leaders of prosthetic companies did for Katherine Bomkamp and as his assistants did for Robert Reich—is limit what you could otherwise clearly see.
* * *
DAN SCOTTO’S JOB was to understand energy companies and advise his clients on whether to invest in them. As the head of his firm’s research division, he had to find out everything he could about what these energy companies did and how well they did it. And then, just like an umpire who doesn’t actually play but still affects the outcome of the game, he had to make the call. Clearly, definitively, he had to sum up his analysis with a recommendation to buy or avoid.
Dan did the fundamental analysis alone. He didn’t have to worry that some larger team would feed him only the good news, as Robert Reich’s assistants did, or that he would be rejected without a hearing, as Katherine Bomkamp was.
As he had done many hundreds of times before, in mid-August 2001 Dan gathered the stacks of financial information he needed to write a fresh piece of analysis on an energy company. What he saw was disconcerting. There was turmoil in the company’s leadership. There were aborted acquisitions. There was softness in the core business divisions. But more than that, the balance sheet just didn’t “pass the test.” In short, there wasn’t enough money coming into the company to sustain its debts and obligations. It was a problem made all the more pressing because this was “not a company with hard assets. It’s built on paper and highly leveraged.” In other words, when the company failed, and it would, it would go down fast.
Dan’s report on Enron—headlined “All Stressed-up and No Place to Go”—was a warning to investors about a company then trading at more than $35 a share. That the company was built on layer upon layer of phony transactions was not known to Dan—or anyone outside the company and its accountants—but he had figured out that the fundamentals of the company did not add up and that trouble surely loomed.
Lest the underlying message of his soberly written report be missed by the investment community, Dan summarized his analysis in a follow-up conference call. Holdings in Enron, he said, “should be sold at all costs, and sold now.”
A longtime Wall Street veteran, Dan was a highly respected analyst. In fact, the trade publication Institutional Investor had named him to their all-star team of analysts nine years running.
Three months after Dan’s report, his analysis proved to be spot-on. Those Enron shares that were trading at $35 when Dan issued his warning were worthless. Investors who heeded Dan’s advice saved thousands, or millions, or even billions. It was an example of the kind of foresight that can define a Wall Street career. Indeed, after three decades in the business, today Dan mentions that report on Enron in the very first paragraph of his resume.
How did his employer react to the highlight of Dan’s career? Three days after he circulated the report, his boss told him that he was barred from the office. They first put him on paid leave. He was told to go home, “cool off,” and think about things. Later, his boss called and announced that the leave was over. And Dan was fired. Of Dan’s Enron report, he said simply, “We don’t think it was a good recommendation or a reasonable one.”
The entire episode was a classic example of the capacity of a large group to make irrational decisions. “I looked at the numbers and I made a call based on what I saw,” Dan said. “But when that report kicks around the company, there are investment bankers and higher-ups who are thinking about how Enron will never hire us, we’ll never make fees from Enron with this thing out there.”
To Dan, the essence of the Enron problem was that it had issued massive debt—generating great profits for investment banks and advisors—but the cupboards were bare. There were no assets to support additional debt, and the existing debt load was crushing.
Fixated on the problem of how to extract future revenue from Enron, Dan’s company was oblivious to the reality that he had provided them a valuable solution. Not only was he going to save them the wasted effort of courting a bad company, he was providing them priceless investor credibility as the firm that warned the world about Enron.
“Instead, my bosses wanted to make more money from Enron in fees. Of course, that’s fantasy,” Dan said. “It’s like trying to sell new deck chairs to the Titanic. I could see that, I could tell them that. But you get a dozen guys around a conference table, they’re all looking at the little part they care about. And instead of an insightful warning, now my report looks like some kind of inciting garbage that’s going to cost the company future business.”
Not surprisingly, the experience encouraged Dan to move in a new direction. He opened his own small financial advising firm. His new firm does analysis and nothing else. “We don’t have a division in charge of burying inconvenient research,” Dan said. “We don’t have a division in charge of acting contrary to what we know to be true. It’s just straight analysis. Here’s what we think, nothing more, nothing less.”
* * *
LOOKING BACK, JORDAN will admit that the whole thing is kind of a setup. “How can you match those expectations?” she asks. “It is supposed to be the day you get to have all your dreams come true. Everything has to be perfect. Everything. You’re Cinderella and here’s your prince, and in this version, all your friends and family are perfect, too, and there is no wicked stepmother and the carriage doesn’t turn into a pumpkin.”
Unfortunately, Jordan and Aaron’s wedding experience was anything but a fairy tale come true.
Jordan imagined something slightly modest but thoroughly charming. But very quickly she realized that it would hardly be up to her.
Aaron’s parents invited Jordan’s parents out for a friendly dinner to celebrate the engagement and talk about how his parents might help with the wedding planning. The gesture was not entirely welcome. Jordan’s mother saw herself as the CEO of this wedding project, and now, before she’d even begun, there were these people butting in. Nevertheless, at Jordan’s urging, her mother said they would welcome the help. Unexpectedly, Jordan’s father even expressed an interest in all this, though Jordan suspected he was only concerned that the wedding not take place during football season.
Then Jordan’s and Aaron’s sisters chimed in as well. Surely they had a role here, too.
Forgotten in all this were Jordan and Aaron, the people getting married, who felt like they had to remind their self-appointed wedding committee that they were the reason any of this was happening.
That was, however, the only thing the group could agree on. Engagement parties. Bridal showers. Where, when, how many? What to do with the guests before the wedding? Welcome party? Luncheon? Golf? It was all up for debate.
As the events grew in scope, Jordan felt like the whole thing was slipping farther and farther away from her.
“This was supposed to be my day, but now it wasn’t really mine and it wasn’t all going to fit in a day,” Jordan said.
There were bigger problems. Every little detail was battled over. Jordan’s mother wanted a vintage look to the reception. It’s classy, she said, and Jordan likes antiques. Aaron’s sister made the case for a modern look. Jordan and Aaron both worked in technology, and she said that they should be celebrated in their own context.
The compromise made no one happy. The giant wedding cake looked like it had come from the not-too-distant future. The centerpieces suggested that Benjamin Harrison might still be president.
Then there was the band. Jordan mentioned a local jazz combo she liked. Jordan’s mother picked out a seven-member contemporary band. She said that they had more range, and that she wanted something more lively. Jordan said that jazz was the music of life. And on and on the battle of the bands raged, until they reached another unsatisfying compromise—they hired both.
It was the kind of schizophrenic group thinking that made investing in Enron seem like a good idea. Obsessed with the problem of making everything perfect, the wedding committee had made everything complicated. And now, instead of a Cinderella story, the wedding felt more like the revenge of the two-headed monster.
Worse than the feeling that the wedding was incoherent, there were the hurt feelings. Everyone involved felt as if there was something important that wasn’t quite right because no one got their way.
Despite all the frustrations and urgent minor battles, it was a wonderful day for Jordan and Aaron. Nevertheless, Jordan has one word of advice for her friends when they get married: “Elope.”
THE TAKEAWAY
When you have a big problem, you call for backup. We believe there is no problem we can’t solve if we throw enough people at it.
But what does the second, or fifth, or tenth, or fiftieth person you bring in really add? They add incoherence, they add filters that keep information from you, and they add an even more powerful layer of fixation on the problem at hand that stands in the way of finding a solution.
Robert Reich, Dan Scotto, Katherine Bomkamp, and Jordan were all frustrated by the inherent weaknesses of group decision making. Dan and Katherine had to deal with a group’s reflexive rejection of their ideas because the group couldn’t see past the problems immediately in front of them. Robert Reich and Jordan had groups that wanted to make them happy, but addressing the problem of their happiness led to irrational decisions just the same.
When 75 percent of people will give an obviously wrong answer just to conform to a group’s preference, then there is no justification for the assumption that more people produce better answers.
Imagine you had twenty artists at your disposal. They would all paint a picture for you. Not twenty artists painting twenty different pictures, twenty artists painting one picture on the same canvas. You know what you would wind up with? No vision. Incoherence. Spoiled efforts as one artist’s work spilled over and ruined what another was trying to do. In the end, you would have something less than what any single one of those artists could do by herself.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: BETTER THAN A GROUP
Compete against yourself. You are working alone and up against a difficult task. You want multiple good ideas but you are only one person, with one perspective on things. A competition against yourself can help you nurture multiple idea streams and work from multiple vantage points.2 You can pit your best idea from the morning against your best idea in the afternoon. The best idea at lunch versus the best idea in the office. As long as the context—time, place, something—is different, your thought process will be different, and you will be your own source of fresh perspective.
Call your friend with purple hair. When we seek input from others, we have a tendency to listen to those most like ourselves. That means we listen to people who are most likely to see things as we see them, and who are least likely to offer a perspective that gets us around our problem. Sociologist Martin Ruef found that innovative business leaders tend to have a diverse array of friendships.3 Those in business who are more conformist, and less successful, tend to spend their time surrounded by people just like themselves. You don’t need an echo when you ask a question. Instead, talk to someone who sees everything differently.