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By Russell M. Linden, PhD

Creating a Culture of Candor

The author is the principal in the firm Russ Linden and Associates, a management consultancy based in Charlottesville, VA. He is an accomplished author and teacher with experience in the public and private sectors, including the Federal Executive Institute, Virginia Innovation Group and the International City-County Management Association.

support group cohesiveness outweighs their willingness to think and speak honestly.

Groupthink is an understandable phenomenon. After all, who wants to be shunned by peers and colleagues? And there’s safety in numbers; if the boss is starting a new initiative and I think the idea is loony as hell, but nobody seems to be objecting, why raise doubts? If the idea somehow succeeds, then nobody will accuse me of having opposed this obviously “brilliant” concept. And if it ends up crashing and burning, well, nobody else saw it coming, did they?

The problem, of course, is that what appears to be safe for the individual (namely, to avoid disagreeing with the group and the boss) is potentially lethal for the organization. It was lethal to 114 Cuban expatriots at the Bay of Pigs; it was lethal to over 58,000 American troops in Vietnam (and approximately 1.5 million Vietnamese); and it is proving lethal in our Iraqi policy today. That was the conclusion of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, when it studied the intelligence community’s pre war assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The Senate committee decided that groupthink was alive and at work among the intelligence agencies that were advising the White House on the probability that Iraq had large stockpiles of WMD.

Groupthink has affected our Iraq policy in other ways. One example (among many): in February, 2003, weeks before the Iraqi invasion, senior Army General Eric Shinseki told a Senate committee it would require several hundred thousand troops to manage post war Iraq. He was publicly ridiculed by Pentagon civilian leaders and his career was effectively ended.

CAUSES OF GROUPTHINK

Why is it that senior leaders allow a culture of groupthink to develop around them, given the obvious costs and risks? There are many reasons, including:

• Leader’s personal insecurity. It’s reassuring to hear others echo your own words when you aren’t sure of yourself. Such leaders sometimes surround themselves with “yes men/
women.”

• Leaders too convinced of their own brilliance. This is

On April 17, 1961, 1,300 members of a CIA supported Cuban exile force stormed the beaches of Cuba at an area called the Bay of Pigs. The invasion ended in total failure; when it was over 114 members of the brigade were dead and 1,189 had become Fidel Castro’s prisoners. Moreover, it quickly became a foreign policy debacle for President Kennedy barely three months into his presidency. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, writing in his memoirs years later, noted that he had done the president a disservice by never raising his deep concerns about the invasion during the planning phase. Rusk wasn’t alone; several members of Kennedy’s senior staff harbored deep misgivings about the Bay of Pigs operation, but their concerns were never raised within the planning team.

Kennedy learned key lessons from the Bay of Pigs, one of which related to his own behavior: his frequent presence in the planning meetings apparently created an atmosphere in which people told him what they thought he wanted to hear. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, made the same mistakes when it came
to Vietnam. Johnson harbored his own doubts about the war, but he tolerated no dissent from others. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara started showing concerns about the war, Johnson replaced him.

THE CULPRIT: GROUPTHINK

In 1972, psychologist Irving Janis coined the term “groupthink” to describe situations like those described above, in which people conform their opinions to the group’s (apparent) consensus. Janis found that in many situations, people’s desire to