Bromford Lab

Why, when wise, experienced leaders make collective decisions, do they often make really bad decisions? In his new paper “A theory of collective stupidity in organisations - and possible remedies,” @geoffmulgan challenges conventional wisdom about leadership failure. He says that “collective stupidity” emerges not from incompetent individuals, but from behaviours that are rational & co-operative but resulting in destructive outcomes. He identifies a key factor as “the tendency to conserve cognitive energy”. Intelligent thought is costly & requires energy & attention. So we save it by adopting narrow habitual thinking & routines. In addition, we are social animals who seek acceptance & approval from others. This causes us to align our thinking with the group, copy behaviours & conform—often at the expense of independent judgement. Excessive respect for overconfidence also plays a part. Lack of diversity in the group makes us even more prone to collective stupidity because there is more pressure to conform, reducing the chance of challenging flawed assumptions. Remedies for collective stupidity: 1) Divide roles & tasks among different people or groups to encourage multiple perspectives & reduce the risk of groupthink. 2) Orchestrate triangulation & doubt to provide alternative perspectives; how would I know if this wasn’t true? What would someone else think? 3) Organise loops – looping back repeatedly to question, think, debate, challenge. 4) Slow down decision-making processes to allow time for reflection & critical thinking. 5) Expose people to a variety of viewpoints & help them understand how others think, countering the tendency to assume everyone shares the same perspective. 6) Seek to achieve a healthy balance of diversity and integration; a variety of views, backgrounds & cognitive styles AND a capacity to integrate with shared languages, frames & ways of thinking. 7) Listen to unwelcome information & unwelcome ideas, creating routines for honest reporting & for mavericks, dissenters & whistleblowers to have a voice. discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprin…. With thanks to Stella O'Brien for an accessible link.