and eliminating redundancies, many executives wait for the dust to settle, figuring they can always make adjustments later. But the longer they wait, the more difficult it becomes to change the status quo. The window of opportunity closes.
Nobody likes to admit a mistake, after all. Which leads to the “sunk-cost” trap, in which we choose courses of action that justify our earlier decisions—even if they no longer seem so brilliant. Hanging on to a stock after it has taken a nosedive may not show the best judgment. Yet many people do exactly that. In the workplace, we might avoid admitting to a blunder—hiring an incompetent person, for example—because we’re afraid it will make us look bad in the eyes of our superiors. But the longer we let the problem drag on, the worse it can be for everyone.
As if these flaws weren’t enough, we also ignore facts that don’t support our beliefs. We overestimate our ability to make accurate predictions. We cling to inaccurate information even after it has been disproved. And we accept the most recent bit of trivia as gospel. As individuals, in short, we tend to make a lot of mistakes with even simple decisions. Throw a problem at us that involves interactions of multiple variables and you’re asking for trouble.
Yet increasingly, analysts say, that’s exactly what business leaders are dealing with. “Managers have long relied on their intuition to make strategic decisions in complex circumstances, but in today’s competitive landscape, your gut is no longer a good enough guide,” writes Eric Bonabeau, who is now chief scientist at Icosystem, a consulting company near Boston. Often managers rise to the top of their organizations because they’ve been able to make tough decisions in the face of uncertainty, he writes. But when you’re dealing with complexity, intuition “is not only unlikely to help, it is often misleading. Human intuition, which arguably has been shaped by biological evolution to deal with the environment of hunters and gatherers, is showing its limits in a world whose dynamics are getting more complex by the minute.”
We aren’t very good at making difficult decisions in complex situations, in other words, because our brains haven’t had time to evolve. “We have the brains of cavemen,” Bonabeau says. “That’s fine for problems that don’t require more than a caveman’s brain. But many other problems require a little more thinking.”
One way to handle such problems, as we’ve seen, is to harness the cognitive diversity of a group. When Jeff Severts asked his prediction market to estimate the probability of the new Best Buy store opening on time, he tapped into a wide range of perspectives, and the result was an unbiased assessment of the situation. In a way, that’s what most of us would hope would happen, since society counts on groups to be more reliable than individuals. That’s why we have juries, committees, corporate boards, and blue-ribbon panels. But groups aren’t perfect either. Unless they’re carefully structured and given an appropriate task, groups don’t automatically produce the best solution. As decades of research have demonstrated, groups have many bad habits of their own.
Take their tendency to ignore useful information. When a group discusses an issue, it can spend too much time going over stuff everybody already knows, and too little time considering facts or points of view known only by a few. Psychologists call this “biased sampling.” Let’s say your daughter’s PTA is planning a fund-raiser. The president asks everybody at the meeting for ideas about what to sell. The group spends the whole time talking about cookies, because everybody knows how to make them, even though many people might have special family recipes for cupcakes, fudge, or other goodies that might be popular. Because these suggestions never come up, the group may squander its own diversity.
Many mistakes made by groups can be traced to rushing a decision. Instead of taking time to put together a full range of options, a group may settle on a choice prematurely, then spend time searching for evidence to support that choice. Perhaps the most notorious example of rushing a decision is a phenomenon that psychologist Irving Janis described as groupthink, in which a tightly knit team blunders into a fiasco through a combination of unfortunate traits, including a domineering leader, a lack of diversity among team members, a disregard of outside information, and a high level of stress. Such teams develop an unrealistic sense of confidence about their decision making and a false sense of consensus. Outside opinions are dismissed. Dissension is perceived as disloyalty. Janis was thinking, in particular, of John F. Kennedy’s reckless decision to back the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, when historians say that President Kennedy and a small circle of advisors acted in isolation without serious analysis or debate. As a result, when some twelve hundred Cuban exiles landed on the southern coast of the island, they were promptly defeated by the Cuban army and tossed into jail.
Decisions made by groups, in short, can be as dysfunctional as those made by individuals. But they don’t have to be, as the swarm bees have already shown us. When groups contain the right mix of individuals and are carefully structured, they can compensate for mistakes by pooling together a greater diversity of knowledge and skills than any of their members could obtain on their own. That was the lesson of the experiments Hackman and Woolley conducted in Boston: Students did better at identifying the terrorists when they sorted out the skills of each team member and gave everyone a chance to contribute information and opinions to the process. Simply by drawing from a wider range of experiences, as Scott Page’s theorems proved, groups can put together a bigger bag of tricks for problem solving. And when it comes to making predictions, like how many gift cards will be purchased this month, groups can cancel out personal biases and bad habits by combining information and attitudes into a reliable group judgment.
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