The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  It proved to be a fatal decision. At 15:00, snow began to fall; by 17:30 it was a full-blown blizzard. Hall, Fischer and three of their team members died on their descent.

  Why did they decide to continue up to the summit, even when the conditions were worsening? Fischer himself had previously spoken of the ‘two o’clock rule’ – to turn around if they failed to reach the summit by 2 p.m. so that they could be sure they were back at camp by nightfall. Yet they continued to their deaths.

  Michael Roberto, from Harvard Business School, has analysed accounts of the disaster – including a best-selling book by Jon Krakauer – and he believes that the teams’ decisions may have been influenced by the now familiar cognitive biases, including the sunk cost error (the climbers had each invested $70,000 in the attempt, and weeks of potentially wasted effort) and over-confidence on the part of Hall and Fischer.22

  More interesting for our purposes, however, were the group dynamics – and in particular, the hierarchy that Hall and Fisher had established around them. We have already seen some reasons why a hierarchy might be productive, since it could set to rest status conflict and infighting within a group.

  In this case, however, the hierarchy backfired. Besides Hall and Fischer, there were more junior guides and local Sherpas with intimate knowledge of the peak, who might have corrected their errors. But the group did not feel comfortable expressing their concerns. Krakauer describes a kind of strict ‘pecking order’ that meant the clients were scared to question the guides, and the guides were scared to question the leaders, Hall and Fischer. As one of the more junior guides, Neal Beidleman, later put it: ‘I was definitely considered the third guide . . . so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn’t always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it.’ Another guide, Anatoli Boukreev, was similarly wary of expressing his concerns that the team had not acclimatised to the thin air. ‘I tried not to be argumentative, choosing instead to downplay my intuitions.’

  According to Krakauer, Hall had made his own feelings on the hierarchy quite clear before they departed: ‘I will tolerate no dissension up there. My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal.’

  Lou Kasischke, one of the team who had decided to turn back, agreed. ‘You need candour between the leader and the followers,’ he told PBS. On an expedition, he said, the leader needs feedback from his or her team, but Hall wasn’t receptive to those opinions. ‘Rob didn’t foster that relationship where he expected us to say these things.’23 A hierarchy, then, can be both a productive and a dangerous thing.

  We have to be wary of basing our conclusions on a single case-study, but Adam Galinsky has confirmed this conclusion by analysing records of 5,104 Himalayan expeditions. Unable to question all the climbers themselves, he instead examined cultural differences in attitudes to authority. Various studies have demonstrated that some nationalities are more likely to believe you should strictly respect people’s position within a group, while others accept that you can challenge and question your superiors. People from China, Iran and Thailand, for instance, tend to respect hierarchy far more than citizens of the Netherlands, Germany, Italy or Norway, according to one widely accepted measure; the USA, Australia and the UK fall somewhere in the middle.24

  Comparing this data with the Everest records, Galinsky found that teams composed of people from the countries that respected a hierarchy were indeed more likely to reach the summit – confirming the suspicions that a hierarchy boosts productivity and eases coordination between the team members. But crucially, they were also more likely to lose team members in the attempt.

  To check that they weren’t accidentally measuring other traits – such as individual determination – that might also have correlated with the prevailing cultural attitudes to hierarchy, and influenced their chances of success, Galinsky’s group examined data from more than a thousand solo trips. Now, they found no overarching differences between the different cultures. It was their group interactions that really made a difference.25

  The same dynamic may lie behind many business disasters. Executives at Enron, for instance, had a kind of reverence for those above, and disagreement or doubt was seen as a severe sign of disloyalty. To survive, they said, ‘you had to keep drinking the Enron water’.

  There is an apparent paradox in these findings: if team members clearly understand their place in the pecking order, overall group performance will be boosted; but this is true only if team members themselves feel that their opinions are valued, and that they can challenge their leaders in the event of problems arising or poor decisions being taken.

  Stretching from the Saint-Etienne football stadium to Wall Street and the slopes of Everest, we’ve now seen how some common dynamics shape group interactions and determine a team’s collective intelligence. This new research appears to have captured the forces underlying teamwork in any context.

  And in precisely the same way that our understanding of the individual intelligence trap offers simple strategies to escape error, this research also suggests some tried-and-tested ways to avoid the most common mistakes in group reasoning.

  From Woolley and Galinsky’s research, we can change the way we recruit new team members. In light of the too-much-talent effect, it would be tempting to argue that you should simply stop selecting people of exceptional ability – particularly if your team’s composition has already passed that magic threshold of 50?60 per cent being ‘star’ players.

  At this stage it’s probably best not to be too fixated on that number – the specific ratio will almost certainly depend on the personalities within a group and the amount of cooperation it requires – but the scientific research at least suggests that we need to place a greater emphasis on interpersonal skills that will enhance the team’s collective intelligence, even if that means rejecting someone who scores far higher on more standard measures of ability. That may include judging someone’s emotional perceptivity and communic-ation skills – whether they draw people out and listen, or whether they have a tendency to interrupt and dominate. If you are leading a multinational team, you might also choose someone with high cultural intelligence (which we explored in Chapter 1) since they would find it easier to navigate the different social norms.26

  Given what we know about status conflict, we can also improve the interactions of the talent you do have. Hildreth, for instance, found strategies to avoid the clash of egos during his previous job at a global consulting firm. One example, he says, is to underline each person’s expertise at each meeting and their reason for appearing at the group, which helps ensure that they have the chance to share relevant experience. ‘Often that’s kind of lost in the melee of conflict.’

  Hildreth also recommends allotting a fixed amount of time for each person to contribute his or her opinion at the start of the meeting. The topic of discussion need not be related to the problem at hand, but this practice allows each person to feel that he or she has already made a contribution to the group’s functioning, further defusing the status conflict and easing the ensuing conversation. ‘You get a lot more equality within the discussion so that everyone contributes,’ Hildreth said. And when you finally come to the problem at hand, he suggests that you set out a firm strategy for when and how you will make the decision – whether it will be by unanimous or majority vote, for instance – to avoid the kind of impasse that may come when too many intelligent and experienced people butt heads.

  Lastly, and most importantly, the leader should embody the kinds of qualities he or she wants to see in a team – and should be particularly keen to encourage disagreement.

  It is here that the research of group thinking comes closest to the new science of evidence-based wisdom, as more and more organisational psychologists are coming to see how the intellectual humility of a leader not only improves their individual decision making but also brings knock-on benefits for their closest colleagues.

  Using staff questionnaires to explore the top management teams of 105 te
chnology companies, Amy Yi Ou at the National University of Singapore has shown that employees under a humble leader of this kind are themselves more likely to share information, collaborate in times of stress and contribute to a shared vision. By tapping into the collective intelligence, such businesses were better able to overcome challenges and uncertainty, ultimately resulting in greater annual profits a year later.27

  Unfortunately, Ou says that CEOs themselves tend to be very split in their opinions on the virtue of humility, with many believing that it can undermine their team’s confidence in their abilities to lead. This was true even in China, she says, where she had expected to see greater respect for a humble mindset. ‘Even there, when I’m talking to those high-profile CEOs, they reject the term humility,’ she told me. ‘They think that if I’m humble, I can’t manage my team well. But my study shows that it actually works.’

  History offers us some striking examples of these dynamics at play. Abraham Lincoln’s capacity to listen to the dissenting voices in his cabinet – a ‘team of rivals’ – is famously thought to have been one of the reasons that he won the American Civil War – and it apparently inspired Barack Obama’s leadership strategy as president.

  Jungkiu Choi, head of consumer banking at Standard Chartered Banking in China, meanwhile, gives us one modern case-study of humility at the top. Before he took the role, top executives had expected to receive the red-carpet treatment when they visited individual branches, but one of Jungkiu’s first moves was to ensure that each meeting was far more informal. He would turn up unannounced and organise friendly ‘huddles’ with the employees to ask how he could improve the business.

  He soon found that these meetings generated some of the company’s most fruitful ideas. One of his groups, for instance, had suggested that the bank change its operating hours, including weekend shifts, to match other shops in the area. Within months, they were earning more from those few hours than they had in the whole of the rest of the week. With every employee able to contribute to the bank’s strategy, its entire service was transformed – and customer satisfaction rose by more than 50 per cent within two years.28

  We can also see this philosophy in Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, who argues that the leader’s single role is to ‘let others succeed’. As he explained in a speech to his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur: ‘[Leadership is] less about trying to be successful (yourself), and more about making sure you have good people, and your work is to remove that barrier, remove roadblocks for them so that they can be successful in what they do.’

  Like the many other principles of good teamwork, the humility of the leader can bring benefits to the sports field. One study found that the most successful high-school basketball teams were those whose coaches saw themselves as a ‘servant’ to the team, compared with those whose coaches saw themselves as sitting apart from and above their students.29 Under the humbler coaches, the team players were more determined, better able to cope with failure, and won more games per season. The humility modelled by the coach pushed everyone to work a little harder and to support their other teammates.

  Consider John Wooden, commonly regarded as the most successful college basketball coach of all time. He led UCLA to win ten national championships in twelve years, and between 1971 and 1974, they went undefeated for eighty-eight games. Despite these successes, Wooden’s every gesture made it clear that he was not above the players on his team, as seen in the fact that he would help sweep the locker room after every game.

  In the memoir Coach Wooden and Me, his former player and lifelong friend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, described many instances of Wooden’s unfailing humility, even when dealing with difficult confrontations with his players. ‘It was mathematically inevitable that Coach would take to heart what one of his players said, feel compelled to patch things up, and teach us all a lesson in humility at the same time.’30 Wooden made it clear that they could learn from each other, him included – and the team went from strength to strength as a consequence.

  After Iceland’s unexpected success at the Euro 2016 tournament, many commentators highlighted the down-to-earth attitude of Heimir Hallgrímsson, one of the team’s two coaches, who still worked part time as a dentist despite leading the national team. He was apparently devoted to listening and understanding others’ points of view, and he tried to cultivate that attitude in all of his players.

  ‘Team-building is a must for a country like ours; we can only beat the big teams by working as one,’ he told the sports channel ESPN. ‘If you look at our team, we have guys like Gylfi Sigurðsson at Swansea [Football Club], who is probably our highest-profile player, but he’s the hardest worker on the pitch. If that guy works the hardest, who in the team can be lazy?’31

  As with the other elements of evidence-based wisdom, the study of collective intelligence is still a young discipline, but by applying these principles you can help to ensure that your team members play a little more like Iceland, and a little less like England – a strategy that will allow each person to bring out the best in those around them.

  10

  Stupidity spreading like wildfire: Why disasters occur – and how to stop them

  We are on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. It is a quiet evening with a light breeze.

  The team of engineers has finished drilling, and they are now trying to seal their well with cement. They have checked the pressure at the seal, and all seems to be going well. Soon extraction can begin, and the dollars will start rolling in. It should be time to celebrate.

  But the pressure tests were wrong; the cement has not set and the seal at the bottom of the well is not secure. As the engineers happily sign off their job, oil and gas has started to build up within the pipe – and it’s rising fast. In the middle of the engineers’ celebrations, mud and oil starts spewing onto the rig floor; the crew can taste the gas on their tongues. If they don’t act quickly, they will soon face a full-on ‘blowout’.

  If you have even a passing knowledge of the world news in 2010, you may think you know what happens next: an almighty explosion and the largest oil spill in history.

  But in this case, it doesn’t happen. Maybe the leak is far enough away from the engine room, or the wind is blowing, creating a movement of air that prevents the escaping gas from catching light. Or maybe the team on the ground simply notice the build-up of pressure and are able to deploy the ‘blowout preventer’ in time. Whatever the specific reason, a disaster is averted. The company loses a few days of extraction – and a few million dollars of profits – but no one dies.

  This is not a hypothetical scenario or a wishful reimagining of the past. There had been literally dozens of minor blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico alone in the twenty years before the Deepwater Horizon spill at the Macondo well in April 2010 – but thanks to random circumstances such as the direction and speed of the wind, full-blown disasters never took place, and the oil companies could contain the damage.1

  Transocean, the company in charge of cementing the Deepwater Horizon rig, had even experienced a remarkably similar incident in the North Sea just four months previously, when the engineers had also misinterpreted a series of ‘negative pressure tests’ – missing signs that the seal of the well was broken. But they had been able to contain the damage before an explosion occurred, resulting in a few days’ lost work rather than an environmental catastrophe.2

  On 20 April 2010, however, there was no wind to dissipate the oil and gas, and thanks to faulty equipment, all the team’s attempts to contain the blowout failed. As the escaping gas built up in the engine rooms, it eventually ignited, unleashing a series of fireballs that ripped through the rig.

  The rest is history. Eleven workers lost their lives, and over the next few months, more than 200 million gallons of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico, making it the worst environmental catastrophe in American history. BP had to pay more than $65 billion in compensation.3

  Why would so many people miss so many warn
ing signs? From previous near misses to a failed reading of the internal pressure on the day of the explosion, employees seemed to have been oblivious to the potential for disaster.

  As Sean Grimsley, a lawyer for a US Presidential Commission investigating the disaster, concluded: ‘The well was flowing. Hydrocarbons were leaking, but for whatever reason the crew after three hours that night decided it was a good negative pressure test . . . The question is why these experienced men out on that rig talked themselves into believing that this was a good test . . . None of these men wanted to die.’4

  Disasters like the Deepwater Horizon explosion require us to expand our focus, beyond groups and teams, to the surprising ways that certain corporate cultures can exacerbate individual thinking errors and subtly inhibit wiser reasoning. It is almost as if the organisation as a whole is suffering from a collective bias blind spot.

  The same dynamics underlie many of the worst manmade catastrophes in recent history, from NASA’s Columbia disaster to the Concorde crash in 2000.

  You don’t need to lead a multinational organisation to benefit from this research; it includes eye-opening findings for anyone in employment. If you’ve ever worried that your own work environment is dulling your mind, these discoveries will help explain your experiences, and offer tips for the best ways to protect yourself from mindlessly imitating the mistakes of those around you.

  Before we examine large-scale catastrophes, let’s begin with a study of ‘functional stupidity’ in the general workplace. The concept is the brainchild of Mats Alvesson at Lund University in Sweden, and André Spicer at the Cass Business School in London, who coined the term to describe the counter-intuitive reasons that some companies may actively discourage their employees from thinking.