Rebel Ideas- the Power of Diverse Thinking

by Matthew Syed

  Even when we do seek to step beyond our own frames of reference, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to do so. We can see this in an intuitive way by considering the so-called ‘wedding list paradox’. Couples about to get married often issue a list of presents they would love to receive. But what is remarkable is just how often wedding guests depart from the list and purchase a unique gift, a gift they have personally chosen.

  Why do guests do this? In 2011, Francesca Gino from Harvard and Frank Flynn from Stanford conducted an experiment to find out. They recruited ninety people and then allocated them to one of two conditions. Half became ‘senders’ while the other half became ‘receivers’. The receivers were then asked to go to Amazon and come up with a wish list of gifts priced between $10 and $30. Meanwhile, the senders were allocated to either choose a gift from the wish list, or a unique gift.

  The results were emphatic. The senders expected that recipients would prefer unique gifts – ones they had chosen themselves. They supposed that recipients would welcome the personal touch. But they were wrong. Recipients, in fact, much preferred gifts from their own list. The psychologist Adam Grant reports the same pattern with friends giving and receiving wedding gifts. Senders prefer unique gifts; recipients prefer gifts from their wedding list.

  Why? It hinges upon perspective blindness. Senders find it difficult to step beyond their own frame of reference. They imagine how they would feel receiving the gift that they have selected. And, by definition, they would like it a lot, which is why they chose it. Recipients, by contrast, do not experience the anticipated joy, because they have a different set of preferences. Otherwise, they would have put the gift on the list in the first place.

  This helps to explain why demographic diversity (differences in race, gender, age, class, sexual orientation, religion and so on) can, in certain circumstances, increase group wisdom. Teams that are diverse in personal experiences tend to have a richer, more nuanced understanding of their fellow human beings. They have a wider array of perspectives – fewer blind spots. They bridge between frames of reference. A study by Professor Chad Sparber, an American economist, found that an increase in racial diversity of one standard deviation increased productivity by more than 25 per cent in legal services, health services and finance.20 A McKinsey analysis of companies in Germany and the United Kingdom found that return on equity was 66 per cent higher for firms with executive teams in the top quartile for gender and ethnic diversity than for those in the bottom quartile.21 For the United States, the return on equity was 100 per cent higher.FN2

  Of course, people from the same demographic do not all share the same experiences. Black people are not, as a group, homogenous. There is diversity within ethnic groups as well as between them. But this doesn’t alter the insight that bringing together individuals with different experiences can broaden and deepen the knowledge of the group, particularly when seeking to understand people. This explains another finding, too: homogenous groups don’t just underperform; they do so in predictable ways. When you are surrounded by similar people, you are not just likely to share each other’s blind spots, but to reinforce them. This is sometimes called ‘mirroring’. Encircled by people who reflect your picture of reality, and whose picture you reflect back to them, it is easy to become ever more confident of judgements that are incomplete, or downright wrong. Certainty becomes inversely correlated with accuracy.

  In a study led by Katherine Phillips, Professor at Colombia Business School, for example, teams were given the task of solving a murder mystery. They were given plenty of complex material, composing alibis, witness statements, lists of suspects and the like. In half the cases, the groups tasked with solving the problem were composed of four friends. The other half were composed of three friends and a stranger – an outsider, someone from beyond their social milieu, with a different perspective. Given what we have learned so far, it should come as no surprise that the teams with an outsider performed better. Much better. They got the right answer 75 per cent of the time, compared with 54 per cent for a homogenous group, and 44 per cent for individuals working alone.

  But here’s the thing. Those in the two groups had very different experiences of the task. Those in diverse teams found the discussion cognitively demanding. There was plenty of debate and disagreement, because different perspectives were aired. They typically came to the right decisions, but they were not wholly certain about them. The fact that they had had such full and frank discussion of the case meant that they were exposed to its inherent complexity.

  But what of the homogenous teams? Their experiences were radically different. They found the session more agreeable because they spent most of the time, well, agreeing. They were mirroring each other’s perspectives. And although they were more likely to be wrong, they were far more confident about being right. They were not challenged on their blind spots, so didn’t get a chance to see them. They were not exposed to other perspectives, so became more certain of their own. And this hints at the danger with homogenous groups: they are more likely to form judgements that combine excessive confidence with grave error.

  VI

  Osama bin Laden made his declaration of war on the United States from a cave in Tora Bora in Afghanistan on 23 August 1996. ‘My Muslim Brothers of the world,’ he said. ‘Your brothers in the land of the two holiest sites and Palestine are calling upon you for help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy, your enemy: the Israelis and Americans.’

  Images revealed a man with a beard reaching down to his chest. He was wearing simple cloth beneath combat fatigues. Today, given what we now know about the horror unleashed upon the world, his declaration looks menacing. But here is an insider in the foremost US intelligence agency describing how he was perceived by the CIA: ‘They could not believe that this tall Saudi with a beard, squatting around a campfire, could be a threat to the United States of America.’22

  To a critical mass of CIA analysts, then, bin Laden looked primitive and thus of no serious danger to a technological giant like the United States. Richard Holbrooke, one of the most senior officials under President Clinton, put it this way: ‘How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?’23 Another expert close to the CIA said: ‘They simply couldn’t square the idea of putting resources into finding out more about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda given that the guy lived in a cave. To them, he was the essence of backwardness.’24

  Now, consider how someone more familiar with Islam would have perceived the very same images. Bin Laden wore simple cloth not because he was primitive in terms of intellect or technology, but because he modelled himself on the Prophet. He fasted on the days the Prophet fasted. His poses and postures, which seemed so backward to a Western audience, were those that Islamic tradition ascribes to the most holy of its prophets. The very images that desensitised the CIA to the dangers of bin Laden were those that magnified his potency in the Arab world.

  As Lawrence Wright put it in The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about 9/11: Bin Laden orchestrated his entire operation by ‘calling up images that were deeply meaningful to many Muslims but practically invisible to those who were unfamiliar with the faith’. This was corroborated by a CIA insider, who said the agency was ‘misled by the raggedy appearance of Bin Laden and his subordinates – squatting in the dirt, clothed in robes and turbans, holding AK-47s and sporting chest-length beards – and automatically assumed that they are an anti-modern, uneducated rabble.’25

  As for the cave, this had even deeper symbolism. As almost any Muslim knows, Mohammad sought refuge in a cave after escaping his persecutors in Mecca. This was a period known as the Hejira. The cave was guarded by a series of divine interventions, including an acacia tree that sprouted to conceal the entrance, and a miraculous spider’s web and dove’s egg that made it seemed unoccupied. Muslims know, too, that Mohammad’s vision of the Koran occurred in a mountain cave.26

  To a Muslim, then, a cave is holy. It h
as deep religious significance. Islamic art overflows with images of stalactites. Bin Laden consciously modelled his exile to Tora Bora as his own personal Hejira, and used the cave as backdrop to his propaganda. As one Muslim scholar and intelligence expert put it: ‘bin Laden was not primitive; he was strategic. He knew how to wield the imagery of the Koran to incite those who would later become martyrs in the attacks of 9/11.’ Wright put it this way: ‘It was a product of bin Laden’s public relations genius that he chose to exploit the presence of the ammunition caves of Tora Bora as a way of identifying himself with the Prophet in the minds of many Muslims who longed to purify Islamic society and restore the dominion it once enjoyed.’

  The potency of his messages was visible, then, but only to those looking with the right lens. Bin Laden’s messages were reaching far and wide, to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Oman, Sudan and even to Hamburg, where a group of asylum seekers were radicalised, travelling to Afghanistan in November 1999 at the precise moment the plot to attack Western targets with planes was reaching its culmination in the minds of the Al Qaeda leadership.

  The ‘anti-modern, uneducated rabble’ had, by now, swelled to an estimated 20,000 who passed through the training camps between 1996 and 2000, mostly college-educated and with a bias towards engineering. Many spoke as many as five or six languages. Yazid Sufaat, who would go on to become one of Al Qaeda’s anthrax researchers, had a degree in chemistry and laboratory science from California State University in Sacramento. Many were ready to die for their faith.

  Warnings of danger were sprouting from the Muslim world, but the internal deliberations of the CIA discounted them. The CIA were the brightest and the best. They had been hired to analyse threats and to prioritise. Al Qaeda was way down the list, not because the analysts were not studying them intently, but because they couldn’t connect what they were seeing.

  ‘The beard and campfire anecdote is evidence of a larger pattern in which non-Muslim Americans – even experienced consumers of intelligence – underestimated Al Qaeda for cultural reasons,’ Jones and Silberzahn write in Constructing Cassandra. A Muslim scholar and expert on US intelligence made the same point: ‘the CIA couldn’t perceive the danger. There was a black hole in their perspective right from the start.’27 Analysts were also misled by the fact that bin Laden had a penchant for issuing his pronouncements in poetry, another point made by Jones and Silberzahn. After the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, for example, he hymned lines that included the following:

  Sails into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and false power,

  To her doom she moves slowly. A dinghy awaits her riding the waves,

  In Aden, the young men stood up for holy war destroyed,

  A destroyer feared by the powerful.

  To white, middle-class analysts, this seemed eccentric, almost quaint. Why would you issue orders in verse? It was in keeping with the notion of ‘a primitive mullah living in a cave’. To Muslims, however, poetry has a different meaning. It is holy. The Taliban routinely express themselves in poetry. It is a major aspect of Persian culture. The CIA were studying the pronouncements, but with a skewed frame of reference. As Jones and Silberzahn put it: ‘The poetry itself was not merely in the foreign language of Arabic; it derived from a conceptual universe light years from Langley.’

  In the weeks following the USS Cole attack in 2000, bin Laden’s name was scrawled on walls and magazine covers. Tapes of his speeches were sold in bazaars. In Pakistan, T-shirts bearing his photo were sold alongside calendars labelled: ‘Look out America, Osama is coming’. Intelligence was picking up broader chatter about a major attack. Words like ‘spectacular’ and ‘another Hiroshima’ were used. The drumbeat leading to 9/11 was now incessant.

  Graduates of the camps in Tora Bora had, by now, passed through three stages of military training, with intensive tuition on hijacking, espionage and assassination. Recruits spent hours studying a 180-page manual entitled Military Studies in Jihad Against the Tyrants, which offered state-of-the-art advice on weapons training and infiltration. The pieces were moving ever faster.

  The CIA could have allocated more resources to Al Qaeda. They could have attempted infiltration. But they were incapable of grasping the urgency. They did not allocate more resources, because they didn’t perceive a threat. They didn’t seek to penetrate Al Qaeda because they were ignorant of the gaping hole in their analysis. The problem wasn’t (just) the inability to connect the dots in the autumn of 2001, but a failure across the entire intelligence cycle. Collaboration should be about broadening and deepening understanding. The homogeneity at the CIA created a vast collective blind spot.

  In July 2000, two young men with Arabic names, recently arrived from Europe, enrolled at Huffman Aviation, a flight training school in Florida. Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi began their training on a Cessna 152. Ziad Jarrah commenced his tuition at the Florida Flight Training Center. He was described by his teacher as ‘the perfect candidate’. Hani Hanjour was now engaged in advanced simulator training in Arizona. The endgame was approaching.

  Meanwhile, CIA analysts refused to believe that bin Laden was serious about war with the United States. They couldn’t recognise the virulence of the germ that had been planted by the leader of Al Qaeda, or grasp the significance of the network that he had, by now, erected across the Middle East. Why start a war he couldn’t possibly win? That didn’t make sense to Western, middle-class analysts. It was another reason why they doubted the prospect of an all-out attack.

  They hadn’t yet made the conceptual leap – far easier to anyone familiar with an extremist interpretation of the Koran – that the victory for the jihadists was to be secured not on earth but in paradise. The code name for the plot among Al Qaeda’s inner circle was the Big Wedding. In the ideology of suicide bombers, the day of a martyr’s death is also his wedding day where he will be greeted by virgins at the gates of heaven. This was their prize, their inspiration.28

  A daily brief to the President in 1998 mentioned that bin Laden was preparing to hijack planes but didn’t discuss the possibility of suicide attacks, instead focusing on the plot to obtain the release of Abdul Basit. The dots depicted a pattern, but it required a diverse team to connect them.

  By the summer of 2001, the plot was nearing its culmination. Jordanian intelligence overheard mention of the Big Wedding, and passed on the rumours to Washington, but their significance was not grasped. All of the nineteen hijackers were now within the borders of the United States. In their ears rang the words of bin Laden, later found on the computer of a member of the Hamburg cell: ‘Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.’ The words were repeated thrice in the speech, an ‘obvious signal to the hijackers who were on their way’.

  At almost the same time, senior CIA official Paul Pillar (white, middle-aged, Ivy League) was discounting the very possibility of a major act of terrorism. ‘It would be a mistake to redefine counterterrorism as a task of dealing with “catastrophic”, “grand” or “super” terrorism,’ he said, ‘when in fact these labels do not represent most of the terrorism the United States is likely to face or most of the costs that terrorism imposes on US interests.’29

  In their own defence, the CIA pointed to messages and memos that implied an inkling of what was coming, but no reasonable analysis could corroborate this view. The problem at the CIA was not in the details, but the bigger picture. As one intelligence expert put it, albeit in a different context: ‘It was not so much a matter of particular intelligence reports or even specific policies; instead, it was a deeper intellectual misjudgement of a central historical reality.’

  On 10 September, according to The Looming Tower, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, travelled into the mountains above Khost. Their men carried with them a satellite dish and television set so they could watch the atrocities unfold.30 By this time, the hijackers were in place, prepared and resolute, looking forward to the virgins in paradise.

  Jones
and Silberzahn speculate that bin Laden ‘must’ have known about the black hole in American intelligence as on 9 September, forty-eight hours before the attacks, he had the ‘chutzpah to call his mother in Syria and tell her, in effect: “in two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while’’.’ The lack of resources allocated to Al Qaeda meant that although the call would be intercepted, the intercept-interpret-analyse cycle for the region was running at a lethargic seventy-two hours. By the time they were studied, it would be too late.

  At 5 a.m. on the morning of 11 September, Mohamed Atta woke in his room at the Comfort Inn motel, Portland airport. He shaved, got his things together, and then made his way down to reception with Abdulaziz al-Omari, his room-mate. At 5.33 a.m. they handed their room key to reception and stepped into a blue Nissan Altima. A few minutes later, they were checking in to US Airways Flight 5930 to Boston, connecting to American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles.31

  At almost the same time, Waleed and Wail al-Shehri checked out of Room 432 of the Park Inn, in the Newton suburb of Boston, and made their way to Logan International Airport to join Mohamed Atta. Ahmed and Hamza al-Ghamdi checked out of Days Hotel on Soldiers Field Road, paid for the pornographic film they had purchased, then set off to the airport with their two first-class tickets on United Airlines Flight 175. The other hijackers were also on the move, tickets in their pockets, the Al Qaeda manual on jihad engraved on their minds. In the plane, as soon as you get on, you should pray to God, because you do this for God, and everyone who prays to God shall prevail.