Crucial Information Gets Ignored: From the Book *Streetlights and Shadows* ANS

I thought this article about how groups affect the thinking of individuals was interesting.  There are several more in this series.  They are from "None So Blind" by Andy Schmookler.  Read the comments too, at least the first two. 
Find it here:   http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=9729 
--Kim

Crucial Information Gets Ignored: From the Book *Streetlights and Shadows*

I'm reading the book STREETLIGHTS AND SHADOWS: SEARCHING FOR THE KEYS TO ADAPTIVE DECISION-MAKING by Gary Klein (M.I.T. Press, 2009). Here is something from that book.

*******************

In Chapter 9, Klein has described how the possession of information in the system generally was not sufficient to alert the system to impending disaster. The three cases he describes are 1) the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 2) the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and 3) the collapse of the house of cards known as Enron.

He then goes on to describe this study:

"In 2006, Dave Snowden and I, working with Chew Lock Pin, Holly Baxter, and Cheryl Ann Teh, performed a study for the Singapore Armed Forces on the dynamics of weak signals [weak signals being, apparently, minor-seeming information that doesn't fit the previous overall pattern or the general expectation]…We set up 'garden path' scenarios in which the initial, obvious account of events was wrong and the weak signals started to dribble in. We ran seven groups of military and intelligence specialists in teams of four. Not a single team talked about the weak signals when there was still time to take early and preventive action.

"However, we had asked the participants to keep private diaries, and in every team at least one member noted the weak signals in his or her diary. Sometimes half the members of a team noted the weak signals in their diaries. In other words, each team had the potential to surface the weak signals. But not a single team talked about them. Somehow the climate of teamwork suppressed these cues. We need to find ways to encourage team members to voice suspicions and hunches without inviting ridicule or losing credibility."

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6 Responses to "Crucial Information Gets Ignored: From the Book *Streetlights and Shadows*"

1. mczilla Says:
2. February 13th, 2011 at 12:49 pm
   
   
3. Don't mean to be facetious at all here, but doesn't the conclusion seem somehow inverted? I mean, these folks are supposed to be on the lookout for clues to approaching trouble, not dancing around each other's preconceptions. Groupthink is an old, self-reinforcing problem, and ridicule is seldom "invited". The final sentence might make more sense if it said "We need to find ways to encourage team members not to react with ridicule or hostile disbelief to those voicing suspicions".
4. [Duane] Says:
5. February 13th, 2011 at 9:10 pm
   
   
6. The Social Psychology of Hatred:
   In a now classic study, Sherif (1937) placed subjects in a darkened room and asked them to estimate how far a dot of light moved across a screen. In fact the pinpoint of light was stationary. Under conditions such as these, an optical illusion known as the autokinetic effect makes it seem as if the light travels. Subjects were thus placed in a situation in which reality was ambiguous and in which they were asked to provide information about something that was indeterminate. Results showed that when subjects completed the task in groups, they frequently demonstrated the emergence of a social norm in terms of their belief about the movement of the light: After several trials the subjects would tend to conform and each subject in the group would provide a similar estimate. In other words, in this situation in which reality was ambiguous, subjects looked to each other for information about what was happening and developed a socially constructed reality regarding their belief about how far the dot of light was moving. Sherif believed that slogans and propaganda produce a similar mental process on a national or cultural level through the creation of cultural assumptions or interpretations of reality regarding international politics and relations with nations considered to be enemies.
   
   
   When empire works, what need we learn how to be humane?
7. Pat Says:
8. February 13th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
   
9. Are we experiencing the same phenomenon now with the situation in Egypt? Mubarak is gone, and the people and the media are telling us "the Egyptian People are now free." Who has been in charge in Egypt for the last 40 or so years: The military. Who is in charge now in Egypt? The military.
10. According to Fareed Zakaria on GPS, the United States spends $1.5 Million
11. A DAY on the Egyptian Military. What information are we not paying attention to? Who is buying the propaganda?
12. Marti Says:
13. February 14th, 2011 at 10:51 am
    
14. After reading this blog for over a year from Albuquerque, this made me finally decide to jump in. This is exactly what happened with the Deepwater Horizon. A whole chain of bad "little" decisions were made, with each decision-maker thinking his/her "little" decision wouldn't be that significant. As the results of all the bad "little" decisions began to create "signals" of increasing trouble, the "groupthink," complete with people being afraid to create trouble, i.e. stop the process, made it impossible to intervene before it was, alas, too late.
    And we have many complex systems in the Gulf of Mexico (actually globally) that are just as vulnerable, and some are way bigger than the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo Well.
15. Katrin Says:
16. February 14th, 2011 at 12:03 pm
    
17. Oh, Andy, would you mind adding on some more text from the book? This is really interesting. i.e. would you give one or preferably more than one more example for 'weak link' ?
    a) as it was perhaps 'picked up' (if not in these groups)…or should have been noticed
    
    b) missed, and why,
    
    c) an example of a diary entry, and how this should/could have been used.
    When I was reading this entry, I was reminded of how the FBI is most often portrayed, especially in movies, as missing all the 'weak links', and only focusing on the obvious,immediate, and learned, or taught during training.
    
    Consequestly, the well dressed, tall, and 'arrogant losers' always lacked the creativity, (if maybe not team work) to solve the case?
18. Andrew Bard Schmookler Says:
19. February 14th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
    
20. There will be more entries from this book, but I don't think they'll be about precisely the same kind of issue (failing to attend to critical information).