Context : Corporate World.
(excerpt from publicly available sources)
On
a birthday, a family decided to go out for dinner. Husband asked wife, where to
go?
Thinking
that he likes Gujarati food, she said: “Let’s go to Agashiye - The Terrace
Restaurant!”
His
son and daughter nodded in agreement.
On
their return, the son remarked, “I wish Papa had taken us to Mainland China, as
he loves Chinese food. Or at least to Shere-E-Punjab for the wonderful tandoori
chicken.” added his daughter.
“Yes,
I too would have loved to go Mainland China!”, the man said.
Wife
looked surprised: “But didn’t we all unanimously agree to go to Agashiye,” she
asked. He said sheepishly “I didn’t want you to feel bad.” And both children
nodded in agreement. Here were four people who of their own volition
would not have gone to ‘Agashiye - The Terrace Restaurant, but collectively
agreed to go there.
This
also happens in the corporate world. This is the Abilene Paradox.
Prof Jerry Harvey calls it 'The Inability to
Manage Agreement.'
The
Abilene Paradox occurs when a group of people collectively decide on a course
of action that is contrary to the preferences of most of the individuals in the
group.
Prof
Harvey states in his paper ‘The Abilene Paradox’, “Organizations frequently
take actions in contradiction to what they really want to do and therefore
defeat the very purpose they are trying to achieve”.
This
is the inability to manage agreement.
He
adds, “The inability to manage agreement, not the inability to manage conflict,
is the essential symptom that defines
organizations caught in the web of the Abilene Paradox.” In the corporate
world, when the top boss throws an idea, the group immediately agrees.
This is because everyone in the group thinks he would look stupid if he
disagrees.
Standing
out as a lone voice is very embarrassing. This leads the group to decide on
‘yes’ when ‘no’ would have been the personal (and the correct) response of the
majority. If the top boss always disagrees with rest of group, then the
organization will never have group giving honest opinion.
I
love this from Ayn Rand, “If we have an endless number of individual minds who
are weak, meek, submissive and impotent. Who renounce their creative supremacy
for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly the ‘whole’s verdict’, we don’t
get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and
impotent collection of minds.”
