Has been 30 years of work on individuals and how we sometimes make mistakes so we might make investment errors and we might make errors in our choice of consumer products. We might make errors in what we are scared about what we are not scared of. Theres also been a burgeoning bit of research that hasnt been pulled together on how groups either aggravate or reduce the problems of individuals. That actually is a huge improvement over the idea of groupthink which is kind have been a popular conscious now. Groupthink means that groups often suppress the individual ideas and creativity of their members and that is a real problem. But to figure out what actually lies behind groupthink, what are the specifics that make it happen, thats something where we really have made a lot of progress in the last decades in the book tries to figure out for ways that groupthink so to speak happens in firms and families and governments and religious organizations and labor unions and student organizations anytime groups dont do so great. Then theres an idea that we have learned a lot why groups fail about how groups can succeed. Some of the three simple things that you can institute in a minute and others through more complicated things that require technologies. Host so i want to get into where the places groups go wrong and how can we fix them up before we do that what drove you to write this book . Did you have personal experiences with your life . Guest i will tell you where it started. I was involved in a project involving juries. When do they get big and when did they get little . With a couple of coauthors we did a large study in what we found was its not the case which is what we expected that when you have a group of six people they will end up after deliberating arriving at an award thats in the middle of what the group of six thought. That is what we expected that you come up in the average. Will be found in this very large study with hundreds of juries was that group jurors end up with higher awards, often much higher awards than the average or middle members so in terms of dollars juries got more punitive than individuals. We also measured how bad they thought misconduct was on a numerical scale of zero to six or Something Like that and if the average individual is at 5 in the jury came in at six. Outraged people got more outrage. People who wanted to punish corporations with 100,000 awards. After they talk to each other they moved up to 200,000 and as i saw that groups and up much more outraged than the individuals who compose them. Whats going on there and thats what made me think theres something to learn about. Host thats fascinating. Whats happening inside of those jury rooms . Are the jurors egging each other on . Guest i think whats happening is two things. One is in a group if you put together people who are outraged about misconduct by a corporation being number of arguments they will here that will suggest the corporation is terrible or the award should be higher is high in the number of arguments they will here that suggest the company didnt do so bad for the awards should be lower will be relatively low. The fact that they start at our region you can think about this about anything. If you are outraged about the United States doing something you think is harming you or General Motors is doing something that you think is bad or the president or the president s opponent. The group is inclined to think that than the number of arguments that push with in that direction will be higher than the number of arguments the other way. I actually saw some tapes where you can see it happening happening in real time. Its about Information Exchange in a group that has a tendency towards outrage in these cases and we can talk about how groups of multiple kinds whatever their tendency as can amplified especially by the people who were speaking out and are disturbed. The other thing i think is this interesting is this which has to do with status and reputation. If youre in a group of people who think that what a corporation did is really bad and you think its not so bad one of our cases Companies Sold something that was a failed baldness cure and while i have the time and continue to think thats really outrageous a failed baldness cure the standard person might think its not that terrible. Its not like anybodys going to die but if in some of the baldness cure failed cases the jury started out our rage. The people that werent so outraged he could see them receiving an silence in because they didnt want to look like passive people. They didnt want to look like weak people. They didnt want to look like they were excusing misconduct. They wanted to preserve their status or their self conception within the group. So as people receive they are receiving away from the group norm and that can be really bad because it deprives the group of important information. Now in the jury cases whether they should be getting higher or lower its not easy to no one in abstract but if your group is composed of individuals who are silencing themselves because they are concerned about reputation status within the group than the problem is the group is losing information. As soon as i saw that in our studies i thought thats about juries but its about groups generally also. Does that happen within a family . Information is lost because people are afraid their reputations are at risk are people think i have something to contribute thats probably not as good as with the other people are contributing. Host so the effect of silencing its making me think of narrow scientific research. I have read that if somebody dissents from a group they experience in the match a lot of the part of the brain that were asked to fear, what scientists call the pain of independence. Talking about that in the jury context can you talk about an example you gave of this happening in a political context . Guest when president kennedy gave the goahead to invade cuba at the bay of pigs he said afterwards it was a terrible failure very damaging event for the United States where we had to concede in negotiations with cuba. That was not good and he said how could i have been so stupid as to let them go ahead kennedy said. The reason was that his advisers were engaged in something a lot like our jury determinations. That is they were going with the flow in the room so there were advisers afterthefact is that i knew this was a mistake but i didnt say anything. The reason was either they thought for some of them their own dissident views are probably wrong because they felt isolated and im the only one that thinks that im wrong and the other point which is your point about the mode a move amygdala amygdala if you Say Something in a group of people for purposes of National Security or liberation if you say this may not be a good idea probably you are thinking to yourself im going to look really bad in front of my peers and im putting myself at risk. Host shouldnt it be the job of the leader of the group to do something about that dynamic and i want to just point out something you talk about in your book which i found fascinating. We hear so much about the power of optimism in general. The power of optimism to achieve success of all kinds and you said you divide the world into anxious and complacent people and you say when groups do well they have anxious leaders. Guest this is something i saw in the white house day after day. There is one leader, the president of the United States but theyre also cabinet heads and heads of policy offices in the white house and if the leader is anxious not in the sense that they are terrified of life but in the sense that they are constantly thinking what can go wrong, what is the problem i might be reading about in the paper tomorrow . What is the way the American People might be adversely affected by what im doing . Thats great in the reason is great is that its like a seatbelt or a safety belt that the nation has by virtue of that level of anxiety. If by contrast you have someone who is complacent and those people can often be charismatic there is a tendency often i think in the corporate world and in government too to engage in happy talk when youre talking to the boss. Because you do want to put on the bosss shoulders more weight. They have enough to worry about so everything is going great and you got it and thats going to be a much easier exchange often than if you say we have some other problems here and im not sure how to sort them out. A boss might think solve the problem. I have a bunch of my own. So the complacent person is often going to look more like the team player and often more like the person who has everything under control. The anxious person where the anxious leader i think shouldnt be full of woe and despair but should be thinking all the time. There are seven things are more that could go wrong and what are we doing to reduce the risks for each of the seven . Host so do you think that groups should be composed of a mix of complacent and anxious people or is it rather that each individual should have a little of both americares or . Guest its a great question and the data doesnt ever find enough to answer that question. I will speculate based on experience. For a leader to have a degree of anxiety i think is absolutely indispensable. Not what it translates to an anxious workplace but in the sense that the leader who has basically a sense of wellbeing and is going to be okay is also thinking this might go wrong, that we have a plan to launch a product and am i now work for the following reasons and are we investigating that or a public official who is developing some Environmental Programs ought to be thinking this is going to have an adverse effect on Small Business and what can we do to cover that . Is this going to have adverse effects on Economic Growth . We have the timing right . Questions like that so for leaders to be thinking about downsides basically every day is really good so long as it doesnt swallow them up. Its going to be demoralizing. Within a group there is probably some importance in distinguishing among stages. If the stages of Idea Development have a bunch of optimistic people saying lets try this, lets try that that can be a kind of lets put a lot of things on the table or on the stage where optimism and deflation are opposites and you want to opt at that stage iv optimism. At the time you are refining which plans to undertake than to switch from the optimism everything welcome to looking at downsides is probably a good idea. Its true that for an engineer or a creative person or a constructor of something whether its in politics or science, you have to put on hold your anxiety about how things are going to work out as a writer or scientist. You have to think this is going to work but to have the key stages even for multiple team members a sense of how things can go wrong that is helpful. I can say for my own experience in the white house i had a staff of about 50 and they were all excellent. I wanted everyone of them to be thinking. I had an office that dealt with government regulation and i wanted them to be thinking all the time what could go wrong with a project that they were helping to oversee just so there wouldnt be a mistake that would hurt the American People. I didnt want them having any week where they thought everything was going great. If they did they probably were imposing risk some people. Host im fascinated by this because it runs so counter to the american ideal lease on its face. When you dig deeper i see it. Digging deeper into leaders it seems clear that if you are a leader of a group you want to get the best of everyone in that group and in that meeting and yet you say its actually very unusual for leaders to create a climate where that happens. Why is that . Is it because leaders tend to be optimistic or are there other forces going on . Guest on the anxiety complacency scale its important to emphasize that a kind of yes we can headline, thats good. So for a religious organization is trying to grow and help people or a charity or a nonprofit, to think that this is going to work. Thats probably an indispensable foundation. At the same time you are thinking what can go wrong. In terms of leaders heres the risk. If the leader indicates a firm view at the outset that this is risk number one that can squelch the creativity and innovation as well as the mix that you want in your group. So if you have a leader who is superb but it is declarative or early on that can be very bad in terms of eliciting information. One of our most successful president s whether you like his politics or his politics or not is Franklin Donna was about. He was famous for giving everyone in sight of his own government is sense that he agreed with them or early on even if they had quite opposing views. Some of his advisers forced done at the moment of the decision that roosevelt indicated great sympathy with their view actually thought they were full of nonsense. The reason he did that was you wanted to be a good manager and give everyone room to give their own ideas and develop them. One way a good leader can overcome the creativity and innovation squelching character of stating a view is not too stated view. So to be very quiet so to speak at the outset and to be eliciting views with a sense of sympathetic curiosity. In government i observed that some of the best people are really great at that. They didnt give people a sense that they were stupid. They didnt give people a sense that they were on the wrong track until the time of decision when they would not say they were stupid but they would say we need to go another way. I will tell you a story about president obama. It was an early meeting involving what to do about the American Car Companies and famously help them and things are going well and he made the right decision. At one of those meetings the youngest person in the room the person with the lowest status made a comment that didnt go to the core of the issue but an important subsidiary issue in the mixed up the letters that were forming some government term. So instead of an gp he said pgn or Something Like that. Everybody in the room laughed and then people started to walk out. The hour was up on the ground that was a funny mistake he made made. The poor guy was very reaction on what the president said was and the reason that was terrific was not the obvious one which it was kindness to the person who is young but the person who was young with low status was really smart. If that person said something today whether or not he got the letters right they had an idea and the person wanted everyone around to hear the idea. That is i think good leadership. It wasnt clear by the way. Host he just wanted to know what it was. Guest good leaders often think silence is golden. Thats very simple to implement. Host okay so if you are the leader and you want to hear others views but you also know the person who speaks the earliest or one of the earliest tends to have a lot of influence in their opinions. Who do you get the flu the floor to first . Guest thats great and it does suggest the importance of leaders thinking of that. If a leader is pretty clear early on justifiably clear on what the right course of action is then there are two smart things you can do that are very different. One is to pick the person you think states the correct view. That will issue say anchored the discussion at a certain place and create what you are stipulating for good reasons is probably right without having and creating a strawman for the rest of the group to target. That can be a smart strategy. It has a risk which is the leader knows that i myself am infallible i am directing the person who shares my fallible belief to start that could be squelching. So a creative alternative is to pick the person you think is both able and let them talk first. I have seen the private sector sometimes the second strategy be used by good managers who deliberately select the person they think is on the wrong track not because all Things Considered that is incorrect to make sure that he was highlighted and gets the full airing. Its a little like what roosevelt did in signaling disagreement with positions that he thought were entirely wrong. Another thing a leader can do by the way doesnt involve sequencing is to formally or less formally something that assigns roles to people. Something i found in government that initially found very jarring was differences as there will forever be empress of government that have different institutional responsibilities. The Environmental Protection agency are concerned about the environment. They are not first and foremost on Economic Growth. The department of agriculture is focused on farmers. That is what there just is. Apartment transportation is focused on the transportation sector. Sometimes there is a government term, one of the dozens and jargon called equities which does have its familiar sense of fairness is. It means the Environmental Protection agency will have its equities meaning environment and the department of transportation will have its equities in the transportation sector. Host is almost a concept of stakeholders. Guest yes they concept of stakeholders. Initially it didnt seem harmful because you want everyone thinking what is best but its actually really productive in the groups opposing that everyone gets to talk because of the group leader is doing business right they have different rules feeling entirely free to say what they know so the department of agriculture will think we are talking about the interest in they wont besides those and they wont think im going to shut up because lets say the department of energy has a view about energy. We are talking about farmers and thats what we know in the Environmental Protection agency even if it doesnt capture the entirety of the Public Interest may have important equities so to speak in the effects on clean air and clean water and the beauty of that and this is no unique animal to the federal government but the beauty of it is after it ends the reigns of informational inputs that the brown gets his very wide. People havent been identified as you are this department are that department. So what a leader can do thats less formal than not a Syndicate Look i know you have these expertise. You have this expertise and you have th