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| Photo credit: Christina-Wocintechchat |
Last week, one of my sisters posted her new hairstyle on our
WhatsApp group. How do I look? She asked. Within a minute my other sisters had
posted Wow! Nice! Chic! Fantastic. All the good words. My sister’s natural hair
is long and silky so when she put a short weave, I thought Oh no! It looked
bulgy, rough and seemed to be weighing a tonne on her. But guess what, I put up
a thumbs-up emoji for her. Perhaps you have done that too before? Told someone
something completely different from what you felt or thought? Perhaps not. But
what does my sister’s hairstyle have to do with you? Just like I shared a false
opinion with her not contradict my other sisters, so sometimes we go along to
get along with the majority.
In my research I sought to find out: was there a name to that kind
of behavior and what would be the consequences of that behavior to an
organization? In 1974, Jerry Harvey, a professor of management science at the
George Washington University went out together with his family through the
sweltering heat of Texas 170 kilometers away to catch a bite in a town known as
Abilene. On returning home, each of the four family members discovered that
none of them had really wanted to go but had tagged along with the presumption
that the other had wanted to go. The fact that four sensible people provided an
opinion opposite to their true thoughts and feelings led professor Harvey to
study the behavior. He termed it the Abilene Paradox and from his research, it
affected up to eighty percent of employees in an organization.
So what makes an organization to be caught up in a situation where
it collectively makes a decision contrary to the thoughts and feelings of
individuals? According to Prof. Harvey, people naturally want to belong in a
group. People also assume that there could be repercussions for sharing
alternative ideas. During one of my meetings with an organization that
advocated for social justice, one speaker listed rape as a minor offense. My
eyes popped-out, my head boiled, I wanted to shout. But wait! no one else
seemed to have noticed and I imagine contradicting a popular colleague would
have caused me alienation. I shut up embarrassed and let it pass.
The Abilene paradox can have serious consequences on organizational
resources. In a project I was part of, our team developed a mobile phone app to
help communities report social injustices. The initiative was great as it would
have saved the organization travel costs. The project was set for piloting with
2,000 with a benevolent fund of twenty thousand US dollars. This included funds
for software development and community training. Over coffee, my colleague and
I noted a huge gap. Many of the women had basic phones with no space for the
forty MB app. But we dared not to dampen the team’s spirit. The project was in
the final stages and the team was excited about it. But as you can imagine, the
fifty-thousand-dollar project failed at the piloting stage.
Rooting out the Abilene Paradox keep teams motivated and take ownership
of work projects. Rossbeth Canter, a professor at Harvard Business School
suggests one-way managers can encourage team members to express what they
really think is to present them with two or three options. And then allow them
to analyze the pros and cons of each option and come up with a collective
decision. Rossbeth further suggests that when running a project, managers must
include checkpoints to permit their project team to pause, regroup, and consult
before moving forward. Todd Ballowe suggests that managers should assign
leadership roles to different team members for diverse ideas and create avenues
to voice an opinion. This include talking to people on one on one, creating an
anonymous hotline or conducting a private vote.
Frank A Clark
says and I quote, "we find comfort among those who agree with us and growth
among those who don’t." Organizations hire people like you and I for our unique
knowledge and expertise. That expertise goes to waste when we hold back
opinions when key decisions are being made. I
now take steps to voice my opinions more backing them up with data. Why not take
up the challenge too. You never know, you could save your organization twenty thousand dollars.
