The Abilene paradox: Go along to get along?

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.