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| Dangers in the comfort zone |
| Vikram Johri / Feb 15, 2012, 00:06 IST |
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When, in 2005, Aaron Krowne, a researcher at Emory University, was issued an ultimatum by his landlord to either let go of his apartment in Atlanta or buy it, he asked around. Everyone advised him to buy it. But when he did the math, he knew something was wrong. He’d have to get an exotic loan (well, they were hugely popular at the time) and he wasn’t sure he could repay. He declined the offer and quit the apartment. By the end of 2006, the American subprime crisis had begun to unravel.
Margaret Heffernan calls people such as Krowne Cassandras, whistleblowers who see the truth before anyone else does or acknowledges. Part of the reason Krowne escaped the wilful blindness that seemed to afflict everyone else was his outsider status. He was a math researcher at Emory and his way of arriving at the decision to not buy was a buy-vs-rent analysis that’s the starting point of every Fin 101 course. It paid off.
This, then, is the premise of Heffernan’s engaging book. Wilful blindness has left a string of detestable conquests in its wake: the FBI ignoring warnings about 9/11; the BP oil spill; Fukushima; Enron; Satyam. The list grows bigger and bigger. One must ask: how much were these scandals the result of stakeholders looking askance at what they knew to be true, simply to avoid rocking the boat? And how much were they the result of genuine oversight?
Heffernan offers a series of explanations to clear the air. We live in an age of information overload, and it is simply impossible to process all the information we receive. We like to have father figures who can guide us and cushion the blows that impede our growth. If those leaders then do things that do not look right, our blinkers –and there are many: love, ideology, respect, tradition – refuse to let us acknowledge the real deal.
Conforming is comfortable, Heffernan says, and it has a scientific basis too. She cites a 2005 experiment, also conducted at Emory University (no relation to Krowne’s research), in which volunteers were asked to compare objects and their resultant brain activity was studied. In one version of the experiment, the volunteer decided on his own whether or not the two objects were similar. In another, he decided after he had been informed what other volunteers had said.
No prizes for guessing, most volunteers went along with what others before them had said. But here is the thing. When they conformed, there was no activity in the prefrontal cortex, the site of conscious decision-making. Rather the activity was in the occipital and parietal regions of the brain, regions concerned with perception. In other words, volunteers seemed to be confirming not out of conscious choice but out of a different way of seeing itself.
So if humans have a natural disposition to wilful blindness, as the case seems to be, how does one escape its menace? Heffernan provides solutions. Too often leaders seek and encourage yes-men who toe their line and offer vapid commiseration. Heffernan baulks at what this can do to organisational culture and employees’ ability/willingness to offer unpopular advice. She advises leaders to inject “artificial discontinuity” into their working environments — phases of confusion and rudderless leadership that force people to relook set processes and come out with new ideas.
Will it work? I am not so sure. Running an organisation is a massively onerous task as it is. Why make it more bothersome by injecting needless commotion? Why not target education? As a student at a B-school right now, I can wax eloquent on the inability of our current education system to develop critical thinking. In India particularly, because of the grip of the government on institutes of excellence such as the IITs and IIMs, the debate on higher education comes to rest on the demand for autonomy and how that ties in with accountability and the need for these institutes to maintain their brand equity.
But how much, and how often, do these places encourage thinking and self-learning? The routine of regular end-term exams ensures that most students are in the race for better marks since that affects their CGPAs and, ultimately, their chances come placement time. No wonder business so often finds itself in the grips of groupthink, leading to disaster.
It might make better sense to improve the way learning is imparted in our schools, something to which Heffernan briefly alluded. Catch them young, let them challenge, don’t push stuff down their gullets... Do all this and hopefully we will have better, more perceptive, less wilfully blind leaders tomorrow. Or maybe not. We can try all we want and prophesy all we like but I have a suspicion we will continue to be fooled by our natural tendencies to get the better of us. But at least we can try!
WILFUL BLINDNESS: WHY WE IGNORE THE OBVIOUS AT OUR PERIL
Margaret Heffernan
Simon & Schuster
391 pages; Rs 399
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