Seven More Planning Pitfalls: I

In the first three posts in this series, I described seven thought patterns that cause individual planners to think in ways that lead to plans with inherent weaknesses. These phenomena influence planners even when planners have enough time and resources to execute the planning exercise. They include widely held but inapplicable beliefs, several cognitive biases, and several organizational influences. But for plans devised by teams, there are additional effects that cause trouble as well. These phenomena are related to how teams think collectively. Let's begin with Group Polarization and Trips to Abilene.

Group polarization

Group polarization is the tendency of groups to adopt positions more extreme than any of their members would adopt if acting individually. When group members learn that their own more radical inclinations are shared by other group members, they tend to assess those inclinations as validated. This experience propagates through the group, in an emergent fashion, each member influencing the others, until the more radical position is firmly held by all. Members then feel comfortable abandoning any remaining reluctance or doubt.

Planning teams are susceptible to group polarization. For example, when assessing risks for particular options, they must make judgments as a group. Judging a risk as high or low can determine whether or not they adopt a particular plan option. Other vulnerable judgments include vendor selection, staff assignments, effort estimates — almost anything the team must decide.

Secret ballots provide one approach to mitigating group polarization. But the safety secret ballots provide is limited, because the team must necessarily engage in open discussion. For protection in open discussion, the team can appoint a "Curmudgeon Team" to oppose radical positions as they appear. Read about curmudgeon teams.

Trips to Abilene

In an insightful work, The Abilene Paradox, Jerry Harvey describes how a group can commit to a course that no group member favors. [Harvey 1988] When a group takes a "trip to Abilene," nobody feels that the group is behaving sensibly. Because they all feel that everyone else favors the group's choice, no one questions it openly. The group then takes action that no member agrees with.

Planning teams, like all teams, are susceptible to the Abilene Paradox. They are especially susceptible when one of the team members is much more influential or powerful than the others. For the moment, call that person Gandalf. If Gandalf makes an off-hand comment that others interpret as a statement of preference, they might express support for it. And in an analogy to Group Polarization, the entire group might adopt Gandalf's idea enthusiastically, even though no one is enthusiastic about it. But unlike Group Polarization, the idea might not be radical. In some sense a trip to Abilene can be the "meh" form of Group Polarization.

To a Group polarization and trips
to Abilene are examples of
emergent group behavior that
can lead to unworkable planslimited extent, groups can inoculate themselves against trips to Abilene by learning about the phenomenon and then adopting an intervention protocol consisting of three steps: noticing your own doubts, inquiring when you're uneasy, and checking for the Abilene itinerary. Read more about trips to Abilene.

Three other emergent phenomena that lead groups astray are False Consensus, Groupthink, and Shared Information Bias. We'll explore how they can affect planners next time.   Next issue in this series 

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Footnotes

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More articles on Cognitive Biases at Work:

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When a project team decides to accept a risk, and when their project eventually experiences that risk, a natural question arises: What were they thinking? Cognitive biases, other psychological phenomena, and organizational dysfunction all can play roles.

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Lessons Not Learned: I

The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias that causes us to underestimate the cost and effort involved in projects large and small. Mitigating its effects requires understanding how we go wrong when we plan projects by referencing our own past experience.

See also Cognitive Biases at Work and Cognitive Biases at Work for more related articles.

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The Storming stage of Tuckman's development sequence for small groups is when the group explores its frustrations and degrees of disagreement about both structure and task. Only by understanding these misalignments is reaching alignment possible. Here is a framework for this exploration. Available here and by RSS on January 29.

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