Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making

"Our natural tendency to maintain silence and not rock the boat, a flaw at once personal and organizational, results in bad—sometimes deadly—decisions. Think New Coke, The Bay of Pigs, and the Columbia space shuttle disaster, for starters. Here's how leaders can encourage all points of view."

That's how Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson describes her paper "Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making."

In this and other papers she describes how a culture of fear and anxiety in American business organizations effectively suppresses both dissent and innovation, resulting in deadening places to work that are not competitive and neither agile nor adaptive.

A good paper of hers that is not listed there is "Speaking Up in the Operating Room: How Team Leaders Promote Learning in Interdisciplinary Action Teams", Journal of Management Studies 40:6, September 2003. Here she follows up the same thread of work that got Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins the Eisenberg award -- figuring out how to let nurses be heard when they saw something that was out of place in the operating room, where historically their voice was neither welcomed nor heard.

As with the Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22-100), the challenge for organizational revitalizing coaches is to disentangle the lines of authority (meaning command) from the lines of authority (meaning confirmed knowledge or eyes from boots on the ground.)

The elitist British culture in the 1800's gave us a management model where the human beings in "management" were considered genetically superior to the other life forms called "labor", giving management unique skills to have a monopoly on all wisdom and thereby deserve all authority.

In the 21st century, organizations are so large, so rapidly changing, and so complex that the sources of wisdom have to be eyes at the front, and "management" is always playing catch-up with a legacy mental model that is running behind. The "higher" up the chain of command managers are, the more removed they are from the reality at the front.

General Colin Powell said once that, if a General in Washington and a soldier at the front-line disagreed on a fact, he'd side with the soldier as having more current information.

The problem is that, with authority-type-1 (power to issue legitimate orders to others) tangled up with authority-type-2 (sight and possibly insight as to what's going on in the real world), management too often perceives a challenge to authority-type-2 as an insubordinate challenge to authority-type-1, and quickly moves to "put down the rebellion."

The result is to blind upper management entirely, which now lives in a mental model detached from reality, spinning off out of control and clueless as to why their actions are proving ineffective or counter-productive, since, by their understanding of the situation out there, what they are doing should have worked.

Anyway, the military has worked this out, at least the concept, and FM22-100 is a superb description of how an organization can retain authority-type-1 (central command) and open up and delegate authority-type-2 (new eyes with surprising news that may totally revise the picture of what's going on outside.)

Other organizations, such as hospitals, might be able to learn something from how the Army figured out how to disentangle those two concepts.

In my mind, it is simply a "vertical loop" where there are two pipes, not one. Commands come down one pipe from above, and news about reality, particular surprising news that central command's picture of the ground needs updating, go up a different pipe, and the two not only don't interfere, but form a loop that makes them amplify each other.

This is a single cybernetic loop, a "clothesline loop over a pulley at each end" and the more each side PULLS on it, the more the other side goes the direction they want it go to.

So, the guys on the ground have to PULL on the rope, and willing accept orders from above, while at the same time the guys on the top have to PULL on the other side of the rope, and willingly accept updates to their mental model of the situation from below.

The whole thing breaks down if either side fails to do their job. If Generals issue orders, but never listen to what the result was, the result is always defeat on the battlefield. If soldiers want a say in what's going on and being decided to do next, but don't want to listen to the resulting stream of orders, that breaks down too.

But if both sides do their jobs, soldiers listen to orders (authority-1, the down-going rope), and generals listen to soldiers (authority-2, the up-going rope), then after a transitional period where trust is being built and this is becoming "phase-locked" and synchronized, we have the full power of cybernetic control available to the organization -- the best of both worlds.

The transitional period to this model can be helped, I think, if what "lean" calls "the final state" is clear to everyone in advance. Lean production thinking ("The Toyota Way") is described by people such as Professor Jeff Liker very strongly based on "philosophy", a term that is largely discounted and meaningless to Americans today.

A better word, the word used in FM22-100, is "Doctrine". That word also has a bad flavor to American culture that worships "freedom", but some kinds of freedom are in the way of success. Runners with rigid bones can move faster than jellyfish. It's a nuanced subject, this rigor versus local-rigidity-with-pivots. But, even more so than "doctrine" come the other dreaded words - "discipline" and "standards."

The US Army has worked its way through those nuances, disentangled the different meanings of authority, and, to the extent their doctrine of accepting both command from above and "dissenting views and challenges to the model" from below is utilized, they are basically unstoppable in their mission.

They can still be defeated if their Doctrine is broken by leaders at the top who want to pick and choose, keeping the "giving orders to below" part, but discarding the "getting updates from below" part. That's not a failure of the Doctrine, it's a failure to follow the Doctrine.

The cybernetic "clothesline" only works if the up channel and down channel are both working and mutually supportive. Some of the first orders downward have to be "send more dissent upwards! We can't hear you!"

This is the nature of the problem that Professor Amy Edmondson researches, that started this post. How to overcome fear of speaking up and empower workers to dissent.

But, use nuances please. Dissent-type-1 (disagreeing with the mental model) needs to be ENcouraged. Dissent-type-2 (disagreeing with a command structure existing or my role in complying with it) is to be DIScouraged, as always.

The command structure gains credibility and strength to the extent that the commands reflect good judgment based on good data, and the only source of the data are the boots on the ground at the front. If the soldiers keep their place (and listen to commands) and the generals keep their place (and listen to advice), it comes together and works.

The most common mode of failure appears to be generals who mistake a fraudulent silence, caused by suppression of dissent-type-1, as agreement with their mental model, and then keep on issuing orders that are detached from reality, resulting in contempt for the whole system and ultimately a collapse in the command structure entirely, let alone a military defeat.

======== afterward

I realized after I posted this that many middle-class suburban children have never actually seen a clothes-line these days. They've grown up with gas or electric dryers, and clothes-lines are prohibited as being tacky or lower-class by suburban Covenants and Restrictions for housing developments.

So, I put a picture of one above. (source: Blessings in the South.) It was remarkably hard to find this picture. This seems to be a "simple machine" of incredible importance for insight that today's generations don't even have in their mental toolbox or vocabulary.

For those who have never seen this in action, there is a loop of rope strung between two pulleys, one on each end attached to poles. In the picture above the lady has three such loops.
She stands in one place and hangs a sheet, say, over one side of the rope, clips it on with clothespins, and then pulls the other side of the loop toward her, which pulls the sheet she just hung away from her, opening up a new spot for the next thing to be hung. That way she doesn't have to move the basket of clothes or herself.

The rule of thumb, of course, is that "You can't push with a rope." Yet, with a loop of rope, effectively you CAN push with a rope, by pulling.

This is the magic of the vertical management loop in the Army Doctrine. To "push" your advice upwards, which is "impossible" as it is pushing on a rope, you "pull" on the commands coming downward. And at the top, to "push" your commands downward (also seemingly impossible), you clear the way by "pulling" the reactions and comments from the troops upwards.

Neither side can cheat here - the rope has to be continuous, and trust in it has to build over time, but then, this model actually does work for the US Army. They can balance very strict command with very good intelligence, overcoming the old saw that "army intelligence" was an oxymoron.

The same principle could, in principle, be applied to government in general ("government intelligence") and corporate management in general. The same rules apply. If both sides do their jobs, it works, and victory is possible. If either side only wants to "push" and doesn't want to "pull", the whole thing breaks down and becomes dysfunctional and defeat is likely.