1986 was an unforgettable year in the history of the United States space program. That was the time when the space shuttle Challenger broke in midair after only 73 seconds in flight resulting in the death of all seven astronauts on board. After several months of an investigation, authorities discovered the cause of the disaster was the O-ring seals in the shuttle’s rocket booster.

Earlier on, space engineers foresaw what would happen. The type of O-ring seals was not appropriate for use in an extreme cold temperature at the time of the launching. They recommended that the seals be redesigned but failed to get any response from their managers who thought many tests had already been done before.

In the corporate world, how many recommendations have been made by ordinary workers that are routinely ignored by their managers that resulted in disasters? The obvious answer can be described in one word — grim. Whatever way you look at it, there are many managers around us who continue to ignore the ideas of their people for some malevolent reasons.

These managers are in the category of command-and-control type. In short, they’ve dictatorial tendencies. I found the validity of this conclusion when I facilitated an exclusive kaizen problem-solving workshop for a medium-size enterprise. The face-to-face one-day workshop went on with 12 participants grouped into three teams.

Each team is led by a real work-life manager who acts as advisers. After a brief introduction about the basic principles, the workshop process went on with problem identification, followed by the generation of solutions, with a bias on choosing only inexpensive options. As I eavesdropped on the teams’ discussion, I noticed there were two manager-advisers who dominated the discussion in their respective teams instead of facilitating the process.

It was not the right approach and yet the three teams were successful in identifying many opportunities that amounted to almost $1 million! That was excellent work done on the monetary side. I was hopeful they could have gained more in terms of the unquantifiable side by building self-confidence and maximizing the leadership potentials of their workers.

‘Groupthink’

I’m not familiar with the culture of this organization. Besides, it could go both ways. Maybe the team members trust their manager-advisers so much they don’t bother to challenge their ideas. Or maybe, they’re fearful of their bosses. Some people could have played it safe by not challenging the ideas of their managers.

Whatever was their reason, I can’t understand why some of them failed to take heed of my advice to play the role of a facilitator, fact-checker and devil’s advocate in a rotating, active manner. These are the important roles that everyone must play regardless of their role in the organization. I was tempted to remind them of their various roles, but I prevented myself from embarrassing people that could have disrupted the process.

Irving Lester Janis (19181990), former research psychologist at Yale University and professor emeritus at the University of California, coined the term “groupthink” for describing the most common mistakes made by teams in the process of making a collective decision. Janis explained it as a “deterioration of mental efficiency.”

At times, it’s better to have a team consensus than be paralyzed by indecision or endless debates. Under “groupthink,” cohesion is given the utmost priority over conflict that could have troubled the teams from coming out with their best recommendation, especially when they’re given only around 40 minutes to tackle complex operational issues in our kaizen workshop.

At times, “groupthink” could be justified when an emergency situation calls for it.

Financial Times columnist and associate editor Stephen Bush says there’s something good about “groupthink” under certain situations. “An organizational blunder caused by groupthink may well be better than the paralysis caused by its absence.”

Questions

Next week, we’ll be starting with the second batch of participants via an online mode. This time, we’ll work on a three-week schedule divided into three hours per meeting or a total of nine hours in all. There are five teams given one week each team to process their thoughts. Would they still be victimized by “groupthink” if they’ve enough time?

I can’t wait to see and hear ordinary workers taking up the leadership role in kaizen problem-solving and decisionmaking. That’s the whole point of industrial democracy — to allow the people at the bottom of the pyramid to be empowered and engaged by management. At Toyota, they call it “Respect for People” strategy.

Now, looking back at the potential opportunities of close to $1 million that they’ve identified before. What if the opportunities were more than $1 million, if ordinary workers were allowed to prove themselves as leaders? Or what if the manager-advisers were like the fumbling managers of the US space program who ignored the recommendation of their engineers?

We don’t know. To know the answers, the following questions should be asked by managers to their workers, particularly the passive ones: What do you think? What are we missing in the process? How could we do it much better than before? The rule is the same when we ask for a favor. If we don’t ask, the answer is always “no.”