Extract Wisdom from “Weirdos”
How to cultivate rebel-friendly cultures in group settings
Everything seemed normal on October 25, 1994, as U.S. Navy combat pilot Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen attempted to land her F-14A Tomcat on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The weather was clear, and as Hultgreen made her final turn a mere mile away from landing, her plane’s engines were both working fine. But something happened during her final approach. Her left engine malfunctioned, and Hultgreen overshot the landing area’s yellow centerline. Her plane turned over to the left, and to compensate Hultgreen caused it to roll over into the Pacific Ocean. Seated behind her, Lieutenant Matthew Klemish initiated the ejection sequence for Hultgreen and himself. Klemish escaped with his life. A fraction of a second later, Lieutenant Hultgreen’s seat ejected downward, directly into the Pacific Ocean. She died on impact.
As horrible and tragic as it was, the accident also embroiled the navy in a major political controversy. The year before, over the objections of senior military leaders, Congress repealed decades-old legislation that excluded women from military combat positions. Pressured to comply, the navy’s brass implemented a plan to activate the service’s first female combat pilot by the end of 1994. That was Hultgreen. Now that she had perished, everyone wanted to know why. Were women ill-suited for combat, as some male voices in the military argued? Had the navy rushed Hultgreen into a combat setting too quickly without the proper training? Or had she merely been the unlucky victim of equipment failure?
The navy’s top legal authority, the Judge Advocate General, released an official accident report blaming equipment failure for Hultgreen’s death. But in March 1995, someone leaked an internal investigation performed by the Navy Safety Council. Its conclusion: pilot error caused Hultgreen’s death. A naval officer, Captain Patrick Burns, blew the case wide open, leaking Hultgreen’s confidential training records to an independent organization, the Center for Military Readiness. The center in turn shared this information with the press. As those records showed, the navy had dealt more leniently with her during training than it had with other would-be fighter pilots. When a male pilot underwent training and received a down or disqualification for failing to land a plane successfully, they typically received two more chances before expulsion. Lieutenant Hultgreen’s training transcript showed evidence of four downs.
A skeptic might feel tempted to write off Burns as an unreconstructed misogynist who never believed Hultgreen had what it took to fly combat missions. Without doubt, Lieutenant Hultgreen and other women met with considerable resistance in the navy, including hostility from male officers. Some officers didn’t appreciate the media attention bestowed upon Lieutenant Hultgreen, with journalists often on base watching her. Some officers held strong beliefs about women’s inferiority to men. Even when male officers weren’t overtly misogynistic, many didn’t know how to talk and act around women. “I think it’s a mistake to open up bombers and fighters to women,” testified General Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force Chief of Staff at a 1993 meeting of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. “I have a culturally based hang-up: I can’t get over this image of old men ordering young women into combat.”
Other conditions also made life harder for female pilots. For example, the navy’s equipment was ill-suited for their bodies. Nearly everything in the cockpit was designed to fit the physical dimensions of men, who on average are 4.7 inches taller than women and have hands 0.8 inches longer. Women will have a harder time piloting safely when equipment is not designed for their bodies such as the seat height, shoulder and back support, distance to the pedals and stick, and distance between control panel buttons.
Lieutenant Hultgreen didn’t want anyone to bend the navy’s standards for her or other women. She just wanted a fair chance. “I don’t think the navy owes women a career path. I think the point is that they should want the best person for the job,” she said. “If people let me slide through on a lower standard, it’s my life on the line. I could get killed.” But this was precisely Burns’s argument. As he saw it, the navy let Lieutenant Hultgreen slide in on a lower standard because of the pressure leaders felt to mint its first female combat pilot. Burns supported gender integration so long as clear evidence existed of women’s combat readiness. He risked his twenty-eight-year military career to leak information because he saw no other way to push back against the political pressure the navy felt. “I owed it to the Navy,” he testified to the Naval Inspector General. “It’s a real disservice to the women who are out there who are doing a good job, that are fully capable of flying airplanes and fighting airplanes and dropping bombs on target. They’re being measured by a different yardstick than their male contemporaries. And that’s not fair to them. So this is not doing a service to anybody.”
We’ll never know for sure what caused Lieutenant Hultgreen’s death. What does seem clear is that the navy didn’t do enough to properly welcome the contributions of principled insubordinates—both pioneering female soldiers and a whistleblower like Burns. External political pressure won’t magically eradicate the biases and prejudices that make a group unwelcoming to minority groups. Likewise, you can’t expect people to serve as honest truth-tellers if an organization itself tries to hide important facts in an investigation. To make the most of principled insubordination, government agencies, companies, teams, and other groups must train people to think differently. They must intentionally design cultures in which stereotype-breaking mavericks such as Lieutenant Hultgreen receive a fair chance. They must also design cultures in which principled rebels like Captain Burns can openly express inconvenient facts without fearing punishment.
So many groups squelch the contributions of minority members, including principled insubordinates. Even groups that pride themselves on being “diverse” often fail to glean the expected benefits. Although demographic diversity receives a great deal of attention, researchers have found little relationship between such diversity in a group and its performance. Job-related diversity dimensions, such as a person’s educational background, years of experience, and functional knowledge and skills minimally impact group performance. It isn’t that diversity is useless. Rather, as researchers argue, “certain kinds of groups may be better able to capitalize on the advantages that diversity affords.” To increase a group’s ability to benefit from diversity of all kinds, including people who harbor ideas we might find “weird” or “strange,” we must abandon the idea that merely recruiting diverse individuals and adding them into the mix will enhance performance.
From there, we must probe the conditions that allow the presence of diverse people and viewpoints to work for us and them, and we must make cultural changes based on those conditions. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam and University of Kiel uncovered two powerful pathways for groups seeking to do a better job of welcoming non-conformists, extracting their wisdom, and enhancing the group’s performance. Let’s examine each, investigating how the navy might have encouraged a more honest and open investigation of Hultgreen’s death, or perhaps prevented it in the first place.
THE BIG IDEA
Diversity alone or the presence of non-conformists won’t magically supercharge performance in team settings. We must make cultural changes based on an understanding of what allows the presence of diverse people and viewpoints to work for us.
PATHWAY 1: CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT THAT ENCOURAGES EVERYONE TO CONTRIBUTE
Groups often fail to make the most of diversity because they struggle to extract knowledge from people on the margins. As a leader, you want your group to be tightly knit and cohesive, since that allows it to operate efficiently. With a sense of harmony and positivity, like-minded people can coordinate their thoughts and actions quickly—think firefighters seamlessly collaborating to arrive promptly at an emergency scene. Yet cohesion can impede principled rebels, who by definition think differently than the majority, from sharing their messages. It can also prevent other group members from considering those messages fairly. You can only access rebels’ valuable ideas—thereby enhancing the group’s ability to seek, conquer, think, learn, and create—if you treat rebels as uniquely valuable contributors and if you draw them out, elaborating on and improving their ideas. Otherwise, you won’t arrive at the best solutions, just the quickest. The group’s collective intelligence will suffer.
THE BIG IDEA
To maximize a group’s collective intelligence, build a culture that affirms certain values: autonomy, critical thinking, freedom of thought, and the desire to seek out useful information regardless of where it originates.
Psychologists call these values “epistemic motivation,” defined as the “willingness to expend effort to achieve a thorough understanding of the world, including the group task or decision problem at hand.” For a group to seek out creative solutions, group members must want to do something different and useful because old ways aren’t working. A group with strong epistemic motivation understands that a deep, systematic search for new possibilities is worth the effort.
Groups rarely extract wisdom from principled rebels if members already feel they possess the information needed to make a decision. But groups where epistemic motivation runs strong tend to look more kindly on non-conformist ideas. One study found that when people remembered epistemic motivation norms and wrote about past behaviors consistent with them, they viewed dissenters twice as positively compared with people who had focused on unity and cohesion as defining elements of the group. Groups that commit to epistemic motivation values perform better in problem-solving, creativity, and innovation, perhaps because they tease out and develop intriguing ideas from the weirdos and rebels among them.
How do you embed values associated with epistemic motivation into your culture? You can’t just proclaim them as norms—you must shape the thinking of individual members and influence how groups actually process information. Here are some specific practices to try:
If you’re leading a meeting, open by discussing how participants might best engage with others and their messages. Explicitly tell members what the group does and doesn’t value. Offer stories and examples to make abstract values more concrete and easier to replicate. Remind everyone that you want people who disagree with the majority. To maintain momentum, you want people to voice disagreement in a constructive manner. Clarify that disagreements require a fair hearing in which people seek knowledge and wisdom rather than attempt to validate their existing viewpoints. Do this every time.
Prominently display a list of behaviors for group members to keep in mind while speaking, listening, interacting, and during decision-making. You might, for instance, include a rule that each participant only receives three chances to speak per meeting unless someone specifically asks them to participate more so that they can share specialized knowledge. You want to prevent a few blabbermouths from dominating the conversation, making it easier for diverse voices to participate. Create a one-page handout for members to pick up, read, and sign before the group convenes.
To increase commitment to autonomy, critical thinking, and the search for new and useful information, ask people to list what they have done in the past or seen others do that is consistent with these values.
Ask group members to pair up and discuss behaviors they will adopt or avoid in meetings that will demonstrate commitment to each value. When you publicly commit to a specific course of action, you make adherence to values more likely.
Build in time for contemplation and deliberation. Reduce the pressure people feel to make decisions quickly.
Minimize the influence that status and power have on who speaks, how long they speak, and whose opinion matters most. Train high-status, popular group members to build off the comments of people who possess less status or power. Remind everyone that useful ideas can come from anyone. After a project or initiative has concluded, reinforce these norms by detailing exactly who shared ideas, had their ideas elaborated on, and as a result improved the final product.
As group conversations conclude, ask people to reflect on several questions: What was the most useful idea you learned from others today? What did you not fully understand that you could only clarify by asking someone else? What can you take from the information-gathering process that unfolded during the meeting to improve how you engage intellectually the next time? These reflections help people remember that the group is a process and that we can constantly improve and ensure we do not fall back into bad habits.
To embed epistemic motivation into the group dynamic, encourage team members to rely on their strengths as they go about their work and turn to differently abled team members for help in areas where they lack expertise. Combining the unique strengths and areas of expertise that reside in the group leads to the posing of more questions and the generation of more ideas. With a larger reservoir of resources at the team’s disposal, better, more creative solutions arise.
Of course, team members can only focus on their strengths and turn to others to round out their knowledge if an ethic of intellectual humility reigns. Your own humility and that of your team members spur on more inquiry into others’ knowledge. Relatedly, a group friendly to principled rebels tends to focus on outcomes rather than the means of obtaining those outcomes. Focused on results, group members will welcome principled rebels, since anyone who asks questions, offers helpful criticisms and counterarguments, and identifies overlooked solutions will improve the team. To promote and sustain intellectual humility, create an incentive structure that rewards group effort and productivity, offering instructions on how to cooperate (sharing what you know and what you can do best).
Promoting epistemic motivation instills a healthy culture, one in which people regard disagreement as a springboard to progress, and differences among group members as portals to new information and solutions. As scientists have found, you can further optimize decision-making in groups, leveraging the unique information that principled rebels carry, by combining epistemic motivation along with a prosocial orientation—the desire to work for the good of the group rather than just the self. In three separate studies, groups that produced the greatest number of possible ideas to solve a problem, the most original ideas, and the most frequent constructive disagreements embraced the values of autonomy and critical thinking instead of conformity and loyalty. Groups valuing autonomy and critical thinking direct their energy toward what would best help the group succeed (a prosocial orientation that was lacking in groups embracing conformity and loyalty).
PATHWAY 2: LOSE THE CLIQUES
Let’s say you’re one of just a few female pilots seeking to integrate into a large, preexisting group of male pilots. The male pilots view the females as outsiders and act, frankly, like jackasses. The women cope with the strain by bonding with one another and looking to one another as sources of support. Such bonding feels good, but it allows a potentially debilitating fissure to arise. The men feel justified in giving unfavorable treatment to newcomers who on the surface appear unwilling to integrate into the larger group. The women feel justified in wanting to work together as a subgroup, since they feel psychologically safe there to express distinct impressions and ideas for modifying the workplace environment. The loser from such “intergroup bias,” as psychologists call it, is the larger group, which has a harder time creating an environment in which non-conformists feel welcomed and empowered to contribute.
Does intergroup bias hobble your team? Ask yourself: Do some on your team physically distance themselves from others if left on their own? Do some exhibit closed body postures or whisper together when others in the group speak? Do some stop their friendly banter or change the subject when a person not in their subgroup appears? Do some tend to criticize or show cynicism toward others not in their subgroup? The presence of subgroup boundaries and social distancing diminishes a group’s ability to extract wisdom from weirdos, and in general, to deliver kick-ass performance. To counteract such boundaries, mobilize “debiasing strategies,” that, as one researcher put it, guide people “out of pattern recognition [or stereotyping] into a more analytic mode of thinking, providing a mental correction to optimize decision making.”
One such strategy is to instruct people in advance how to see past the usual in-group, out-group barriers to better empathize with others. In a laboratory experiment, Dr. Inga Hoever and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam assembled 77 three-person teams and asked them to organize a creative community theater production. With one set of teams, researchers established functional diversity by assigning each team member a specialized role: the artistic director was responsible for the creative reputation and quality of the plays; the financial manager for the theater’s financial success and profitability; and the event manager for making the visit to the theater enjoyable for audiences. Each group member received different information (location plan, schedule of plays, production costs, etc.) and a distinct viewpoint about what would make for a successful production, mimicking the functional diversity in an organization dealing with competing objectives. In a second team, the three team members lacked functional diversity—they collaborated with the same information but no role assignments. All teams had twenty minutes to develop a final creative action plan for the theater company while independent observers watched the group process unfold.
Researchers trained half of the groups in a low-cost strategy called “perspective-taking” that helped them to bridge the divide between people with varying interests (that is, the experiment had four groups: two (diverse vs. homogenous) times two (received perspective training or not). “Training” is perhaps a little generous here: members of these teams just received a one-pager about perspective-taking that coached them on how to best interact with others who were different from them and “view matters as if you were in the other person’s shoes.” The one-pager encouraged team members to consider what others cared about, why they conduct themselves as they do, and where the seeds of any disagreements lay.
The results were striking. Diverse groups didn’t perform better creatively than homogeneous groups. In fact, diverse groups receiving no instructions on how to relate to one another seemed to display the least amount of creative thinking, even lower than the groups that lacked functional diversity. But giving members of diverse groups a simple, one-page handout on perspective-taking enabled them to perform at the highest level creatively—twice as high as both the groups that lacked functional diversity and those that were diverse but hadn’t received instructions for how to work with diverse team members.
These findings add to other research showing that if you proactively anticipate differences in opinions, you are more liable to understand and appreciate the reason for disagreements. In one field study, researchers gave Israelis and Palestinians five-hour workshops on perspective-taking skills, including the ability to take on another person’s viewpoints and experience their emotions. They heard a story about a leader who failed to employ perspective-taking and how it hurt his relationships with employees, and they also learned about famous leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Steve Jobs who benefited from perspective-taking. Participants practiced perspective-taking during a simulated negotiation and learned how perspective-taking helped in places like Northern Ireland. At no point did the workshop address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the workshop, participants received weekly refreshers about perspective-taking that prompted them to think about how they were applying these skills. Researchers discovered that this single workshop led to a reduction of negative attitudes between Israelis and Palestinians, an increase in hopefulness that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could be resolved, and increases in conciliatory behavior—changes that persisted for six months afterward or longer.
We can enhance our perspective-taking by training ourselves to look at the world—and in particular, the contentions of non-conformists—more objectively. When we categorize a person as an “other,” we tend to seek out information that confirms that hypothesis, even though it actually helps us more to seek out evidence that clashes with our assumptions. If you believe a woman can’t serve as a navy combat pilot, you’ll selectively focus on data that seems to “prove” that they can’t and avoid contradictory information. Scroll through online forums for military personnel, and you’ll see confirmation bias at its ugliest. “We should dig up more examples of career-women crashing and burning (no pun intended) when propped up through affirmative action like this,” one comment reads. Another observes that, “Theres [sic] a few biological studies . . . that show females are inherently worse at spatial awareness (flying in 3d) and logic (comprehending the flight computers on f14s . . . or anything).” And these are the relatively innocuous comments.
Think about the meaning of these two comments. The first states that instead of trying to determine objectively whether men and women differ in piloting skill, we should only unearth cases that fit the “women are worse” story line. The second explicitly verifies that studies exist showing differences between men and women, with no concern for the quality of the research or its relevance. We humans love to be right, which means we’ll bust our butts to selectively find, ignore, and distort information that supports what we already think. We become even more entrenched in our intergroup biases and, as a team, less capable of extracting information from minorities and using it to improve.
THE BIG IDEA
