Australian professionals are experienced and well-educated yet put them in meetings with clear objectives, agendas to address, or problems to solve and peculiar behaviours start to manifest.
The Ringelmann effect suggests that the more people in a meeting the less value they contribute. Max Ringelmann discovered in the 1880s that as more people pulled on a rope, they increased the total force but the effort made by each individual reduced.
Thinking inside the box
Each individual in the meeting will perceive issues differently. The engineer sees a technical problem to solve, the lawyer sees conflict, the accountant sees cost, and the PR person sees messaging. The French call this déformation professionnelle —professional training distorts the way we see the world. This is similar to occupational psychosis—a specialised way of thinking that develops from a person’s daily work routine.
When the solutions start getting tabled we see further behaviours appearing. Someone suggests we use the same technique that was used for the last meetings. This is Maslow’s hammer (or the law of the instrument)—“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
Or there is the solution that everyone knows and has used so they can’t see anything better—this is the Einstellung effect. American psychologist Abraham Luchins named this behaviour in 1942. Einstellung is German for a setting or disposition, and Luchins used it for the mental “set” that develops when a familiar solution prevents us seeing a better one. He demonstrated it with a water-jar puzzle—after repeatedly teaching people one way to measure a quantity of water using three different-sized jars, they kept using the same method even when simpler solutions would have worked.
Or perhaps the most memorable example determines the answer—the availability heuristic. A heuristic simply means a mental shortcut–so in this case the answer of solution that first springs to mind gets more weight than other more appropriate solutions.
Expertise is not a limiting factor
Sometimes expertise can hold a meeting back. Thorstein Veblen called this trained incapacity—the training that makes us exceptionally capable in one situation can make us less capable in another. For example, a technical expert may be so accustomed to solving the technical problem that they are unable to recognise that the problem may be in how to explain the solution.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson in his 1957 book Parkinson’s Law: Or The Pursuit Of Progress described a scenario where a committee approved an enormously complex and expensive atomic reactor very quickly because they didn’t understand the issues before spending inordinately more time discussing a bicycle shed. This became known as bikeshedding (or Parkinson’s law of triviality). Parkinson also famously argued that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Competency requirements for meetings
Unfortunately, for the world and for the workplace, being able to understand a subject isn’t a prerequisite for making decisions about it. BOGSATT (Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around The Table) is used where men of questionable ability, experience, or knowledge make important decisions.
There may be an ultracrepidarian in your meeting offering strong opinions on subjects on which they have absolutely no expertise. The much-quoted Dunning–Kruger effect suggests that a lack of knowledge of a subject may make it harder for someone to recognise the limits of their knowledge.
Then the boss speaks. A silly idea now sounds considerably more impressive. Authority bias helps here, as does the HiPPO effect—the higher influence of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. In 2006, Dylan Lewis at software company, Intuit, coined HiPO, for highest paid opinion. His colleague Avinash Kaushik passed it on to Microsoft’s Ron Kohavi, whose team added another P to make highest paid person’s opinion. With the obvious hippopotamus reference, Microsoft distributed thousands of hippo stress toys to signal that evidence-based decisions should trump the boss’s opinion.
Soon everybody stops critically testing the decision in order to preserve the consensus—groupthink. Or, more strangely, everybody agrees because they mistakenly think everyone else agrees—the Abilene paradox. American management professor Jerry Harvey coined the Abilene paradox after a family visit to Coleman, Texas. On a brutally hot afternoon, his father-in-law suggested driving 85 kilometres north to Abilene for dinner. Nobody wanted to go, but everybody thought everybody else did.
These are descriptions of behaviours that may make intelligent people make unintelligent decisions. Which probably describes most meetings.