Can the hard man of Brexit fix corporate groupthink?

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Just before Steve Baker joined the long list of Conservative party MPs who lost their seats in the UK’s July election, a journalist asked him what he would do if he ended up leaving politics.

Without hesitating, the former Royal Air Force engineer and self-identified “Brexit hard man” said he would be skydiving, motorcycling and “fast catamaran sailing”.

This was interesting, especially for those of us who had never imagined there was such a thing as slow catamaran sailing. But it turns out Baker also had another plan in mind: teaching businesses how to avoid the perils of groupthink.

He has just launched a consultancy called The Provocation People with Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, which aims to help firms promote fruitful internal disagreement.

The idea behind their venture is partly personified by the partnership between Baker, who once said the EU should be “wholly torn down”, and Dolan, who has never voted Tory and would on balance prefer the UK had stayed in the EU.

“I’m supping with the devil here!” said Baker when I spoke to the pair last week. “We’ve both got friends who wonder what on earth we’re doing.”

In fact, the two share significant libertarian tendencies: they first met when Dolan got in touch to discuss a mutual suspicion of Covid lockdowns and went on to co-author a newspaper article criticising the idea of vaccine passports. 

Still, I suspect any over-egging of their differences will be the least of the problems they face.

More than 50 years have passed since the late US research psychologist Irving Janis came up with the theory of groupthink to explain how a team of clever people could make diabolically bad decisions.

He studied foreign policy disasters like the US failure to anticipate Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the botched US Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

But his idea was soon being studied in business schools because it seemed obvious that the human urge for consensus meant companies, not just militaries, could also suffer from groupthink. 

The problem has indeed been blamed for multiple corporate disasters, from the Volkswagen dieselgate scandal to the collapse of Switzerland’s Swissair airline and the downfall of the Lehman Brothers bank.

Yet groupthink persists. Baker and Dolan are just the latest entrants in a crowded field of advisers who have yet to eradicate the conundrum.

Some reasons for this have been well documented. Making better decisions can eat up time that people lack. It also tends to be easier to manage a team of like-minded individuals.

I suspect some leaders also prefer not to have their own views challenged by too much diversity of thought. I was reminded of this by a recent chat with a boss at a company with several thousand employees who said he made sure top managers knew he would change his mind if they presented a better idea than the one he had been pushing.

There are plenty of reasons to keep trying to fix the groupthink problem, as economists Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Paul Swartz make clear in their book, Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk.

The last four years alone have brought a string of false alarms, from fears that Covid was about to usher in a new Depression to the idea that digital lockdown economy stars like Zoom would deliver outsized productivity boosts.

Firms that took such beliefs seriously risked harm, which is why the authors argue for “economic eclecticism”, or a mindset free of any particular theory or school of thought that offered a single answer to risk assessment.

With this in mind, I asked Baker what sort of groupthink he thought his Conservative party was suffering from as it faced yet another leadership race after its disastrous election loss.

“It’s impatience,” he said, explaining a rush for quick answers to complex, deep-seated economic and social problems underpinned the debacle of Liz Truss’s shortlived leadership.

And could he and Dolan suffer from any groupthink themselves? Baker paused before admitting it was possible they both suffer from a misguided belief that lots of people need to break out of groupthink.

“Perhaps there are firms out there who already are extremely good at adversarial collaboration,” he said. “I haven’t seen much evidence.”

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