Last week I wrote about people on the barricades and it proved to be an unintentionally prescient reference for the week ahead. I’m going to declare this right up front: I’m a sports fan and my favourite leisure area provided one of the great case studies of all time this week on how to mismanage change. So, partly because there are interesting lessons to reflect on and partly because I want to get something off my chest, the topic of this week is the terrifying danger of groupthink. If you don’t like sport, don’t switch off, it’s not about the game, it’s about leadership.
If you really don’t pay any attention to anything that looks like it has to do with men or women chasing inflated spheres around on a patch of grass, this week saw the birth and death of the European Super League. 12 of the world’s richest football clubs (and that means uber rich) and one of the world’s most respectable banks managed, collectively, to make a public faux pas of such epic proportions that it united politicians of all persuasions, sworn eternal rival supporters, clubs, church, state, media and even the Royal Family in opposition. J.P.Morgan reputedly put up $3.8 billion to fund this fiasco and they are not famous for backing losing horses.
What on earth happened to allow these glitterati billionaires to fall into a groupthink that things would ‘settle down’ after their announcement to the effect that they were going to eviscerate the people’s game and set up a game of their own that none of them could ever lose? The response was so intense that the league lasted less than 48 hours, with many of the owners being forced into something uniquely humiliating: eating large mouthfuls of humble pie in public.
I promise you, I’m getting to the leadership piece but I’d like to share an insight into why this was so personal to so many people (setting aside the ‘not one thing more’ eruption of Covid suffering that was definitely mixed in there somewhere too).
In 1966, on the afternoon of July 30th, a chubby little boy was idling his way home from Saturday school, intent on his regular purchase of a quarter pound of fruit salads (a delectable raspberry and pineapple chew that would now nuke all of my fillings in one go) from the local shop. But when he got to the shop, he faced the unthinkable: the shop door was closed and a slowly swinging sign inside the door confirmed this horrific reality. No chews. Nonplussed, he peered rather bravely through a window adjacent to the shop, which he knew to be the living room of the shop owners. Through the half drawn net curtains, he was aghast to confirm that they were in fact in the room, on their sofa, watching television! They were watching a black and white game of football, something rarely, if ever seen by the chubby and very upset little boy.
This was a game that stopped a nation. It was the World Cup Final and from the time there have been radios and televisions, it is a scene that has been replicated in different forms from Buenos Aires to Berlin, from Rio to Rome, from Lagos to Lodz. Our team is our tribe. Social identity theory, first described by psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner, identified that people are drawn into, actually crave, membership of groups (tribes). When they are ‘in’ they can very quickly act aggressively and unkindly to those who are not ‘in’ or who are in different groups. Ask any football fan which teams they ‘hate’ and they will be able to reel off a list with easy fluency (with apologies to the self-actuated who disdain such behaviour – but there aren’t many of you). Why do kids from different schools in the same town hurl insults at each other? Why was I scared of trainee soldiers when I was a hippie undergraduate? Wrong tribe.
How then, did these rich club owners and their super savvy bank sponsor misjudge the mood of the organisations they owned so badly? What we saw played out last week was a rumble of Tyson vs Ali, Vettel vs Hamilton, Federer vs Nadal proportions – it was WWF Exclusive: Tribe meets Groupthink and it was a no contest.
Irvine L. Janis’s work Groupthink : psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes (Boston : Houghton Mifflin 1982) might have been written about the decision of these owners. Groupthink happens when the desire to reach a particular outcome seduces groups of often highly capable people into overlooking contradictory evidence. Such thinking often declines to entertain conflicting views which might be represented as weak, conservative, self interested or lacking vision to allow the label ‘not worthy of consideration’. Groupthink often happens when a dominant leader makes it clear what is the desired outcome but equally it can happen when a leadership group contains too many like-minded people who have pushed out oppositional voices to secure for themselves a greater level of emotional and intellectual comfort.
Who challenges the leaders in your organisation? If you are the leader, how accepting are you of alternate views? What do you look for when you promote or recruit? People who add different dimensions or people who see the world like you? Leaders joining new organisations commonly seek out and recruit former colleagues who will bring in memories of shared experiences and reinforce the leader’s belief that they are doing ‘the right thing’. It’s human nature – but it’s not always good for an organisation. Our failed Super League leaders convinced themselves that their actions were ‘for the good of the game’ when actually it was their own interests that were being served. I understand – who wouldn’t prefer to have secure revenue projections over an extended period but don’t tell the Leyton Orient tribe that this move was being made for their own good. It wasn’t and they weren’t going to buy it.
Management of significant change can simply never work if it comes out of the blue. There are so many things wrong with that idea that it’s hard to know where to start. But if you start anywhere, start by listening to and actually knowing the people in your own organisation and the needs of your customers. Most of your employees will be able to tell you exactly what you need to do to improve your business; try some ‘two stars and a wish’ meetings with a selection of your employees and see what you learn. In two schools, it’s how I wrote the first strategic plan.
Whatever else you do, don’t groupthink your way into ignoring the power of the tribe. In that contest, there is only ever one outcome.
