This article explores the importance of ‘good conflict’ in idea generation, decision making, and leadership teams. Add some mental models to your cognitive toolkit to help you develop collective intelligence.
Break Your Echo Chambers
For the first time in my life, the England football team made it to a final of a major competition, the European Championship.
The last time was 1966 when we won the World Cup. Fifty-five years of waiting. (update: still waiting, congratulations Italy)
A lot of attention and credit has gone to Gareth Southgate, the manager of the England football team. I enjoyed Matthew Syed’s article about his leadership and multi-faceted team.
Syed explores the limitations of a homogenous team of like-minded experts.
You would have an echo chamber. They would reflect each other’s assumptions back to each other. It would be comfortable, chummy and consensual. It would also be monolithic and non-creative.
The FA Technical Advisory Board has been advising on performance and development since 2016 and consists of a broad range of different backgrounds:
- Kath Grainger, an Olympic rower
- Stuart Lancaster, the rugby coach
- Manoj Badale, a tech entrepreneur
- Sir Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach
- Colonel Lucy Giles, a college commander at the Sandhurst Military Academy
- David Sheepshanks, the mastermind behind the St George’s Park national football centre.
the group is capable of offering fresh insights on preparation, diet, data, mental fortitude and more. This is sometimes called “divergent” thinking to contrast it with the “convergence” of echo chambers.
Syed concludes by explaining that:
The key is to bring people together whose perspectives are both relevant to the problem, and which are also different from each other. This maximises both “depth” and “range” of knowledge — leading to “collective intelligence”.
Your Talking Points
⟶ How are you creating “depth” and “range” in your team recruitment?
⟶ How are you exploring beyond your industry for insights and innovations?
Euros 2020: What all of us can learn from Gareth Southgate
Part of Gareth Southgate’s success could be his willingness to turn to football outsiders to help prepare his England…www.bbc.com
Counter Wooden-Headedness
The acceptance of divergence and good conflict led me to think about the Tenth Man Principle. This is a mental model or dialogue protocol that has resonated with me for a long time.
The Tenth Man is a devil’s advocate. If there are 10 people in a room and nine agree, the role of the tenth is to disagree and point out flaws in whatever decision the group has reached.
This approach originated after the Yom Kippur War (known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War) in 1973. The Israeli Defence Force’s Intelligence Directorate created a Red Team, a devil’s advocate team that can challenge prevalent assumptions within intelligence bodies.
We have three intertwined mental models or structures we might use.
- The Tenth Man Principle
- A Red Team
- The Devil’s Advocate
You will be familiar with the Devil’s Advocate, a discourse convention of prefacing a dissenting viewpoint with, ‘just to play Devil’s Advocate.’
A Red Team — terminology from the world of security systems — is set up to deliberately challenge and stress a plan or structure to identify weaknesses. We can use this idea to explore alternative viewpoints or offer critique on a proposed project.
The author, William Kaplan, finishes with broader brush strokes. He extends the Tenth Man concept beyond military intelligence and frames the problem in the words of historian Barbara Tuchman as ‘wooden-headedness’.
Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived or fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. ~ Barbara Tuchman
The Tenth Man Principle and the Red Team or Devil’s Advocate Team are protocols to counter fixed or closed-mindedness.
The purpose of the Tenth Man Principle is to:
- Challenge conventional and received wisdom;
- Look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective;
- Engage actively with and reconsider the status quo;
- Search for information and arguments that contradict theses;
- Provide a sounding board for anyone who wishes to raise issues;
- Explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios.
This list is a robust set of critical thinking intentions, which in the aggregate, define open-mindedness. We need to increase our open-mindedness to develop innovative solutions to complex problems.
Your Talking Points
⟶ How is your team identifying your assumptions and actively challenging the status quo?
⟶ Discuss the potential trap of missing the best solution because you seek harmony and consensus.
How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role
The October 1973 Yom Kippur War, known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War, showed the risks to Israel of…www.thestar.com
The Value of Dissent and Conflict
When we generate ideas, conventional wisdom encourages a zero feedback zone. We often withhold criticism and feedback as we are sharing ideas. But perhaps that is not always the best technique.
According to research by Charlan Nemeth, and her team, a degree of conflict can increase the number of ideas we generate.
The approach they outline is to encourage open debate and feedback as ideas are shared. Participants are encouraged to communicate freely and not limit any reaction or contribution.
They describe a 25% increase in ideas generated from a debate and critique approach than straightforward brainstorming tasks.
The paper offers some connected insights to our exploration of the value of conflict and diverse teams. Here are some highlights, the second quote directly links to the Tenth Man Principle:
The notion that groups perform better when they share and even confront differences bears some resemblance to the research on the value of dissent and diversity. Diversity is often found to aid the quality of decisions, presumably because of the multiple perspectives that it provides.
in more naturalistic settings, there is evidence that groups with a dissenter make better decisions. Organizations fare better when dissent is valued and expressed.
A further detail referenced in the paper offers some insight into whether it is better to generate ideas on your own or within a team:
individuals working separately generate many more, and more creative (as rated by judges) ideas than do groups, even when the redundancies among member ideas are deleted.
This insight emphasises the importance of designing time to work solo before other team structures for idea generation.
Your Talking Points
⟶ Is there enough trust in this team to use deliberate debate? (see link below to explore this further)
⟶ How do you provide individual time to generate ideas alongside team sessions?
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