U TURN IF YOU WANT TO ON THE ROAD TO A BAD DECISION 
 
So there are four of them in this car heading north from Coleman in the heart of Texas to the town of Abilene, some 53 miles away. It is a hot day, and the drive is dusty and tedious. Someone has had the bright idea to interrupt a nice family game of dominoes to go on a four-hour round-trip to eat at a really not very good restaurant.

When they are back home again, one family member admits that she hasn't enjoyed herself all that much. One by one they all confess that they would rather have stayed at home. “I only went along with it because I thought the rest of you wanted to go,” is the refrain. No one wanted to go to Abilene. It had just happened.

This story was first told by Professor Jerry Harvey in an article published in 1974 called “The Abilene Paradox and other meditations on management”. It offers a wonderful insight into the way that decisions can sometimes just emerge, without ever being consciously “made”.

Whether they mean to or not, groups exert a pressure to conform. A senior management team can find itself a long way down the track to a bad decision without realising that the idea has very little support around the table. The bigger the decision – a takeover, for example – the more momentum is likely to be built up.

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, recently got to within touching distance of a decision to call a general election, carried along by almost unstoppable momentum. Virtually all his senior colleagues now claim they were opposed to the idea all along.

It was a sad end to an impressive first 100 days in office. But not as sad as the events that marked the end of President John F. Kennedy's first 100 days – the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

This botched invasion of Cuba is often held up as the definitive example of “groupthink”, that process by which, the psychologist Irving Janis said, “the [group] members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action”.

Close-knit teams are particularly susceptible to the pull of groupthink. The late Prof Janis suggested several ways in which teams can avoid it. Two key steps are to invite experts from outside into meetings, and to appoint at least one person to the role of “devil's advocate” – a role that should be played by different people in successive meetings.

Why do clever people make bad decisions? No doubt groupthink explains why some boards end up committing to an idiotic course of action. Cowardice may stop people who know better from speaking up. But what if everybody is acting in good faith, is drawing on good data and apparently relevant experience? What explains the bad decisions that do undeniably get made even in these propitious circumstances?

This is the subject of a new (and, as yet, untitled) book, to be published next year, written by Ashridge's Andrew Campbell and Jo Whitehead and Tuck's Sydney Finkelstein. In it the authors revisit Gary Klein's research into what he called “naturalistic decision-making”.

“People with experience do most of their decision-making subconsciously,” the authors say.

“They assess the situation by matching it with an experience in their memory, but this matching process happens subconsciously. They then select a course of action from their memories of past actions. This also happens subconsciously.

“Finally, they test the practicality of this course of action by imagining what will happen if the action is taken. This imagining activity is the main conscious work that happens during a decision . . . We mostly make decisions subconsciously using experience, intuition and imagination. We do not normally do much conscious analysis, such as identifying options and comparing them.”

The danger here, as Mr Campbell explains, is that we can be misled by this process of “pattern recognition”. Our recollection of past events can be coloured by our emotional response to them (“emotional tagging”). “We are particularly at risk of making a bad decision when our experience is misleading,” he says.

In the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy suggest that decision-making should be divided into a three-stage process – preparation, “call”, and execution – allowing time to “redo” (i.e. adjust) that decision as you go along.

Alternatively, you could always just try shouting “are we on the road to Abilene here?” in any meeting that looks as though it is going to come up with a bad decision.

We all make mistakes. The key thing is to learn from them. And even if “experience” can let us down sometimes, I still find the following little dialogue rather heartening (thanks to the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania for providing it):

Q: What is the secret of your success?
A: Two words. Q: What are they?
A: Right decisions. Q: How do you make right decisions?
A: One word. Q: What is that?
A: Experience. Q: How do you get experience?
A: Two words. Q: What are they?
A: Wrong decisions.

为什么聪明人做蠢事？ 
 
他们4个人开车从位于得克萨斯中心的科尔曼向北行驶，目的地是53英里外的阿比林。天气很热，一路上满是灰尘，旅程单调乏味。他们之中一个人想出了这个聪明的主意，因此打断了一场有趣的家庭多米诺游戏，转而来回花4个小时去一个实在不太好的餐厅吃饭。

当他们回到家时，一位家庭成员承认，她感觉并不那么愉快。所有人都一个接一个地承认，自己宁愿呆在家里。他们重复着：“我去只是因为我以为你们其他人都想去。”没人想去阿比林。但事情就这么发生了。

杰瑞•哈维(Jerry Harvey)教授在1974年发表的一篇题为《管理中的阿比林悖论和其它思考》(The Abilene Paradox and other meditations on management)的文章中，第一次讲述了这个故事。它巧妙地洞察到有时候决策产生的方式，这些决策并非人们有意识地“做出的”。 

无论他们愿意与否，团队都会施加一种服从的压力。一个高级管理团队可能会发现，自己经过漫长历程却做出了一项糟糕决策，他们没有意识到与会者几乎没有人支持这个决策。决策越重大（比如一次收购活动），这种劲头可能就越强大。

英国首相戈登•布朗(Gordon Brown)最近差一点就要做出（提前）举行大选的决定，付诸行动的劲头几乎势不可挡。而实际上他的所有高层同事现在都声称自己一直反对这个想法。

对于布朗执政后令人印象深刻的前100天而言，这是个糟糕的结局。但还没有像约翰•肯尼迪(John F. Kennedy)总统执政前100天结束时发生的事件那么糟糕——猪湾(Bay of Pigs)惨败。

这次入侵古巴的拙劣行动，往往被作为“集体思维”(groupthink)的权威例证。心理学家欧文•詹尼斯(Irving Janis)表示，通过这个过程，“（团队）成员追求一致意见的努力，胜过了他们切实评判其它可选做法的动机。”

组织严密的团队特别容易受到集体思维力量的影响。已故的詹尼斯教授提出了团队可以避免这种影响的几种方式。两个关键举措是，从外部邀请专家参加会议，并至少任命一人担任“魔鬼代言人”——在连续不断的会议中，这个角色应由不同的人担任。

为什么聪明人会做出糟糕的决策？毫无疑问，集体思维解释了一些董事会之所以最终得出愚蠢做法的原因。胆怯可能会使更了解情况的人不敢说出想法。但如果人人都诚实行事、利用可靠数据和显然相关的经验，又会怎样呢？怎么解释在这些有利条件下、无可辩驳地做出的糟糕决策呢？

这是将于明年出版的一本新书（至今尚未命名）的主题，这本书由阿什里奇管理学院(Ashridge)的安德鲁•坎贝尔(Andrew Campbell)、乔•怀特黑德(Jo Whitehead)和塔克商学院(Tuck)的悉尼•芬克尔斯坦(Sydney Finkelstein)合著。在这本书中，作者重新回顾了加里•克莱恩(Gary Klein)对其称之为“自然决策”(naturalistic decision-making)的研究。

作者们表示：“有经验的人都是在下意识状态下做出大多数决策的。”

“他们评估形势的方法是，将其与记忆中某次经历进行匹配，但这种匹配过程是下意识的。随后他们从过去行动的记忆中选择一种做法。这也是下意识发生的。”

“最后，他们会检测这种做法的可行性，方发是设想如果采取这个行动，将会发生什么事。这种设想活动是在一个决策过程中发生的主要有意识行为……我们基本上利用经验、直觉和设想来下意识地做决定。我们通常不会做太多有意识的分析，比如找出可以选择的方法，然后进行比较。”

正如坎贝尔所解释的，这里存在的危险在于，我们可能被这种“模式识别”(pattern recognition)过程误导。我们对往事的回忆会受到我们对其情感反应的影响——“情感标签”(emotional tagging)。他表示：“当我们的经验起误导作用时，做出糟糕决策的风险就特别大。”

在近期《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review)中，沃伦•本尼斯(Warren Bennis)和诺尔•迪奇(Noel Tichy)提出，决策过程应被分为3个步骤——准备、“提出”和执行，这样在前进过程中就有了“重做”（即调整）那个决策的时间。

另外，你可以在任何似乎要做出糟糕决策的会议上，经常尝试喊出这样的问题：“我们在通往阿比林的道路上吗？”

我们人人都会犯错误。关键是从中吸取教训。即便“经验”有时会令我们感到失望，但我仍觉得下面的简短对话非常令人鼓舞（感谢宾西法尼亚大学(University of Pennsylvania)心理学系提供了这段对话）：

问：你成功的秘诀是什么？

答：两个词。

问：是什么？

答：正确决策。

问：你如何做出正确的决策？

答：一个词。

问：是什么？

答：经验。

问：你如何获取经验？

答：两个词。

问：是什么？

答：错误决策。