I have said it before and I’ll say it again: This blog is a-political
and there is zero chance of that changing, if for no other reason than
that the competition for oxygen in the political subdivision of the blogosphere
is homicidal.
That does not by any means rule out drawing insights from current events,
however, and today’s 48-point headlines all have to do with the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence’s ringing condemnation of a dysfunctional
CIA culture. As The Washington Post put it:
The findings also offer a broad indictment of the way the CIA
[…]
carried out its core mission, accusing the agency’s leadership of succumbing
to “group- think,” of being too cautious to slip spies into Iraq and
of failing to tell policymakers how weak their information really was.
In evaluating the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the
committee blamed intelligence leaders who “did not encourage analysts
to challenge their assumptions, fully consider alternative arguments,
accurately characterize the intelligence reporting, or counsel analysts
who lost their objectivity.”
Senate aides, who conducted hundreds of interviews with intelligence
officials throughout the government as well as with United Nations
weapons inspectors and others, said they found no evidence that junior
or senior officials knowingly distorted or withheld information to
make a particular case. Nor did they find evidence of undue political
pressure by policymakers. But they did conclude that contradictory
information was often ignored or dismissed.
As I read it, this is a powerful lesson in the perils (mortal, in this case) of junior and senior people in an organization going along to get along. Lee Iacocca famously said that if two Executive Vice Presidents both agreed with him, he didn’t need one of them. Note that the insidious rip-tide pressure to succumb to “group-think” requires no one to “knowingly distort or withhold information” or to feel “undue political pressure”—and that’s what makes this particular organizational-failure syndrome seductive and addictive. It can overtake your culture in stealth mode: Indeed, it scarcely overtakes a culture otherwise.
But how real a threat is this to law firm management? After all,
lawyers are famously gifted at debate and often viewed as genetically
predisposed toward contention. But their professional training
to behave thus is focused on dealing with the "outside world," not necessarily
behind the closed doors of an executive committee mseting. I’m
not suggesting we need bomb-throwers in those (hopefully) collegial quarters;
I’m suggesting we keep our critical faculties engaged in 5th gear, that
the tenor of those meetings is "idea-friendly," and that everyone knows
they have permission to "think out loud."
