During a meeting, our team had to decide on the best way to handle a complex project. We worked constructively through several parts. After one vital question, there was a long moment of silence followed by laughter. It was obvious we had come upon the most difficult part of the plan. After a long pause, a member of our team proposed a solution – I’ll call it Idea X. Again there was silence. Again there was laughter. We finally decided it was a good idea and moved on.
The project is now under way and Idea X has turned out to be disastrous. The amazing thing is that everyone in that meeting, including the person who proposed it, admits now they knew it was a terrible idea. How could we have let this happen? Why did nobody say anything?
I think you might have encountered the Abilene paradox. It’s an idea that was advanced by a social psychologist and professor of management scientist from the United States called Jerry B. Harvey. The name comes from an anecdote about his family.
Harvey and his wife were on holiday at her parents’ home in Texas and were having a lazy afternoon – playing dominoes and drinking cooled lemonade – on an extremely hot day. Harvey’s father-in-law suggested they go to Abilene, a town almost 100 kilometres away, for dinner.
Everyone agreed. They drove through the desert in a car without air-conditioning as the temperature reached 40 degrees. The food, when they got there, was unpleasant. When they returned to the holiday house after hours in the oppressively hot vehicle, everyone admitted they hadn’t wanted to go in the first place.
What Harvey realised when he reflected on the strange occurrence was that the problem came about because of a series of assumptions, poor communication and a desire to avoid being “ostracised”.
While the anecdote reads like something from a Raymond Carver short story in which repressed, over-polite 1970s Americans suffer in silence, there’s strong evidence to suggest the problem is more generalisable, and is pertinent to modern workplaces.
In the 1970s family account, the father-in-law suggests they go on this ill-advised trip because he worries the family is bored and sees himself as responsible for the holiday. In your case, I suspect the person who proposed the idea made a different kind of assumption: that the long pause and awkward laughter required a decisive response. I also suspect they are a senior member of the team and so felt obligated to deliver that response.
In both the Abilene story and your situation, the assumptions were wrong. The family were not bored – they were inactive because of the heat but content. Similarly, your team did not desperately require an answer there and then. They needed to accept that they had hit, as you said, the most challenging aspect of the project, a knot that couldn’t be undone in a single meeting.
Harvey would call what happened an “inability to manage agreement” (as opposed to conflict). Even though every single person in the room knew (or at least retrospectively professed to know) that the answer was deeply flawed, they agreed to it. Why did nobody say anything? Almost certainly due to internal assumptions. And this is where the fear of ostracism comes in.
How did you let this happen? The paradox helps to explain it but not necessarily how to avoid it next time. To achieve that, I think you need to understand what motivated each person in the room to agree.
Was it over-politeness? Did people desperately want to avoid seeming ungracious? Did they feel that denigrating the person willing to offer something at an uncomfortable juncture in the meeting was worse than jeopardising the project?
Or are there slightly more sinister reasons? Did people keep their mouths shut because they had good reason to believe they would be punished, looked down upon or labelled “difficult”? Was the awkward silence and laughter a product of a workplace devoid of psychological safety?
Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He’s written about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.