Swap your office’s dominance dynamics for cognitive diversity
“Meetings predict terrible outcomes even more powerfully than smoking predicts cancer.” This is the verdict of Leigh Thompson, a world expert on group dynamics.
Thompson became interested in human relationships as a teenager when she witnessed her parents going through a painful divorce. She almost became a marriage guidance counsellor, but settled for academia instead.
Why are meetings so dysfunctional? One of the key reasons is what anthropologists call “dominance dynamics”. When one or two people dominate the discussion, it suppresses the insights of others, particularly the introverts.
“The evidence suggests that in a typical four-person group, two people do 62 per cent of the talking, and in a six-person group, three people do 70 per cent of the talking,” Thompson says.
“Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the people doing all the talking don’t realise they are doing it,” she continues.
“They are adamant that everyone is speaking equally, and that the meetings are egalitarian. The reason is that they often lack self-awareness. So, if you point it out to them, they bristle, and you often get into an escalating conflict.”
Dominance hierarchies are deeply integrated into human psychology. We share them with other primates and, according to the psychologist Jordan Peterson, even lobsters.
Indeed, so highly attuned is our status psychology that you can place five strangers in a room, give them a task, and watch dominance hierarchies develop within seconds.
What is even more remarkable is that external observers, who can’t even hear what is being said, can accurately place people at the various positions in the hierarchy, just by watching their postures and expressions.
The pervasiveness of dominance hierarchies hints that they serve an important evolutionary purpose. When the choices that confront a tribe or group are simple, it makes sense for a leader to make decisions, and for everyone else to fall into line.
But in situations of complexity, dominance dynamics have darker consequences. When people are afraid of a dominant leader, they are inclined to parrot their perspective, saying what they think the boss wants to hear rather than what they truly think.
This shrinks the collective intelligence of the group to the dimensions of just one brain.
This is why enlightened leaders are pivoting from a dominant style to a more inclusive approach. These leaders tend not to issue unilateral orders, or bare their teeth.
On the contrary, they explain their ideas, because they know that colleagues who understand and endorse them are more likely to execute them with judgment and flexibility. They listen to those around them, because they recognise that they are not too smart to learn from others.
Of course, there are situations where dominance retains its logic as a leadership style. When a decision has been made, and there is no turning back, leaders need to galvanise their teams to get the job done. Diverse opinions are a distraction.
But when evaluating as opposed to executing decisions, or when coming up with new ideas, dominance tends to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
There are a number of techniques and methods that help leaders to preserve the contributions of diverse minds and maximise the collective intelligence of the group. One of the most celebrated is the “golden silence” of Amazon.
For more than a decade, meetings have started not with a PowerPoint presentation, but total silence. For 30 minutes, the team read a six-page memo that summarises, in narrative form, the main agenda item.
This has a number of effects.
First, it means the presenter has to think more deeply about their proposal in order to write it up in narrative form.
But there is a deeper reason why this technique is powerful: it gives people the space to bring their diverse ways of thinking, reasoning through the weaknesses and strengths of the proposal, before discussion.
This reduces the risk that diverse perspectives will fail to surface. Even when discussion does start, the most senior person speaks last, helping to ensure that diverse perspectives are not suppressed.
In a post on LinkedIn, Brad Porter, a vice president at Amazon, explained the benefits: “Amazon absolutely runs better, makes better decisions, and scales better because of this particular innovation.”
The problem is that too few leaders are aware of these and other cutting-edge techniques, meaning that meetings are all too often dysfunctional.
It is a curious irony. We spend much of our lives building up individual expertise. We spend years at school, then at university, then we undergo on-the-job training, gradually attaining knowledge and understanding.
We then take the biggest decisions in forums that make us collectively dumb.