Rebel Ideas- the Power of Diverse Thinking

by Matthew Syed

  III

  Rob Hall reached the summit of Everest at 2.20 p.m. The views were spectacular, the neighbouring peaks of the Himalayas seeming like foothills below, the vertex so elevated that it’s almost possible to glimpse the curvature of the earth.

  Hall was elated. Minutes earlier, when he had been traversing the Hillary Step, he passed Jon Krakauer, one of the members of his team who had already summited, descending. They embraced. Krakauer thanked Hall for masterminding the expedition; one that had enabled him to fulfil a lifetime ambition. ‘Yeah, it’s turned out to be a pretty good expedition,’ Hall replied.17 It would be the last time that Krakauer saw Hall alive.

  Rob Hall was one of the finest mountaineers in the world. He had summited Everest on four previous occasions. As a leader, he had a deep appreciation of the importance of team cohesion. He had made sure the various members had got to know each other, and that they shared personal stories of what summiting meant to them and their loved ones. It was clear early on that the team, from the climbers to the support staff, were pulling for each other. As Helen Wilton, the Base Camp manager put it:

  I felt like a part of something great. I really think that to do something with people for a common purpose is a wonderful thing. And to help people achieve their dreams is something that caught me as well. So much emotion and experiences and demands of you happen in such a short space of time: six weeks of intensive living.18

  This sense of purpose, coupled with the courage of the climbers, would manifest itself in astonishing acts of heroism as the disaster unfolded. But the problem on that fateful day wasn’t one of cohesion, as has often been claimed. And it wasn’t down to the mistakes of any one individual, despite the finger-pointing that followed the disaster. The problem was more subtle: dominance dynamics.

  Neal Beidleman, a junior guide in the Mountain Madness team, who would prove to have a key role, was in a state of growing anxiety as he stood on the summit of Everest at 2.30 p.m. The turnaround time laid down by Fischer, the team leader, had come and gone, putting pressure on the mobile oxygen supplies. Perhaps Fischer, suffering with illness, wasn’t thinking clearly. Perhaps he was unduly influenced by a desire to see his clients reach the summit. What was clear is that Boukreev, the senior guide, had decided to descend alone, imperilling the ratio of guides to clients, creating even deeper anxiety in Beidleman. And yet he didn’t challenge the slipping turnaround time, nor the decision by Boukreev to descend.

  Why not? On the surface, it seems strange. Intervening was crucial to the safety of the group. It only starts to make sense when you consider status. ‘Because Beidleman’s high altitude experience was relatively limited, his station in the Mountain Madness chain of command was below Fischer and Boukreev,’ Krakauer writes. ‘And his pay reflected his junior status.’ In the months following the disaster, Beidleman made a telling admission, hinting at the steep hierarchy gradient in play on that day. ‘I was definitely considered the third guide,’ he said, ‘so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn’t always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it.’19

  But if the dominance dynamics were acute between senior and junior guides, they were even more so between the guides and clients. The clients may not have had the same depth of experience as their leaders, but they had years of altitude climbing under their belts. Moreover, as the climb unfolded, they were gleaning critical information about changing conditions, the physical state of colleagues and much else besides. Each guide had only one pair of eyes. The team had many.

  And yet the very day before the ascent Hall had given a stern speech about the importance not of speaking up, but of mute deference. ‘[He gave] us a lecture about the importance of obeying his orders on summit day,’ Krakauer wrote. ‘ “I will tolerate no dissension up there,” he admonished, staring pointedly at me. “My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal. If you don’t like a particular decision I make, I’d be happy to discuss it afterward, but not while we’re on the hill.” ’20

  Hall gave this speech for what he thought were the best of reasons. He had deeper experience of Everest, and was in the best position to make key decisions. But he neglected the fact that his capacity to make wise judgements relied not merely on his own perspective, but those of his team. He rightly stressed the importance of listening to his ultimate judgement, but he didn’t realise that this could be fatally compromised without access to the collective intelligence of the group.

  The steep hierarchy, which characterised both teams, would manifest itself time and again as the pressure mounted. When Martin Adams, a client on the Mountain Madness team, was inching ever closer to the summit, he noticed something that made his heart beat faster: what looked like wispy clouds below, but which he realised were thunderheads. Adams was a commercial pilot and had long experience of interpreting cloud formation. ‘When you see thunderheads in an aeroplane, your first reaction is to get the fuck out of there,’ he later said.

  But he didn’t speak up. Neither the guides nor his fellow teammates realised what the clouds meant. They didn’t have Adams’s experience when it came to subtle variations in vertical cloud patterns. As Krakauer put it: ‘I was unaccustomed to peering down at cumulonimbus cells from 29,000 feet and I therefore remained ignorant of the storm that was even then bearing down.’ And yet Adams didn’t inform the guides of this critical information.

  Adams’s silence might seem odd, given the stakes, but it is predictable when one understands the psychology. The guides had been positioned as leaders. They were the dominant figureheads. The clients had been instructed to obey decisions rather than contribute to them. Speaking up probably didn’t cross his mind. The guides, who should have been abandoning the summit attempt and getting everyone down to safety, did no such thing.

  A few minutes later, Krakauer, one of the few now on the descent, arrived at the South Summit, keen to get his hands on the supplementary oxygen stashed there. He saw Andy Harris, one of the guides, sorting through a pile of bottles, and expressed his relief that they could now take advantage of the fresh supply. But Harris replied in a curious way. ‘There’s no oxygen here,’ he said. ‘These bottles are all empty.’ But he was wrong. There were at least six full bottles. It is probable that his regulator had become clogged with ice, meaning the bottles registered empty when he tested them.

  Either way, Krakauer knew that Harris was mistaken because he had, by now, grabbed a fresh canister and was sucking in the oxygen his body was craving. And yet he scarcely challenged Harris. He knew Harris was mistaken. He knew that oxygen was crucial to his safety, and to the safety of the group, but he didn’t push the matter. Instead, he headed down the mountain, as Harris waited at the South Summit to assist the descending climbers.

  Why didn’t Krakauer speak up? Didn’t he care? Was he oblivious to the safety of his teammates? Think back to the testimony of Professor Flin, who said: ‘Co-pilots would rather die than contradict the captain.’ Think back, too, to the engineer on United Airlines 173. Humans are acutely sensitive to hierarchy, even when the stakes are existential. Self-silencing occurs unconsciously.

  In perhaps the most powerful passage of his book, Krakauer writes:

  My inability to discern the obvious was exacerbated . . . by the guide-client protocol. Andy and I were very similar in terms of physical ability and technical expertise; had we been climbing together in a nonguided situation as equal partners, it’s inconceivable to me that I would have neglected to recognise his plight. But on this expedition, he had been cast in the role of invincible guide, there to look after me and the other clients; we had been specifically indoctrinated not to question our guides’ judgement. The thought never entered my crippled mind that Andy might in fact be in terrible straits – that a guide might urgently need help from me.

  This was another interaction that would have fateful consequences. At 4.41 p.m. Hall – who had now summited – radioed base to say that he and his client Doug Hansen were in trouble above the
Hillary Step and desperately needed oxygen. Had he known there were fresh bottles waiting at the South Summit, he could have climbed down to retrieve them before re-ascending. But Harris cut in to say (wrongly) that the bottles were empty. Krakauer’s failure to speak up moments earlier meant, in effect, that Hall remained with Hansen above the Hillary Step, desperately trying to drag him down the summit ridge, bereft of bottled oxygen, just minutes before the storm finally hit.

  Time and again, information wasn’t shared. Critical decisions were made that didn’t reflect what the team, as a whole, knew. And yet it is striking when reading the retrospective accounts of the disaster how mystified participants were as to why they hadn’t spoken up. Why didn’t I share what I knew! Why didn’t I voice my concerns! As Krakauer put it in the context of his failure to challenge Harris: ‘Given what unfolded over the hours that followed, the ease with which I abdicated responsibility – my utter failure to consider that Andy might have been in serious trouble – was a lapse that’s likely to haunt me for the rest of my life.’

  The mistake – looking from the outside in – is to suppose that participants didn’t care enough. That they were not sufficiently motivated to help their teammates. It is worth remembering that those who failed to communicate were putting themselves in danger. The problem was not motivation, but hierarchy. Key branches in the decision tree were being selected without the combined wisdom of the group. And with each new branching of the decision tree, the climbers – more than thirty people on the mountainside – were being taken, slowly but inexorably, towards disaster.

  By the time the hurricane finally struck, the accumulation of misjudgements would be magnified into the dimensions of a tragedy. ‘One minute we could look down and see the camp below, and the next minute, you couldn’t see it,’ one later said. Snow started to fall as visibility vanished. Beidleman and Groom, two of the guides, merged into a single team along with seven clients and two Sherpas as they groped their way towards Camp 4. The sound of the wind was deafening. Their eyelids kept getting stuck together, glued by icicles. They had to be ever-conscious of pushing too far to the east, which would take them to disaster over the Kangshung Face.

  ‘As you move further and become more disoriented, and the entire time you are doing this, the storm, the wind, the snow, the cold, everything, is moving, is crescendoing,’ Beck Weathers later said. ‘And now the noise level is starting to overwhelm you, and you have to yell at each other to be heard at all, and we got a sense that we were just being led like sheep.’21 Hopelessly lost in the maw of the storm, they trudged around in circles. Everyone was now out of supplementary oxygen. ‘It was like pulling out the plug. There was no electricity,’ one would recall.

  Reading about their plight, one is struck both by the growing desperation and the astonishing courage. Some collapsed. They were hauled up by teammates. Others talked of giving up. They were talked out of it. When they huddled by a rock, hoping for a break in the clouds, they almost drifted en masse into deadly slumber. ‘We knew that going to sleep was the wrong thing to do, and it was way too easy to do,’ Beidleman said. ‘You just suck yourself back, you draw yourself back as far as you could into your down suit hood and just close your eyes and take a few breaths, and . . . let go.’22

  When the clouds parted for an instant, giving them a fix on the camp, five were unable to move. Their bodies had stiffened to hyper-rigidity. Those who could still walk stumbled back to the tents, most falling into an exhausted stupor in the folds of their sleeping bags. It was left to Boukreev, who had avoided the storm by descending ahead of the group, to brave the maelstrom alone. Singlehandedly, he dragged three people back to camp, leaving the last two on the rocks of the col. Any further attempt to mount a rescue would probably have killed him. By now, he was frozen stiff.

  High up above, Hall was heroically struggling to save the life of Doug Hansen, exhausted and almost comatose, as the storm raged around them, dragging him down the knife-edge ridge, both starved of oxygen. When Base Camp advised Hall to leave his companion, reasoning that this was his only chance to save himself, Hall refused. Andy Harris, aware of the plight of his friends up above, made an astonishing bid for the Hillary Step. He was never seen again.

  Fischer, exhausted and probably suffering with illness, died at the south-east ridge. Yasuko Namba died on the South Col, one of the two who had been left exposed to the elements overnight. She remains in the record books as only the second Japanese woman to reach the Seven Summits. Beck Weathers survived the night in what is still regarded as the greatest miracle in mountaineering history, staggering into camp the following morning. He was later helicoptered off the mountain, suffering with severe frostbite. His right arm was amputated between the elbow and wrist, he lost all the fingers of his left hand as well as parts of both feet. His nose was reconstructed with tissue from his ear and forehead. His story is one of the most inspirational in the genre.

  Hall continued in his lonely battle to save Doug Hansen in the eyrie above the Hillary Step. In his haunting documentary about the expedition, David Breashears – a filmmaker who was at Base Camp as the disaster unfolded – couldn’t help wondering what had happened. ‘It must have been a desperate struggle as he tried to move Doug along that ridge, only a few feet at a time, so far from the safety of camp . . . And what happened to Doug? Did he still have enough life in him to reach out to Rob and say: ‘Don’t leave me.’ Or did Doug ever look at Rob and say: ‘Just go. Save yourself.’23

  We will never know the answer to these questions. All that can be said with certainty is that Hall battled to save Hansen until the end, surrendering his own life in a vain attempt to get both men down from the rooftop of the world, just as Harris lost his life after climbing back up the ridge to the Hillary Step having heard the cry for help from his teammates.

  One reads of these actions with a sense of awe. One thrills to their heroism. These individuals were pulling for each other, making sacrifices for each other, risking their lives for each other. Even Boukreev, criticised severely (and, to many, unjustly) by Krakauer for descending to Camp 4 in advance of his team, risked his life not once or twice, but three times, as he dragged stricken comrades back into the tents amid the savagery of the hurricane.

  But what this example shows, and why it is so revealing, is that a team ethic, while precious, isn’t sufficient. No amount of commitment can drive effective decision-making in a situation of complexity when diverse perspectives are suppressed; when critical information isn’t flowing through the social network. By inadvertently creating a dominance dynamic, Hall deprived himself of the very information he needed to make life and death decisions as the pressure intensified.

  It cost him his life.

  IV

  Let us leave Everest and examine decision-making in the real world. For many of our most important decisions are taken in meetings. There are kick-off meetings, town hall meetings, work meetings, board meetings, management meetings, staff meetings, breakfast meetings, off-site meetings and video-conference meetings. Millions of meetings take place daily around the world.

  The logic of holding meetings is entirely valid. Many brains are more effective than one brain – provided these brains are diverse. Over the last two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has increased by more than 50 per cent. But it is here we must confront a sobering if rarely discussed truth. Study upon study has revealed the same basic finding: meetings are catastrophically inefficient. As Leigh Thompson, an academic at the Kellogg School of Management, told me: ‘Meetings predict terrible outcomes even more powerfully than smoking predicts cancer.’24

  Thompson is Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations, and has spent her life studying group judgement. She became interested in human relationships as a teenager when she witnessed her parents going through a painful divorce. She briefly considered becoming a marriage counsellor, but ultimately decided that she wanted a broader understanding of human interaction.<
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  As she conducted her research, she quickly noticed dominance dynamics. When one or two people dominate, it suppresses the insights of others in the team, particularly the introverts. If the dominant person is the leader, this makes things even worse, with people parroting back his opinions. Rebel ideas that exist within the group are not expressed. She says: ‘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. It gets progressively worse as the group size gets bigger.’ In fact, this is so common that it has spawned a name: ‘the uneven communication problem’. ‘Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the people doing all the talking don’t realise they are doing it,’ Thompson says. ‘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.’25

  At most meetings, then, communication is dysfunctional. Many people are silent. Status rigs the discourse. People don’t say what they think but what they think the leader wants to hear. And they fail to share crucial information because they don’t realise that other people lack it. In one experiment, a team was tasked with hiring a manager from three candidates. The researchers rigged the attributes of the candidates to ensure that one was far better than the other two. Better qualified, superior characteristics, a better fit. The researchers then provided candidate information to the members of the hiring team – but with a twist. Each team member received an information pack with only a subset of information about the three candidates. The team, as a whole, had all the information, but each member only had a portion of it. This meant that the correct decision could only emerge if each person shared what they knew. What happened? The teams failed miserably. Almost none made the right choice.