Rebel Ideas- the Power of Diverse Thinking
Page 24
I would also like to thank the many people who agreed to be interviewed for the book, or who helped in other ways. These include Milo Jones, Geoffrey West, Carol Dweck, Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Anita Woolley, Russell Lane, Satya Nadella, Matthew Stevenson, Michael Smith, Leigh Thompson, Yaya Fanusie, Ole Peters, Alex Adamou, Craig Knight, Eran Segal and Jeremy Mogford, and the wonderful staff at the Old Bank Hotel. Stuart Gent inspired the idea of using diagrams in Chapter 2. Chapter 5 was largely influenced by the research of the brilliant philosopher C. Thi Nguyen and the psychologist Angela Bahns, as well as the book Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow.
Above all, I would like to thank Kathy, my wife, Evie and Teddy, my children, and Abbas and Dilys, my parents. You are the best.
Copyright Acknowledgements
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:
Figures 1–6 drawn by Kathy Weeks.
Crossword 5,062 from the Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1942 © Telegraph Media Group Limited 1942.
Figures 7 and 8 from The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change by Randall Collins, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Figure 9 drawn by Rodney Paull, adapted from an illustration used by Dr Todd Rose in his video The End of Average.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if there are any errors or omissions, John Murray will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent printings or editions.
Notes
1: Collective Blindness
1 Sources vary slightly on the precise date of Moussaoui’s enrolment at the flight academy. We have used this reference from the Office of the Inspector General: https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0606/chapter4.htm
2 For more background see http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/03/02/moussaoui.school/index.html and http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/03/02/moussaoui.school/index.html
3 Bruce Hoffman, ‘The Modern Terrorist Mindset’, in R. D. Howard and R. L. Sawyer (eds), Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security (McGraw-Hill, 2011). See also Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947–2001 (Stanford Security Studies, 2013).
4 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (W. W. Norton, 2004).
5 ‘Russian Files on Al Qaeda Ignored’, Jane’s Intelligence Digest, 5 October 2001.
6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223213727_I_Knew_It_Would_Happen_Remembered_Probabilities_of_Once-Future_Things
7 Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Connecting the Dots: The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform’, New Yorker, 10 March 2003.
8 Amy B. Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton University Press, 2009).
9 Author interview with anonymous source.
10 Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, Constructing Cassandra.
11 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08850600150501317?needAccess=true
12 Author interview.
13 Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 2008).
14 Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, Constructing Cassandra.
15 Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, Constructing Cassandra.
16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbgNSk95Vkk
17 See http://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu/KH%20pdfs/Gick Holyoak%281980%29Analogical%20Problem%20Solving.pdf”
18 http://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu/KH%20pdfs/Gick-Holyoak%281980%29Analogical%20Problem%20Solving.pdf”
19 Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury, 2017).
20 Sparber ‘Racial Diversity and Aggregate Productivity’; Florida and Gates ‘Technology and Tolerance: The Importance of Diversity to High-Tech Growth’, Research in Urban Policy, 9:199–219, December 2003.
21 For French companies, the difference in return on investment was not significant.
22 Quoted in Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (Twelve, 2008).
23 The 9/11 Commission Report.
24 Author interview.
25 Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (Potomac Books, 2003).
26 Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, Constructing Cassandra.
27 John Miller and colleagues, who wrote The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot (Hyperion, 2002), make the same point with arch understatement: the CIA ‘. . . continued to overlook, or at least underestimate, the breadth and power of the fundamentalist Islamic reform movement sweeping the Middle East.’
28 The one unit specifically tasked with monitoring Al Qaeda was shunted out to a facility in northern Virginia and its head person marginalised. When he sent a warning to the head of the CIA, he was effectively demoted to junior librarian.
29 Pillar was referencing nuclear, bacterial and chemical attacks, but as Jones and Silberzahn point out, Pillar ‘failed to appreciate the possibility that “grand” terrorism could be achieved with conventional approaches’. See Constructing Cassandra and also Paul Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2003).
30 Other sources place bin Laden in Pakistan at the time of the attacks.
31 Much of the chronology of the actions of the 9/11 terrorists is taken from Der Spiegel, Inside 9-11: What Really Happened (St Martin’s Press, 2002) and Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 (Penguin, 2007).
32 The 9/11 Commission Report.
33 There was too much emphasis on consensus and not enough on dissent. In her book Spying Blind, the academic Amy Zegart identifies structural weakness at the agency. Various other concerns have been raised by scholars and broadly acknowledged by the CIA.
2: Rebels Versus Clones
1 See http://aris.ss.uci.edu/~lin/52.pdf
2 Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The Blunders of Our Governments (Oneworld, 2013).
3 Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The Blunders of Our Governments.
4 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/forget-culture-fit-your-team-needs-add-shane-snow
5 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few (Abacus, 2005).
6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232513627_The_Differential_Contributions_of_Majority_and_Minority_Influence
7 Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay off in the Knowledge Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017).
8 Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton University Press, 2007).
9 https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/women-sports-are-often-underrepresented-science
10 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park Codebreakers Helped Win the War (Biteback, 2011).
11 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X.
12 Robin Denniston, Thirty Secret Years, A. G. Denniston’s Work in Signals Intelligence 1914–1944 (Polperro Heritage Press, 2007).
13 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X.
14 Sinclair McKay, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The History of the Wartime Codebreaking Centre by the Men and Women Who Were There (Aurum Press, 2010).
15 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X.
16 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X.
17 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11151478/Could-you-have-been-a-codebreaker-at-Bletchley-Park.html
18 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11151478/Could-you-have-been-a-codebreaker-at-Bletchley-Park.html
19 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X.
3: Constructive Dissent
1 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Ac
count of the Mt. Everest Disaster (Macmillan, 1997).
2 https://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/1109945/interview-jan-arnold-rob-halls-wife-everest/
3 John Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
4 Edmund Hillary, The View from the Summit (Transworld, 1999).
5 These figures apply to the time of the 1996 Everest expedition.
6 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
7 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
8 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/everest-film-assassinates-my-character-says-climber-87frkp3j87z
9 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297918722_Dominance_and_Prestige_Dual_Strategies_for_Navigating_Social_Hierarchies
10 A point made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Allen Lane, 2008).
11 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24507747
12 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33544778
13 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33544778
14 https://repub.eur.nl/pub/94633/
15 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39633499
16 https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/seven-steps-to-creating-a-data-driven-decision-making-culture/
17 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
18 Storm Over Everest, a film by David Breashears.
19 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
20 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
21 Storm Over Everest, a film by David Breashears.
22 Storm Over Everest, a film by David Breashears.
23 Storm Over Everest, a film by David Breashears.
24 Conversation with the author.
25 Conversation with the author. And see also Leigh Thompson, Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Thompson’s work tallies with the research of Anita Woolley, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, who led an experiment with more than seventy-eight groups assigned to different tasks, from creativity to decision-making. The researchers assumed that the teams with highest aggregate IQ would perform the best.
In fact, two other factors turned out to be more important than IQ. Teams where members spoke for similar amounts of time performed better than those dominated by one or two voices – researchers call this ‘conversational turn-taking’. The second factor was social perceptiveness: teams performed better when populated by people who could read each other’s moods and meanings. These tended to have more women, who, on average, have higher levels of social intelligence.
These results are compelling. When one person is dominating, the insights of other team members are crowded out. Social perceptiveness also contributes to the flow of information by ensuring that perspectives are not just expressed, but understood. It sometimes takes emotional intelligence not only to hear what someone is saying but also to grasp what they mean. As Woolley says: ‘Having really smart people in the group wasn’t itself enough to make a smart group . . . Rather, the thing that drove collective intelligence was the way the group interacted. When they interacted effectively, they exceeded the capability of individual members.’
26 Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
27 Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (Crown, 2015).
28 https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/ambpp.2017.313
29 Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend and Foe.
30 Quoted in Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2015).
31 The seminal paper was written by Henrich and Gil-White, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11384884
32 Conversation with the author.
33 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56cf3dd4b6aa60904403973f/t/57be0776f7e0ab26d736060e/1472071543508/dominance-and-prestige-dual-strategies-for-navigating-social-hierarchies.pdf
34 Conversation with the author.
35 https://creighton.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/psychological-safety-a-meta-analytic-review-and-extension
36 https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
37 Conversation with the author.
38 Conversation with the author.
39 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty-amazons-6-pager-brad-porter
40 Conversation with the author.
41 Quoted in Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World (W. H. Allen, 2017).
42 https://www.pnas.org/content/112/5/1338
43 Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend and Foe.
44 Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend and Foe. Interestingly, while hierarchy led to more fatalities, it also led to more climbers reaching the summit. Why? When I spoke to Anicich, the lead researcher, he said that it hinged on context. Dominance works when the conditions are stable and teamwork is mostly about coordination and speed. When conditions are complex and changing, however, dominance shades into danger. ‘This is when a leader needs to hear the perspectives of the team,’ he said.
45 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51169484_Differences_Between_Tight_and_Loose_Cultures_A_33-Nation_Study
46 Stephen Sales, ‘Economic Threat as a Determinant of Conversion Rates in Authoritarian and Nonauthoritarian churches’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, September 1972, 23(3), pp. 420–8.
47 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-rob-hall-1348607.html
48 It is likely that Harris and Hansen were dead when Hall spoke his last words. See also Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.
4: Innovation
1 Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (Profile, 2011).
2 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton, 2014).
3 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age.
4 Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (W. W. Norton, 2017).
5 Shaw Livermore, ‘The Success of Industrial Mergers’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 50, Issue 1, November 1935, pp. 68–96.
6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24092915_The_Decline_of_Dominant_Firms_1905–1929
7 https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/suitcase-wheels-turns-40-radical-idea-now-travel/story?id=11779469
8 McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd.
9 Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (4th Estate, 2010).
10 https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/a_virtuous_mix_allows_innovation_to_thrive
11 https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/a_virtuous_mix_allows_innovation_to_thrive
12 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2015.0272
13 Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus.
14 See Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age.
15 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age.
16 http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/
17 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.30.4.83
18 https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/resources/entrepreneurship-policy-digest/the-economic-case-for-welcoming-immigrant-entrepreneurs
19 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17-011_da2c1cf4-a999-4159-ab95-457c783e3fff.pdf
20 https://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/resources/2015/entrepreneurship%20policy%20digest/september%202015/the_economic_case_for_welcoming_immigrant_entrepreneurs_updated_september_2015.pdf
21 McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd.
22 See also Erik Dane ‘Reconsidering the Trade-off Between Expertise and Flexibility’, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 579–603.
23 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902616300052
24 https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp9651047.pdf
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sp; 25 https://www.squawkpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Identification-of-scientists-making-long%E2%80%90term-high%E2%80%90impact-contributions-with-notes-on-their-methods-of-working.pdf
26 https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/1035/arts-foster-scientific-success.pdf
27 https://www.forbes.com/sites/catherinewines/2018/09/07/why-immigrants-are-natural-entrepreneurs/
28 https://blog.aboutamazon.co.uk/company-news/2018-letter-to-shareholders
29 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/introducing-a-new-competition-to-crowdsource-a-more-inclusive-economy/
30 Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist.
31 See Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation (Allen Lane, 2010).
32 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Belknap Press, 1998).
33 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
34 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192
35 Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From.
36 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.0452
37 Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success.
38 Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success.