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Just before Steve Baker joined the long list of Conservative Party MPs who lost their seats in the July UK election, a journalist asked him what he would do if he ended up leaving politics.
Without hesitation, the former Royal Air Force engineer and self-described “Brexit hardman” said he would go skydiving, motorcycling and “fast catamaran sailing.”
This was interesting, especially for those of us who had never imagined slow catamaran sailing existed. But it turns out Baker also had another plan in mind: teaching companies how to avoid the dangers of groupthink.
He has just launched a consultancy called The people of provocation with Paul Dolan, professor of behavioral sciences at the London School of Economics, whose goal is to help companies promote fruitful internal disagreements.
The idea behind his company is partly epitomized by the partnership between Baker, who once said the EU should be “totally torn down”, and Dolan, who has never voted Conservative and would generally prefer the UK would have stayed in the EU.
“Here I am dining with the devil!” Baker said when I spoke to the couple last week. “We both have friends who wonder what the hell we’re doing.”
In fact, the two share important libertarian tendencies: they met when Dolan got in touch to discuss a mutual suspicion about Covid lockdowns and later co-authored a newspaper article criticizing the idea of vaccine passports.
Still, I suspect that any exaggeration of their differences will be the least of the problems they will face.
More than 50 years have passed since the late American research psychologist Irving Janis formulated the theory of groupthink to explain how a team of smart people could make devilishly bad decisions.
He studied foreign policy disasters such as the United States’ failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the failed American Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
But his idea soon began to be studied in business schools because it seemed obvious that the human need for consensus meant that companies, not just the military, could also suffer from groupthink.
In fact, the problem has been blamed for multiple corporate disasters, from Volkswagen’s dieselgate scandal to the collapse of Swiss airline Swissair and the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank.
However, groupthink persists. Baker and Dolan are just the latest to join a crowded field of advisers who have yet to eradicate the enigma.
Some reasons for this have been well documented. Making better decisions can consume time that people lack. It also tends to be easier to manage a team of like-minded people.
I suspect that some leaders also prefer not to have their own views challenged by too much diversity of thought. This reminded me of a recent conversation with a boss at a company with several thousand employees who said he made sure senior managers knew he would change his mind if they presented a better idea than the one he had been pushing.
There are many reasons to continue trying to solve the problem of groupthink, as economists Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Paul Swartz make clear in their book: Shocks, crises and false alarms: how to evaluate the true macroeconomic risk.
The last four years alone have generated a series of false alarms, from fears that Covid was about to trigger a new Depression to the idea that stars of the digital lockdown economy like Zoom would generate huge productivity gains.
Companies that took such beliefs seriously risked harm, which is why the authors advocate “economic eclecticism,” or a mindset free of any particular theory or school of thought that offered a single answer to the evaluation of risks.
With this in mind, I asked Baker what kind of groupthink he thought his Conservative Party was suffering from as it faced another leadership race after its disastrous election defeat.
“It’s impatience,” he said, explaining that the debacle of Liz Truss’s short-lived leadership was due to the rush for quick answers to complex and deep-rooted economic and social problems.
And could he and Dolan suffer from some groupthink? Baker paused before admitting that it was possible they both suffered from the mistaken belief that many people need to break out of groupthink.
“Maybe there are companies that are already extremely good at adversarial collaboration,” he said. “I haven’t seen much evidence.”