by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
Sometimes a fiasco provides an excellent learning opportunity as we can study the group dynamics that led smart people to a stupid place. Then again, the fiasco may just be yet another example of stupidity.<\/strong><\/p>\n “That’s fascinating!” That may be a nice way of saying, “How could a group of such smart people do such a stupid thing?”<\/p>\n Groups of smart people do stupid things. Some people call that “groupthink.” I call it “negative synergy.” Other people call it “all of us are dumber than some of us.”<\/p>\n People have studied these situations. Sometimes the results are fascinating in how a little pressure here and there (sometimes real, often imagined) led people to err in this way and that. The lessons are available for all groups in the future.<\/p>\n Then again, most of the situations lead me to ask, “How could a group of smart, mature people do such a stupid thing?”<\/p>\n “Well,” the answer usually begins, “you have to understand …”<\/p>\n No, I don’t have to understand. You knew about group dynamics; you knew about groupthink, and you knew about all those other things as well. You did something stupid. Stop it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes a fiasco provides an excellent learning opportunity as we can study the group dynamics that led smart people to a stupid place. Then again, the fiasco may just be yet another example of stupidity. “That’s fascinating!” That may be a nice way of saying, “How could a group of such smart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25,53,67],"tags":[139,147,174,187],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-meetings","category-problems","category-work","tag-culture","tag-meetings","tag-problems","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1368,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions\/1368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}