People like me have been responsible for some of the biggest disasters in recent memory, writes Richard Gillis.
ON A SUNNY day in late September 2001, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center still smouldered, I was in the room when one of the worst ideas in publishing history passed through. It was a "ground-breaking" new report entitled Opportunities for Sport and Leisure in the Middle East, a piece of research so ill-conceived that it nearly brought my then employer down. It certainly brought the house down.
Within its pages, the author devoted several chapters, to both Iraq and Afghanistan, which he described with rare foresight, as "sleeping giants of the leisure sector".
The result was ridicule and humiliation in equal measure as news of our new product launch spread, helped by the efforts of our own PR department. Since then, I've always taken a keen interest in the genesis of bad ideas. It is strange that given the apparent sophistication of modern market research, how such stinkers still see the light of day.
The odd thing was that I knew as soon as I'd heard the report pitch that it was a silly thing to do. And I also know that several of the other people in the room at the time thought the same way. We just didn't want to appear negative.
This plays to my pet theory that so engrained is the "positive mental attitude" culture in business that it has become institutionalised.
George Clooney is the only man left in the world who can get away with being self-deprecating. The rest of us must be relentlessly, tediously "pro". To publicly question a new initiative is tantamount to career suicide.
Last week, I aired these views over lunch with Marc Gerstein, an organisational psychologist (me neither) and author of a new book called Flirting With Disaster, Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental.
Gerstein has exhaustively researched the concept of "the organisational bystander", which is a trick cyclist's way of describing my inaction.
His central point is that people like me have been responsible for some of the biggest disasters in recent memory, from the Vietnam and Iraq wars, through the tsunami, Chernobyl, the Challenger space shuttle crash, the credit crunch and the Mexican pesos crisis.
All these and more could have been avoided, or their effects dramatically reduced, if individuals had acted more quickly on what he calls "weak signals".
For example, Smith Dharmasaroja, an official working for Thai Met, the government body responsible for monitoring weather, had warned of the threat of tsunami seven years before it occurred. He was fired for his efforts.
"People called me a lot of names, and criticised and called me a madman," he told a television reporter.
"Some government officials told me I destroyed the tourism industry in Thailand."
The same catastrophe highlighted what can happen when people act on "weak signals". Tilly Smith, a 10-year-old British schoolgirl was holidaying on Maikhano beach with her parents when she noticed the ocean waters were frothing and rapidly receding from the shore.
Two weeks before, Tilly's geography teacher had explained to her class that such phenomena could be signs of an impending tsunami.
When her mother told the local hotel manager, he took the controversial decision to clear the crowded beach on the advice of a 10-year-old girl.
Minutes later, a huge wave crashed ashore. But records show that Maikaho beach suffered no fatalities, one of only a small handful of similar resorts in Thailand that could make that claim.
In companies, it's usually only money that's at stake as a result of poor decision making.
Gerstein refers to "Groupthink" when people unconsciously strive for unanimity.
By intuitively shunning alternative points of view, insiders can cause dissent to dissipate before it is even expressed.
A feature of the collapse of consulting firm Arthur Anderson, which occurred as a result of the Enron accounting crisis, was how bystander behaviour had become endemic in the corporate culture.
New York Times journalist Kurt Eichenwald describes this phenomenon in his book, Conspiracy of Fools.
"Standing up to Enron wasn't considered a plausible option; the deep pocketed client could shift the consulting business at the drop of a hat.
"That was a risk that the Anderson partners were not prepared to take."
Add to this greed and careerism, the worries of being exposed by the media, and we get a cocktail of incompetence.
But the chastening news is that cock-ups are going to become more common, not less, and crap ideas will be greenlighted on a more regular basis, despite the millions spent on research and development.
This is quite reassuring to the bystanders among us, who might otherwise be forced into standing up for what we think is right. The message is clear: the next time you're in the room when a stinker comes by, sit on your hands. Everyone else is.
