October 26, 2011 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The U.S. Army has formalized the role of “devil’s advocate” into its decision making—a practice the United States Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have adopted in their fight to eradicate polio.
Groups are good at carrying out tasks, but they don’t make wise decisions, Greg Fontenot, a retired colonel and director of the army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, told participants at PopTech’s annual ideas conference in Camden, Me.
Group dynamics make it difficult to imagine alternative solutions, and group members’ false assumptions and biases feed off of each other, explained Mr. Fontenot. The result, he said, is “reasoning by analogy.” The group identifies past problems that look like the one it is confronting and try to apply the lessons of the past to the new situation, which Mr. Fontenot said is sometimes a dangerous course.
‘Run for Your Lives’
“When you hear ‘best practices,’ run for your lives,” he told conference participants, who responded with knowing laughter. “The Titanic was built with best practices. It was faithfully operated in accordance with best practices.”
To confront the problems inherent in group decision making, the army created what it calls red teams, officers who are given one-year assignments to question assumptions and provide different perspectives.
“We’re trying to initiate soldiers whose charter is to challenge groupthink, present alternate perspectives, and to keep commanders and staff from engaging in wish fulfillment: They want it to work, therefore it will,” said Mr. Fontenot.
Before officers start their assignments, they receive training on critical and creative thinking, communication and negotiation, and techniques that allow them to function in cohesive groups without succumbing to the collective will of the group. Stints are limited to one year to ensure the officers don’t get too comfortable in the role or, conversely, become worn down by the resistance they encounter.
The officers’ questioning sometimes goes unheeded, said Mr. Fontenot. But the longer-term goal of the program is to increase the number of people throughout the Army who have served on a red team and in time change the service’s overall culture of decision making.
Improving Global Health
The effort to eradicate polio has made tremendous strides, but for the last 12 years, progress has stalled, Ellyn Ogden, USAID’s polio eradication coordinator, told the PopTech audience. Yet despite the plateau, she said, global-health officials continued to hold to the same approaches they had always used and didn’t question their assumptions, some of which turned out to be wholly inaccurate.
Ms. Ogden said that when she learned about red teaming, she thought it could be an important approach to spark changes—and that grant makers were in the best position to act as red-team members: “Donors can take a more skeptical view.”
In 2009 Mr. Fontenot and one of his colleagues held a training session for Ms. Ogden and her counterpart at the Gates foundation right before they were set to meet with the World Health Organization and Unicef to work on a new strategic plan for eradication efforts.
Ms. Ogden credits red teaming with changes, such as the creation of an independent monitoring board, that she believes have lowered the number of new polio cases.
“This has application in any decision process,” Mr. Fontenot told conference participants. “It’s not about the military. It’s about changing the way we decide by changing some of the fundamental assumptions.”
Go deeper: More information about red teaming is available on the Web site of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth.
Mr. Fontenot also recommends these books to learn more about how groups make decisions: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow; Groupthink, by Irving L. Janis; Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, by Roberta Wohlstetter; and Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May.
