Managing the Hive Mind

Gary Wolf in today's Los Angeles Times has an opinion piece on the problems the Bush Administration and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez are having with U.S. attorney firings brouhaha.

Wolf writes that the problem is really more of a structural problem that he calls the "hive mind." What he failed to point out was that these problems aren't limited to the Bush Administration; rather, they are inherent in any group that closes itself to criticism and outside opinion. It really the same type of groupthink that social psychologist Irving Janis studied. It really is the same malady that plagues the Claremont 400 in our own town and brought down former City Manager Glenn Southard, himself an architect of that hive culture.

Wolf remarks:

The key to making a consensus operative — getting it out of mere chatter and into the real world — is preventing the outbreak of factionalism and debate, which can lead to time-wasting attempts to resolve conflicts by "thinking" about them. The Bush administration, so brutal when seen from the outside, has been a remarkable oasis of cooperation within. Now well into the last quarter of its eight-year tenure, the executive branch has weathered a series of national crises that border on catastrophe, and yet it has yielded no point of principle or policy. Though plans may have occasionally been foiled by force majeure (the unforeseeable sectarian violence in Iraq, for instance, or the surprising vulnerability of Gulf Coast cities to wind and water), still, in nearly every case, White House staffers have stuck to their stories and to each other. There have been few public fights and bitter resignations, fewer negotiations with adversaries, no apologies and certainly no explanations.

The thing is, if you replace "Bush administration" with Claremont 400 or Enron management, you get the same results. Dysfunction and mismanagement emerge inevitably from these closed social systems. Gary Wolf, who writes for Wired Magazine, misses the point. What we need in government, in management, is more open sourcing.