conformity in the workplace…

April 13th, 2009 tkadom Posted in Presentations and screencasts, Random |

During my irrelevant reading this weekend, I stumbled across a neat experiment about social conformity, and the impact that it can have on the human mind.

Ash’s Conformity Experiment demonstrates how social pressure can cause people to suspend their intelligence and agree with a group even when they know the group is wrong.  Essentially these people over-rule themselves when they hear the rest of a peer group give an answer even if they believe the answer is wrong.

How often do we agree with a technical decision because it appears to be the group consensus, and how often to we clear our throat and stick our neck out?  Recently I was involved in a technical decision for a client, and I had the unique perspective of being one of three technical decision makers on the subject of adding a third party api to a site we were developing.  We came up with a 2-1 split where one other technologist agreed with me and the other one was a fairly strong dissent.  Needless to say the dissenting voice owns his own business and did not get where he is today by being shy. 

We argued the point on its technical merits and in the end went with the majority decision.  I think we could equally have settled on the minority position, but my point is that this type of dissent is actually quite rare in most organizations, and in fact it seems that group think and group design is more often the norm than not.  With few exceptions in better development shops, most teams seem to cluster around their stars and agree with them.

I remember working at a large financial institution a few years back, and it seemed like no one ever questioned the work.  I was hired as a technology consultant to build financial models based on mortgage data that we were purchasing from Bloomberg.  Each time a bloomberg terminal pulled up a security, we paid a transaction fee to Bloomberg.  The maddening thing to me was that the institution I worked for owned and published nearly 40% of the data that it bought back from bloomberg.  It almost seemed like a no-brainer not to purchase that data back when it was your data to begin with. 

The director of the group I worked for instantly saw the opportunity to save the company money.  She proposed that we build a data mart for the organization that would post process our own data in the same manner that bloomberg did in the hope of saving the company millions.  Her Idea fell flat at the executive level where one of the Vice Presidents voiced his concern that the internal system would be unreliable. 

That vice president may have been right.  It was a build or buy decision, but what amazed me most then, and still amazes me today is that no one ever questioned the fact that we were buying our own data.