Article on Conformity for Proteus Life Magazine

Conformity

By Kirk Fisher

“The poet goes to the edge of experience, and feels those things that don’t yet have a name.”    --T.S. Eliot

Teaching the principles of anything, without first changing mindset is useless. We teach innovation in our workshops, but the harder step is to look at how we think. Before we simply add tools to the mix we need to examine the biggest hindrance to innovation: conformity.

Conformity has an immediate power over our minds and actions. It can be a positive force, of course. We need compliance, identification with a team, and socialisation skills. We also need to be able to have pre-set, simplified procedures. This is how we work together. It is how we build individual ideas into big concepts. Please follow your traffic laws, for instance, when driving home. It is simply arrogance, as well, not to read, or cultivate the wisdom of those who are experts in our fields.

The paradox is that conformity can also mean the loss of innovation, original thinking, and can result in terrible judgements. We find unconscious conformity at the heart of our how we think when we fall into fundamentalism, or the fascism of masses of people. You may think of footage of the Nazi Nuremberg Rally…or think about any number of fashionable but ill-constructed causes today. Conformity, or ‘Groupthink’, by some of the brightest minds of their generation, is often given as the reason for the U.S. entry into the Vietnam War.

You may be less aware, though, of how the instinct to believe others first eats away at our ability to make decisions in the workplace, and even saps our ability to think intelligently.

Howard Gardner has studied how we think throughout life. If you are familiar with ‘multiple intelligences’ you are familiar with some of his work.

Gardner found that young children were very powerful in their ability to take in information, organise it and use it. About 99% of children, he found, who were between the ages of 0 and 4 years old were ‘geniuses’ in their ability to use their intelligence.

When he continued up the age levels, though, he found that only 70% of children between ages 5 and 10 were still operating at this same ‘genius’ level. Further on, only 20% of young people between the ages of 11 and 20 used their intelligence potential to this level. After age 20 only 2% still had highly integrated intelligence.

At first the researchers could find no explanation. Then Gardner and others noticed that these rates of decline followed exactly the rate at which we give up faith in our own judgement in favour of our peers. Conformity, in other words, steals our genius. It swallows our ability to think to our potential.

We see this in business, too, where studies show that trained, experienced professionals, again and again, will give up their point of view to defer to the opinions of their superiors.

As we say in our training, we don’t want bloody revolutions, but we do want to encourage robust discussion. Our work cannot afford less than full potential thinking.

You may recall the Challenger explosion. Before the race the engineers warned the project managers that the O-rings might fail in the cold predicted for that day. This is not what the managers wanted to here.

“Are you sure,” they said, “that you can prove this is a problem?”

When pressed, the engineers backed down, and that day seven astronauts lost their lives in the explosion from the failed O-rings.

It can be a painful process to go beyond our normal thinking, in a team or as individuals. The French painter, Matisse, described his creative process as extremely violent. To sit down and paint each day felt the same as if he was sitting down to punch someone in the face. ‘It is like lancing an abscess,’ he said.

The drive to see one’s work in fresh or innovative ways is often difficult in professional situations if innovative thinking is not encouraged.

Cynthia Rabe, in her book, “The Innovation Killers,’ describes three qualities of those who break through conformity, and who help organisations break through conformist thinking. She notes how important it is that organisations seek out, and cultivate these qualities in employees.

Renaissance Thinkers, for instance, are people who are wide-ranging in their interests and curious in their outlook. Renaissance Thinkers enjoy exploring connections where connections don’t normally occur.  She also encourages ‘psychological distance,’ which is the ability to not get caught in the expert mode, and to develop a sense of almost not-knowing.

Similarly, Edward DeBono suggests that we look at increasing our alternatives for any given decision. If you are choosing from any less than 12 ideas you are not choosing, he suggests. You are merely reacting.

Try this: choose a problem you are facing and force yourself to come up with 20 solutions. Often it is hard to go past 4 or 5 possibilities, but we see how our criticising mind is limiting us.

“Oh that couldn’t work,” we say. “That’s ridiculous!”

I have heard a story about when DeBono was hired to solve a problem for a builder of a skyscraper. No one wanted to rent the upper floors of the building because the elevators they had installed were too slow. The cost of installing a new system in the finished building would be too much, they said, but neither could they afford to rent the lower floors only.

DeBono came into the building and sat in the lobby for a day, studying the lifts. At the end of the day he came to the owner and told him to install a bank of mirrors around the entrance to all the lifts.

“How will that speed up the lifts?” he was asked.

“It won’t,” he said, “but people love to look at themselves, and they won’t mind the wait as much.”

Making a commitment to go beyond conformity is a commitment to looking for a better way of doing things and it is about stretching beyond where we are now. As the comedian Will Rogers said: “You’ve got to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.”

We recognise that ideas are power in today’s marketplace, and so we must look at what stops ideas from being born, and what stops them from being acted upon. The commitment great leaders have to listening to new ideas takes humility and courage. Think of the difference between the investors in early phones and the British diplomat, who at the first demonstration of a long-distance phone call said: ‘Well that is well and good for Americans, but in England we many boys to use as messengers.’

The commitment we all must have is to look at what narrows our view, and what narrows our ability to choose. We need to cultivate and stretch our perspective daily, as Renaissance Thinkers, but to look for habits of mind that force us to go beyond. What is in the balance is our tomorrow, and our potential for today.

“The reasonable man [sic] adapts to the world,’ said George Bernard Shaw. ‘The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to his ideals. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Be unreasonable.