Courting Failure Within Your Organization

Are you courting failure within your organization?

Here at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, we teach under the premise that people and organizations around the country court failure in predictable ways. This happens due to their mindsets, biases, and experience which are largely formed and molded by their culture and context. One of the areas seen within our program as an issue is within the decision-making process.

Decision-making, by its simplest definition, is the cognitive process of identifying a path to a desired outcome. Two areas of needed growth and identification in reaching these desired end states are fostering cultural empathy and groupthink.

Fostering cultural empathy

In an attempt to ask better questions and facilitate planning, policy making, and strategic and operational decision-making, one must foster cultural empathy.

We do not attempt to make one escape or discard their own deeply held values, beliefs, and ideals, or to even practice cultural relativism, but to gain a better knowledge and understanding of the differences and similarities between our own culture and those held by others. We also teach red teaming cultural methodology in an attempt to reduce blind ethnocentrism.

Groupthink

Irving Janis defines groupthink as, “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

In other words, when working in a group, people have a tendency to adhere to the majority thought held within the room in an attempt to be a part of the group. No one wants to be the outlier, but there always needs to be the one whom plays “Devil’s Advocate” and test assumptions and present alternative perspectives to determine the course of action chosen is the right one.

How does this affect the emergency and disaster management field?

If there is one thing important to take away today, it is that culture is local. This statement goes further than local–as in country, and even state. Culture is local to communities and areas in which you live.

Take Leavenworth, KS for example. Life there is centered around the military base and the community farmers to complete their harvest. Yet 30 miles south, in Kansas City, culture is completely different as it is vocalized on art, music, and food.

Decision-making is a huge part of EDM, as we are reviewing, developing, or determining the needs of our communities. It is important that we remember and understand that groupthink has the ability to inhibit good decision-making within an organization and understanding that the beliefs, values, and ideals deeply held within our communities are equally important to take in to consideration during the decision-making process.