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Invite underlings to disagree
The vote at Thiokol
At Thiokol, the general manager polled only the vice presidents about the launch. Brian Russell, one of the youngest engineers in the room, looked across at Roger Boisjoly and Arnie Thompson, who were dejected, and wondered whether he would be the only one to disagree and whether he had the courage to say so. He was never asked. After the company agreed to launch, he wished he had called out that there was a dissenting view.
What makes it hard
Making room for the least senior person to speak against what everyone already believes about safety, and then evaluating what that person offers, is the hard part. A second difficulty follows: deciding which problems have to be solved before a launch and which can be solved along the way. There is no magic answer to that one.
Carrying it forward
The same habit reaches past engineering. Asking people for their feelings and thoughts on a matter, in decisions at work or in family relationships, is how Russell tries to live now.
Why do junior people stay silent in meetings?
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson introduced the term psychological safety in a 1999 paper on work teams. It describes whether people believe they can speak up with a question, a concern, or a mistake without being punished or embarrassed. In her hospital research, units with stronger leadership reported more medication errors, not fewer, because their staff felt able to report them. Her work tied silence in teams to the signals people read from the person in charge.
Why does hearing others first change answers?
In Solomon Asch's experiments in the 1950s, volunteers judged which of three lines matched a reference line, a task nearly everyone gets right alone. When the actors around them gave the same wrong answer, about three quarters of the volunteers went along with the group at least once. Across all the critical trials, they gave the wrong answer about a third of the time. Conformity dropped sharply when even one actor in the group gave the right answer.