Leaders are fallible

Jenni Russell

A culture that demands overconfidence from those at the top will suffer the consequences.
 
Bill Clinton has a new mantra. Once a day, as he told an audience this week, he makes it a rule to find a reason to say “I didn't know that” and “I was wrong”. He takes it so seriously that if the opportunity doesn't come up naturally, he creates one.

Clinton is doing this because he is ferociously curious. He's a man on an intellectual journey, and he wants to understand a complex, constantly changing world, rather than being trapped by limited, outdated interpretations of it. He's trying to challenge the mind's natural inclination to jump to conclusions about a subject and never question it again. He says he wants to be a learner until the day he dies, and that the only way to achieve that is to have an open mind.

Put that way, Clinton's approach sounds like eminent good sense. It's more than that. It's difficult and remarkable. We don't tend to do it ourselves, preferring to stick to a set of certainties we happened across some time in the past. And we certainly don't like it in our leaders. Statements that sound like a charming admission of intellectual humility from an ex-leader come across as dangerous weakness in current ones.

Just consider the wall of criticism that met Theresa May, the British Home Secretary (Interior Minister) this week because she was unaware of an element of how her department was operating. Not knowing something — about the operation of the country's border controls — nearly finished her. If she had dared to add to that by saying that she was wrong, she would have been out. Think of the jeering her boss, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, has been subjected to whenever his government has changed its mind: on privatising forests, on reforming the tax-funded health service, on the courts and sentencing proposals.

Responses

The media gloats over U-turns, changes of direction or apologies as signs of frailty, not as possible signs of sense. Imagine the response the chancellor (Finance Minister) George Osborne would get if he stood up and said that he hadn't realised how badly the economy would respond to an austerity programme, and that he had been wrong to drive one through. Suppose Barack Obama confessed the same doubts about the massive stimulus package that isn't delivering growth in the U.S. Our reaction would be fury and scorn. We demand omnipotence, certainty and results from the people at the top, rather than an intelligent willingness to change their minds as the facts change too.

This would be reasonable if certainty and conviction were correlated with success. They aren't. We would like to believe that they were, because we're always looking for guidance from people who tell us they have answers, whether they are politicians, doctors, economists, financial advisers or business leaders. The evidence shows how feeble the link between confidence and judgment is. Even worse, the more powerful individuals become, the more likely they are to trust their own instincts, to ignore information brought to them by others, and to end up making mistakes.
 
Examples

We're surrounded by proof of how badly leaders read reality, from the financial crisis to the euro and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This month, research in the journal Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes shows how powerful people end up making less accurate decisions than less powerful ones. Merely being reminded of a situation in which they once had power is enough to make people more dismissive of others' input, and they are wrong to do so. Outside information helps to smooth out the distortions that result when people give too much weight to their own opinions.

Leaders rarely understand this. They learn the opposite lesson. Since confidence is seen as an important attribute of leadership, most successful people come to see taking advice as a sign of weakness. That confidence is good for them individually — it means they are more likely to be trusted and promoted — but bad for the organisations they work in, which are more likely to commit themselves to poor decisions.

That pattern of confidence being good for individuals' careers but bad for the accuracy of their predictions is a common one. In 2005, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philip Tetlock, published a long-term study of the predictions made by 284 political and economic commentators. He had asked them to make predictions about the likelihood of wars in the Gulf, the survival of Gorbachev, the future of emerging markets. The results were devastating. The commentators performed worse than basic computer algorithms, and the more famous and in demand the respondents were, the more flamboyant and overconfident their forecasts.

Subject of a book

The Nobel prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in a book out this month, Thinking, Fast and Slow, shows how unwittingly flawed many professionals' judgment is. The chief financial officers of America's largest corporations turn out to be unable to predict the stock market: several years' research showed that if they thought it likely to go down, it was more likely to rise. Highly regarded traders turn out to have had good results purely by chance. Even doctors are not immune. Autopsies show that doctors who described themselves as completely confident of their diagnosis while their patients were alive were proved to be wrong 40 per cent of the time.

Changing cultures in which individuals are rewarded for their overconfidence while the rest of us suffer the consequences of their decisions is extremely hard. In the political hierarchy, some people know it's needed. This week, two advisers to Britain's Prime Minister told me they're frustrated by the civil service's reluctance to challenge the potential weaknesses in government ideas. They're looking for criticism. A former adviser to Labour, Geoff Mulgan, believes it's essential to puncture the bubble of shared assumptions in which ministers and special advisers live. He thinks one solution is to ban advisers from departments on a Friday to allow ministers direct access to outsiders and independent thinkers instead.

At this miserable moment in 2011 we need to demand sober, solid, more broadly based judgments from the powerful. But we also have a role. We should be more willing to admit that the complexity of the world means those leading us will make mistakes. If we want better decisions, more honesty and a swifter correction of errors, we must stop being so childishly unforgiving about our leaders' fallibility. President Clinton isn't unique. We can be wrong too. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2011