"SOME of the planet’s greatest minds work at NASA, the American space agency. They put a man on the moon. Their spacecraft explore the outer edge of the solar system, their cosmic probes measure radiation from the Big Bang. Their telescopes peer at planets beyond our solar system, their robots explore the surface of Mars.
And yet, when a piece of foam dropped off the Columbia space shuttle during its launch 12 years ago, NASA was really, really stupid.
The foam had smashed into a wing and caused damage to the thermal protection tiles on its surface.
But, as James Surowiecki writes in his fascinating 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, the expert group of managers assembled by NASA to assess the damage decided, during lots of meetings, that this wasn’t a problem.
Sixteen days later, when Columbia re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, the unprotected spot on the wing burned up, and the space shuttle disintegrated, killing all seven crew members.
Surowiecki cites the tragedy as a painful demonstration of the way in which, “instead of making people wiser, being in a group can actually make them dumber”.
The NASA team had not started with an open mind. It was operating on the assumption, that it knew more than it did, and that the foam strike was unimportant, despite evidence to the contrary.
There was an “utter absence” of debate or minority opinions at their meetings. Consensus was expected. “Small groups can make very bad decisions because influence is more direct and immediate,” Surowiecki writes.
“The value of dissent is shown in studies of mock juries, where the presence of a minority viewpoint all by itself makes a group decision more nuanced and its decision-making process more rigorous.
“This is true even when the minority viewpoint turns out to be ill-conceived.
“The confrontation with a dissenting view forces the majority to interrogate its decisions more seriously.”
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