CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO began to read this book for its application in the workplace, thank you for having taken this deep dive with me into the roots of inappropriate obedience in childhood development. For those of you who are reading this book for its application to childhood development, I invite you to join me once again in looking at the benefits of Intelligent Disobedience in the workplace, where the children being raised will soon find themselves.
Ideally, developing the good citizenship skill of Intelligent Disobedience is made easier when the groundwork is laid in childhood education. Meanwhile, we are left to live and work in a world in which the pressures to conform and obey are powerful. We need to decide how we will equip ourselves to resist ill-conceived or dangerous orders and how we will create environments that support Intelligent Disobedience for those in our care.
Preparation is a critical factor, for it may be too late to develop the discipline at the moment it is most needed. Let’s examine the most memorable event that ushered in the twenty-first century as an example of this.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Cyril Richard “Rick” Rescorla was on the job as a vice president for security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which had some 3,700 employees in the World Trade Center, including 2,700 in the south tower. By a coincidence only of note to this book, Rescorla lived in Morristown, New Jersey, where The Seeing Eye is located. That morning, as he did every weekday morning, Rescorla drove to the Morristown station and waited for the 6:00 a.m. train on the same platform used to train seeing eye dogs in Intelligent Disobedience.
Rescorla had come to Dean Witter years earlier, prior to its acquisition by Morgan Stanley, to head up its security operation. A professional who was unusually alert to systemic danger, Rescorla, with the help of a former military colleague, quickly appraised the danger of terrorist attack to the twin towers. The towers, the tallest buildings in the world at that time, were symbols of Western culture, which was under attack by radical Middle East groups that had perpetrated a number of serious bombing attacks over the previous few years. The towers were particularly vulnerable due to their structural overreliance on internal supporting columns. Rescorla and his colleague wrote a detailed assessment of the risks for the Port Authority of New York, who owned the buildings, giving remedial recommendations. These recommendations were dismissed as too costly and politically unpalatable.
In 1993, with Rescorla on duty, the towers were subject to a massive truck bomb attack in the underground garage, which caused significant damage and casualties. This event reinforced Rescorla’s well-reasoned concerns about the vulnerability of the towers and the potential for being the target of subsequent, more lethal attack. He was not able to persuade Morgan Stanley executives to abandon their lease and move out of the buildings. But he did achieve support for his insistence on implementing evacuation drills at monthly intervals to prepare for such an attack. Knowing the cost of having 3,700 employees of a New York investment firm take time to do safety drills, this in itself is noteworthy. Reports indicate that he had to stand up to the pressure of high-powered executives who resented the intrusion on their and their staff’s schedules. This was the prior act of Intelligent Disobedience that made his subsequent act on 9/11 awesomely effective.
When the first plane hit the north tower at 8:46 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, Rescorla saw the tower burning from his office on the forty-fourth floor of the south tower. We can imagine the surge of adrenaline he experienced at that moment. Unlike many others who felt shock, panic, and confusion, Rescorla had a plan and had practiced it. So when the announcement from the Port Authority came over the public address urging people to stay at their desks, there was no hesitation on recognizing this was a directive to ignore and to counter emphatically. This was the quintessential act of Intelligent Disobedience performed without hesitation that saved thousands of lives.
Rescorla grabbed his bullhorn, walkie-talkie, and cell phone and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to evacuate the south tower and the adjacent World Trade Center 5 building. Due to his urging, they followed the drill with speed and orderliness. If we can extend our canine metaphor, Rescorla was now operating like an insistent sheepdog from his native Cornwall, England.
All but three of Morgan Stanley’s employees escaped with their lives. That is a staggering achievement in the face of nearly two thousand lives lost in the towers that day. One who didn’t survive was Rescorla, who went back into the building searching for any stranded employees. That last act was one of heroism, which has been honored appropriately with medals and public praise. But the great lessons of developing his own situational awareness of risk, of persuading the power structure of the organization to respond at least partially to that risk, of creating plans to mitigate the risk, of rehearsing those plans with thousands of people and employing informed and Intelligent Disobedience at the moment those plans needed urgent implementation have not received the full attention they deserve.
Three Pillars of Safety and Correct Violation
The success of Rescorla’s actions rested on three pillars, described by Professor James Reason, whose work I am going to bring into this discussion. It focuses on safety in complex organizations, which is often the environment in which Intelligent Disobedience must be exercised. His analysis is not based on the events of the Morgan Stanley evacuation but captures them well.
There would appear to be three main elements: the identification and assessment of an expected hazard … the development, testing and training of a set of counter measures designed to neutralize the threat … and an effective and timely way of deploying these countermeasures, a process relying critically on situational awareness. The latter has three components: perceiving the critical elements in the current situation, understanding the significance of these elements, and making projections as to their future status.1
Clearly, all of these elements are found in guide dog behavior and training, in Crew Resource Management training, and in other preparations we have examined. What seems to be missing from Professor Reason’s analysis, if it were applied to the situation that faced Rescorla, was the need for a fourth element of Intelligent Disobedience, both in developing and training the countermeasures to the potential hazard and in executing them at the required, traumatic moment.
In fact, though, Professor Reason’s work covers this element using different language in his earlier description of the “12 varieties of rule-related behavior.”2 The aptly named Reason offers a comprehensive analysis of the permutations that can exist in a safety-related situation. These include compliance or noncompliance to appropriate rules or procedures, inappropriate rules and procedures, and situations not foreseen or covered by existing rules and procedures. He cautions about the dangers of slipping into habits of noncompliance to rules that serve an appropriate purpose. This is an important caution for us to bear in mind because it would not be Intelligent Disobedience to disregard those rules.3 In contrast to this, he draws attention to another of the twelve potential responses, which he calls “correct violation.” Given the context in which an event occurs, it may be foreseeable that following the usual rule would not work. In that context, Intelligent Disobedience is a correct violation.
Although dramatic events like Rescorla’s responses to the events at the twin towers are useful to alert us to the life and death potential of Intelligent Disobedience, every day, in organizations of every type, smaller acts of Intelligent Disobedience can keep programs on the rails and personnel in rule-bound bureaucracies and earnings-driven corporations from taking actions that would bring harm to their customers or constituents and discredit to their organizations.
In earlier chapters we have examined a number of the skills needed for effective Intelligent Disobedience such as situational awareness, assertive voice, and seeking allies who will also resist destructive orders. There is an additional element that should be included in developing effective responses.
Timing and Social Interaction
This element is found in an important analysis of Milgram’s experiments that we have not yet covered. It is the roles of timing and social interaction in determining an outcome of either misguided obedience or appropriate resistance.
Think back to the situation in which Betty Vinson, the mid-level WorldCom accountant, found herself. When she was first approached about manipulating the monthly report to hide the fact of corporate losses, Betty hesitated. She then allowed herself to be convinced to participate despite her discomfort at doing so. From there Betty found herself on a slippery slope. Each month, when a fresh request was made, she continued to go along until she was confronted by an internal auditor and could no longer contain the strain she felt about her participation in the malfeasance. By then it was too late. She had colluded in enough illegal activity to earn a jail sentence. Yet, she was so close to saying “no” early on. She had even written a letter of resignation, and then tore it up. The more she participated in the cover-up, the less able she was to extract herself from the web she helped weave.
Through a careful analysis of films that were taken of some of Milgram’s experiments, researchers found that the earlier an individual began to clearly resist, the more likely he or she was to end up refusing to go on with the experiment.4 This may sound self-evident, but there is an important dynamic occurring.
The subjects in the experiment, in almost all cases, experienced significant strain between wanting to cooperate with authority and not wanting to continue inflicting harm. They had a psychological contract to assist the researcher with the learning experiment. As they began to see the pain the experiment appeared to cause, the strain of whether they should continue, or refuse to continue, grew. The subject needed to resolve that strain, one way or another.
This analysis of the films found that subjects use a gradation of behaviors to respond to the strain:
♦ Cooperation phase. Initially subjects assist the experimenter and experience little strain.
♦ Strain phase. When they begin to experience psychological/moral strain, participants try to resolve it by either checking with the experimenter as to whether what was happening was supposed to happen or by notifying the experimenter that the symptoms were getting worse. These are relatively passive ways of expressing the strain. They are hints at what the subject is experiencing, not assertive declarations. If they feel reassured by the experimenter’s responses, this reduces the strain and they accede to the instructions to continue. If the strain persists, they move to the next phase.
♦ Divergence phase. In this phase, participants actively or overtly question what is occurring or clearly object to the impact the experiment is having. When the experimenter insists the experiment must continue, some comply to resolve the strain, rationalizing as to why they should (the experimenter is trained, it’s not lethal, I’m just doing what I’ve been told, etc.). If they could not or would not rationalize their continued compliance, the strain persists and they move to the next phase.
♦ Divergence reduction or amplification. The subject can reduce divergence and resolve or compartmentalize the strain by submission to the insistence of the authority figure to continue the experiment. Or the subject can amplify divergence, drawing clear distinctions between his and the experimenter’s values hierarchy, and state an unambiguous refusal to continue.
Interrupting the Mesmerizing Effect of Authority
What this research adds to our understanding of protocols for training in Intelligent Disobedience are at least three things:
First, the analysis of these behaviors in the Milgram films shows that the earlier a subject overtly questions or objects, the more likely he is to break off the experiment before its end. Those who wait longer to voice questions or objections are more likely to resolve the strain they experience by complying with the experimenter through to the end. The longer they comply with the orders, the more they must rationalize their participation and the less likely they are to break with the authority.
Second, we form an understanding that the strain of the values clash must be resolved and there are two paths for resolution: one of obedience and one of disobedience. In training human beings in Intelligent Disobedience, we will need to help them understand the inevitability of experiencing the discomfort of this strain, the need to be able to stand in that discomfort and make conscious choices about how to resolve that strain. In other words, the simple resolution of the strain through compliance is not sufficient.
Third, there is a mesmerizing flow that occurs when one begins to obey authority and can take on a life of its own. That flow can be, and needs to be, interrupted much like in martial arts when an attack needs to be slowed down or diverted using the opponent’s own force. Voicing discomfort or asking for clarification of directions is insufficient to stop the flow. Direct questions or objections are more likely to interrupt the progression and expose the authority’s inability to give satisfying answers to the points raised. The authority’s inadequate or authoritarian response to resistance breaks the spell of authority and allows a recovery of one’s own autonomy.
This sequence is at times observable in our own lives when we are faced with growing discomfort, not just about direct orders but about an activity in which we are involved—how the little league coach is berating players, how our minister is using the pulpit to advance distasteful views, how the boss is coming in increasingly late requiring us to cover for her. We can experience strain about whether to raise our voice concerning these matters, to interrupt them and possibly to change them. The longer we wait, the more intense the strain. Eventually, we resolve it by amplifying our divergence and saying something to the offender, or we rationalize that it is not appropriate to do so and we go along, perhaps compartmentalizing our discomfort. The longer we wait, the more likely it is we will go along.
Milgram marveled at the politeness of some subjects in the face of what they thought were harmful, even potentially lethal acts. We are social animals, and politeness serves us well in many situations. Sometimes we can effectively perform acts of Intelligent Disobedience politely but resolutely. We must also be able to act with determined impoliteness when necessary. In a dire situation, the sequence of breaking the spell of authority described previously may need to operate with only seconds between the stages.
While writing this chapter, I discussed these progressions and methods of preparing for an event, such as Reason’s three pillars of safety or Crew Resource Management training, as well as the capacity to urgently respond to an actual event, with a group of my partner’s family members. One of them had served in the navy as a submarine engineer. He shared a germane story of throwing politeness out the window, or we might say out the porthole if it had been a surface vessel.
The sub was on routine maneuvers and was preparing to surface. There are strict protocols, of course, to ensure the sub doesn’t surface into harm’s way. One of those maneuvers is to do a 360 degree sonar sweep at depth of 150 feet. Because sonar is usually detecting what is ahead of the vessel, the sweep is to detect anything that might be approaching the intended surfacing position from another direction. Nothing was reported.
The next maneuver is to do a 720 degree rotation of the periscope—twice checking the entire circle around the surfacing position. The officer of the deck conducted the sweep, saw nothing, and allowed the surfacing sequence to continue.
Neither of these sweeps proved to be competent.
By a stroke of good fortune, a young crew member, who was at the lowest rank on the vessel, requested “periscope liberty.” In nautical terms that is a request for permission to perform a periscope sweep, to gain more operational experience. Permission was granted.
The seaman climbed into the periscope tower. As soon as he began his sweep, he saw the bow of a freighter coming straight toward the sub. Without the slightest “polite” or “mitigating” language, he barked out the command “Emergency deep!” That is the command that every crew member knew meant instantaneous execution of rapid dive sequence. In the aft of the vessel, the engineer who told this story, which was pieced together based on the subsequent After Action Review of the incident, received the extraordinary command for “full reverse” of the engines. Without knowing the context, he instantly complied and the vessel slowed its forward motion. The engineer knew from the simultaneous pitch of descent that the sub was in emergency dive mode. Seconds later he heard the unmistakable rumble of propellers pass overhead.
When the heart rate of everyone aboard began returning to normal, procedures were implemented to safely surface the vessel. An inspection of the hull revealed the antennae had been snapped off by the freighter’s props. It could not have been a more narrowly avoided collision. The seaman who had overridden the officer’s order to surface had clearly saved the ship from disaster and probably the careers of the officers of the vessel. Politeness would have been fatal. So would a lack of prior preparation.
At the same time, this story has value in reminding us of the importance of appropriate compliance. The engineer who received the command for full reverse of the engines complied instantly, per his training for dealing with emergencies. Being aft, he had no directly observable data of what was occurring to warrant the command; nor did he have any data that would lead him to question the command. His immediate compliance was as important to the safety of the vessel as the junior seaman’s overriding a senior’s order. This distinction, between appropriate and inappropriate obedience, is what makes either choice intelligent.
In the relatively slowed down time of much of the corporate or organizational world, we usually have hours or days to sort through the question of intelligent obedience or disobedience. Perhaps that makes the disciplines required of Intelligent Disobedience harder to perform, without the adrenaline rush that accompanies situations requiring instant response. This is all the more reason to make individual contributors and teams aware of the dynamics that work in favor of conformity and obedience and against Intelligent Disobedience.
Sooner or later, a boss is going to ask her subordinates to do something that shouldn’t be done because she is missing information, the subordinates are misinterpreting the order, or the order is lacking in good judgment. Incorporating the fundamentals of Intelligent Disobedience into professional training will protect the whole organization from stepping in front of an oncoming car—or freight train.
There is a project management (PM) training company that teaches Intelligent Disobedience as a module it offers as part of its advanced level of PM training. The bane of all projects is mission creep, when the original scope of the project continues to be expanded without thought given to the impact on the timeline or the need for additional resources. Mission creep from customers is difficult enough to manage. When it is instigated by superiors, or superiors become advocates for the customer’s expanding requirements, it is harder still to resist. Yet, every project manager knows that if the creep becomes a crawl and the crawl becomes a lurching zig-zag in direction, the chances of the project being successfully completed, or completed within budget, are greatly diminished. As the steward of the project, the PM has to be able to use all the tools of voice and resistance to shepherd it to completion.
Intelligent Disobedience can be taught freestanding, or it can be woven into other professional development. It is certainly a legitimate part of any ethics training. There are courses on “managing up,” where this skill set is a natural fit. It can be incorporated into classes on leadership and followership, exploring what each owes the other. Clearly, safety training programs should create awareness and competency of the topic. High-level team building explores the need to avoid group think through maintaining one’s own reality in the face of group pressure and is a natural stepping stone to individual accountability. Even a little Intelligent Disobedience training can reap outsized rewards.
Overcoming Barriers to the Organization’s True Needs
It is common in organizational life for a positional leader to set a lofty goal or hold high expectations for performance, despite limited or reduced resources. Sometimes those goals or expectations are driven by the leader. Sometimes they are set for the leader by more senior leaders, by market analysts, by government programs, or by competitive necessity. Problems arise when there is so much pressure to achieve these goals that “anything goes.” Witness WorldCom.
James Reason whose “pillars of successful actions” were all found in both Riscorla’s and the submarine’s successful preparation for and response to catastrophic failure, identifies “the blinkered pursuit of the wrong kind of excellent … usually in the form of seeking to achieve specific performance targets” as one of the three pathologies that make systems vulnerable to this failure.5 We saw in the chapter on WorldCom how widespread the obsession was with metrics and achieving targets.
In these cases, intelligent resistance may be needed, but almost always it is most successful if accompanied by offering alternative ways to achieve the underlying interest.
Let’s say the boss wants to be able to report 100 percent safety for six months. To achieve this, he is discouraging reporting “minor” safety violations. I have seen this more than once. Perhaps you have seen or experienced similar pressure to “smooth” statistical reports.
Obeying would be decidedly unintelligent. Disobeying may simply result in being pushed aside for someone who will blindly obey. Coming back to the boss with a plan to aggressively find the root causes of each “minor” accident in order to reduce safety incidents to near zero is a potentially acceptable alternative. Especially if you point out that the “wrong kind of excellence” may come back to bite him, whereas the right kind of excellence is both the right thing to do and the professionally prudent course of action.
Equally common in organizational life is that the system itself may be generating the barriers to effective action, to ways forward through challenging obstacles. Almost anyone who works in a traditional organization shudders at the number of times they hear “we can’t do that” in response to initiatives to improve some aspect of the organization’s work. These obstacles may not take the form of a direct order, but rather in withholding of approval or help for taking reasonable actions to address legitimate needs. A proactive form of Intelligent Disobedience is needed.
Creative Intelligent Disobedience
In the private sector, if an innovative employee or team encounters too many obstacles to developing new products or methods, the more courageous ones go off and develop the breakthroughs outside of the company. The high-tech sector is full of such stories and of individuals who have become very rich as a result.
In the public sector, there are fewer options for leaving the system to develop alternative solutions to meet the needs of the constituencies being served. In the worst cases, this results in poor service and antiquated practices. In the best cases, this promotes the development of creative Intelligent Disobedience within the system.
Barry Richmond is a retired colonel in the Indiana National Guard. He is an avid student of leadership. We had the opportunity to share ideas and stories before a series of presentations I made at Franklin College, in Indiana. I asked him to elaborate on his stories, which are exemplary of creative Intelligent Disobedience.
In true form for a serious thinker on leadership, he mused as to:
“What is Intelligent Disobedience? Is it simply disobeying a direct problematic order? Or is it more fundamentally disobeying command intent? Or a particular interpretation of a regulation? Or, even more profoundly, is it disobeying the barriers we ourselves erect to discovering ways to do what is needed in a situation?”
Richmond’s story is a classic case of developing competence in overcoming barriers imposed by bureaucracies. The context of the story is the senior roles he held at key National Guard facilities in Indiana in the post-9/11 world. In that changed world, National Guard units played an increasingly critical part in the US response to militant extremism in the Middle East and adjacent regions. Resources were needed to support this enhanced mission. I have excerpted his remarks in the following paragraphs, choosing to leave them in his own, spirited voice.
The first NO.
There they sat in all their glory—used SUVs lined up in neat rows in the quartermaster lot of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). I drove by them frequently and wondered what would become of them? We desperately needed some type of four-wheel vehicles in the Range Branch of the Camp I managed. If only … One day I asked a master sergeant to go to the DNR quartermaster and see what they were going to do with those vehicles. He told me they would be auctioned off to the highest bidder at their annual excess property auction. Mmm … Further discussion revealed that DNR could just transfer them to us since we fell under another state agency, the Military Department of Indiana. I was in hog heaven—now I could get enough vehicles for our range branch, as well as other directorates on the Installation. But first I had to endure my first learning experience of working through the bureaucracy of acquisition.
Initially it was “No, we cannot do that.” I consulted some “candoers” and researched the regulation. Answer: “Well maybe, but you have to do x and y and z and … by the way, there is no budget for any maintenance on the vehicles … so what are you going to do when they break down or need any maintenance?” Well, we will do self-service maintenance in our range shop, and when we cannot do that anymore, we’ll pull them into the impact area and redesignate them as hard targets.
Yessssss … finally it was approved, and 40 SUVs with just over 100,000 miles on them became range vehicles, Military police vehicles, logistics vehicles, and more. Everybody who needed wheels loved them.”
As a reader you may be saying “Whoa, didn’t you just change the topic on us? Richmond wasn’t being given an order that if obeyed would cause harm.”
True. But in a regulation-bound society, we are frequently given compelling or constraining orders about what we must or must not, or can and cannot do, even when our proposal will do good or prevent harm. The true source of the obstacle is essentially invisible. We rarely see the rules that are supposedly written somewhere. We are simply told that the rules prevent doing something. The persons telling us this may or may not have read the rules and considered them in the context of all the other rules and values that apply.
If we give up every time a rule seems to prevent us from doing something creative, positive, and good, we would be displaying learned helplessness, rather than Intelligent Disobedience. Learned helplessness is a phenomenon observed in experiments in which, no matter what the subject tries to do, it cannot meaningfully influence its environment. So it gives up even trying. In a highly regulated society, individuals, and an entire citizenry, can sink into a state of learned helplessness. Cultivating an instinct for questioning rules that seem to defy common sense and developing the art of questioning effectively are core competencies of creative Intelligent Disobedience.
The regulatory society throws up an array of blockages that we need to be willing to test and solve if what we are trying to do is of general benefit. In my work with a wide range of clients, I have found that those who run into a barrier and question it often find the barrier is the result of one interpretation of a situation. Being willing to actively question the ruling finds other interpretations that are just as valid and allows constructive initiatives to proceed.
Too often, the response to regulatory barriers manifests in the form of cynicism or ineffective complaining to others. This is a red flag warning of the condition of learned helplessness. The effective response to walls of regulatory barriers is contained in the observations we made about the successful resisters to the Milgram experiments: asking direct questions that break the mesmerizing spell of authority. Through effective questioning that demands on-point and specific responses, test whether the regulation is legitimate and applicable or if it is incorrectly and counterproductively being applied to the situation at hand. Barry Richmond researched the regulations and asked the right questions.
Richmond encountered a series of such bureaucratic obstacles. As he surmounted each one with resolve and persistence, he developed the self-confidence required to tackle a situation on a scale that may arise only once in a career, similar to Rick Rescorla’s ultimate act of Intelligent Disobedience. We can see why Colonel Richmond began his account by asking What is Intelligent Disobedience? He astutely asked the question:
“Or, even more profoundly, is it disobeying the barriers we ourselves erect to discovering ways to do what is needed in a situation?”
The Big NO.
The tragedy of 9/11 changed us forever. Now we trained for homeland emergencies with an urgency we had never known, but one we felt day in and day out. We searched for places to conduct realistic emergency response training for our National Guard and state and federal partners. And then, a fellow colonel said, “Barry, I know a place in southern Indiana that would be perfect. It is a state hospital that is closing.” I said, “We need something bigger than a hospital.” He responded, “Go look at it; you won’t believe it.” So I went to look at it … and I couldn’t believe it.
This wasn’t a hospital, it was a town! It had a school, a water treatment plant, a sewage plant, a steam generation plant, dining facilities, carpenter shop, electrician shop, a chapel, and on and on … fifty-five buildings, most connected with underground tunnels, a 280-acre reservoir, all on a thousand acres. This was Disneyland … a training heaven. And the state was going to tear it all down as soon as the hospital closed. We needed this. We had to save it from demolition. But how could we afford it?
Initially, my internal conversation went like this: “Are you out of your mind?!?! How would we ever pay for this!?!? The maintenance cost alone would be over a million dollars annually … maybe two … or more. No. No. No.”
Then Barry Richmond’s creative Intelligent Disobedience voice kicked in. Instead of focusing on the barriers and “obeying” them, he looked for the paths around them. After overcoming his internal roadblocks, he was ready to overcome the external roadblocks that were in ample supply. When others in the bureaucracy voiced their own “no,” he did not accept this as a signal to “stand down” but looked for ways to bring them aboard. Giving them a taste of the potential in the hospital facility would make the difference in their attitudes.
First things first. We needed to get permission to do a State Homeland Security training exercise while the hospital was still in the process of closing. Most of the buildings had been closed down and were available for the exercise. Yes!
Our soldiers loved it. My bosses, the generals, flew down to check the exercise out. Now they were infected with the “we have got to get this” bug.
One researcher who was studying urban operations training sites came down, and as he surveyed the “city” from a rooftop, he said he had been to all of the urban training centers in the Department of Defense, and this was the biggest and most realistic.
Eventually, the hospital closed. And the state did not tear it down. The governor transferred it to his National Guard and seeded some maintenance funds for transition while we got some federal- and customer-funded support.
A decade has swept furiously by. We have added training venue upon training venue, all designed to offer realism and specialized training scenarios to those who have to operate in complex urban environments. The concept of funding a fully populated “living, breathing city” is still foreign to the military training system. It breaks all the rules. But the largest Homeland Defense training event is held there every year, and NATO comes to train. And everyone who visits says this is the best. And some say, “We want one of these ‘cities’ too. How did you ever pull this off?”
We smile … and hug our great partners and supporters who help us wade through the complex swamps that swirl around great ideas … as we scrape off yet another dream-sucking bureaucracy leech. It’s all part of the journey. Endeavor to persevere.
What factors helped Barry Richmond look at each situation and not let a bias for compliance with implicit or explicit rules stop him from looking for that path forward? This is a trained engineer and military man, in other words a man who understands the value of rules and has a sufficient track record of respecting them to be given successively increased responsibilities within the institutions that create those rules.
The reality is that we cannot know all the factors that prepared him to take the creative disobedience stances he took. There were few correlations between life experiences and behavior in the Milgram obedience experiments. What we can know, however, is that Richmond had a deep commitment to the mission for which he was responsible. This is the core requirement of Intelligent Disobedience. Intelligent Disobedience in its full maturity is proactive, not simply reactive to a dangerous order.
Barry Richmond displayed commitment to mission, situational awareness, an autonomous state of mind, a bias for action, and perseverance in the face of barriers. Milgram and our own life experience tell us that we cannot count on the majority of people to naturally display these elements of Intelligent Disobedience. So what do we do?
In all professions and industries where compliance to wrong orders or bureaucratic road blocks can have serious adverse consequences, we need to build the elements of Intelligent Disobedience into both orientation and development programs. The necessity to recognize a situation calling for Intelligent Disobedience can occur on the first day of the job or in the tenth year. Examples of how the culture supports Intelligent Disobedience are needed. Accountability is impressed on all team members. And the culture must be supportive when the team member acts from that sense of accountability.
We have already seen how wide is the range of activities in which Intelligent Disobedience may be needed—from health care, to transportation, to energy, finance, education and the military, to name only a few. All professions have certification programs and continuing education requirements. All companies and institutions have on-boarding processes and professional development opportunities. In addition to teaching the rules, standard procedures, and protocols, they should also design into their curricula modules that teach Intelligent Disobedience and reinforce that training periodically. However well a culture builds the principles of Intelligent Disobedience into the socialization of its young, each profession and each workplace needs to verify that the principles are sufficiently driven home so they are activated when situations call for their unequivocal exercise. We need more Rick Rescorlas and Barry Richmonds. We can wait for them to appear, or we can design our professional development programs and work environments to create them.
Let’s review key elements for training a work force in Intelligent Disobedience and supporting its use in the organization culture.
1. Identify likely risks, train people in appropriate responses, practice evaluating situations to determine if those responses should be deployed or if alternative measures—correct violations—should be taken.
2. Train people in the four phases in questions of obedience: cooperation, strain, divergence, and divergence amplification or reduction, and how to consciously use these to do the right thing.
3. Impress on individuals that the earlier they overtly question or object to an inappropriate order, the more likely they will break the mesmerizing effect of authority.
4. Intelligent Disobedience can be done with polite resoluteness, but prepare people to act with determined impoliteness when necessary.
5. Create an organizational norm that, when told policy forbids doing something, individuals insist on seeing the relevant policies to determine if they apply as interpreted to the current situation.
6. Teach creative Intelligent Disobedience using simulations that require networking and agility to imaginatively overcome roadblocks in bureaucratic organizations.
7. Build into orientation and development programs the elements of Intelligent Disobedience as an appropriate balance to the focus on standard operating procedures and policy.
8. As organization leaders, remain supportive when individuals display Intelligent Disobedience in service to the organization’s mission and values, even if outcomes are less than desirable.
9. Value and encourage the creative use of Intelligent Disobedience to counteract a culture descending into a learned helplessness that stifles innovation and self-correction.
10. Teach committed perseverance when working to correct unacceptable situations or to find better ways of achieving worthy goals.
