In 1956, Dr. Alice Stewart published research that found that exposing developing babies to X-rays led to greater incidences of childhood cancer and death. But it took 25 more years before medicine caught up and stopped using X-rays when working with pregnant women.

Why? According to Dr. Margaret Heffernan, speaking at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2016, this is a clear-cut case of “willful blindness.” The law defines this as the condition in which there are things you could and should know but choose not to know. It’s potentially prosecutable, as Heffernan discovered when she read the transcript of the trial of the chairman and CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, who ended up being found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud in 2006, and then died of a heart attack before being sentenced.

Willful blindness can have real consequences. And it’s common in corporate cultures because it exists as a function of evolutionary biology.

“The problem here is a mental model of disease. Up to a threshold everything is safe after which it becomes dangerous,” said Heffernan, a TED speaker who’s run five companies and worked in television and digital. “For a fetus, there is no safe level of radiation and exposure. Asked to choose between a theory and this difficult data – these models have tremendous power and validity for us. They attract confirming data and they repel disconfirming data.”

This tendency to attract confirming data appears in companies as the tendency for people to hire in their own images, which results in a lack of diversity. That, in turn, limits ideas and innovations because very similar people tend to think very similarly.

“We surround ourselves with and trust people like ourselves—people who won’t challenge us, people who see and think differently and we tend to really respect those people and be skeptical of those who are wildly different from ourselves,” said Heffernan. “Our brains, likewise, are attracted to confirming people. We have blind spots to things that don’t fit in. We surround ourselves with amplifiers of our own perspective.”

How do we combat these pitfalls?

Dr. Stewart hired a statistician that she then assigned one simple task: Try his very best to disprove her findings. His job was to prove Dr. Stewart wrong because only then could she be confident enough to keep going.

“This is a fantastic model of collaboration,” said Heffernan. “A true thinking partner who isn’t an echo chamber gives us some other way of explaining what we’re seeing. One of the antidotes to willful blindness is to create an environment in which it’s really safe to ask these questions.”

In companies, it’s important to create teams of like-minded people working together. Thomas Malone, an MIT researcher, studied how to build the most effective teams. He tested hundreds of people’s IQs and then gave them hard problems to solve. He then put those people in teams and gave them new problems to solve. Some teams did a lot better than others.

The question he was trying to answer: What are the characteristics of really high achieving teams?

It wasn’t the teams that had the highest aggregate IQ, so putting all the smartest people in the room together isn’t going to help you.

Instead, the highest-achieving teams had three factors on their sides:

1) They score more highly on empathy – how connected am I with you, how much am I thinking about you;

2) They get roughly the same amount of participation from every person on the team. Everyone contributes;

3) They have more women, and that’s likely because women tend to score higher on empathy tests.

Why is being highly empathetic important to team success?

“Really high achieving teams are defined by what’s happening between them – it’s the mortar more than the bricks,” said Heffernan. “They seem to develop a collective mind that is better and more creative than any individual mind. In general, great ideas tend to start out pretty poor and then everybody piles in and they end up pretty genius even though nobody’s signature is on them. To tap that genius, we have to know each other, trust each other and we have to be willing to give each other credit.”

In the course of her research, Heffernan investigated the production of Adele’s smash-hit first album, 21. Heffernan found that some 200 people worked on that “solo” album. In talking to some of them, she heard over and over again that the process was truly collaborative and that made people want to bring their best.

“When you have that experience, you will go anywhere to have it again,” said Heffernan. “You build a network of people who love doing these things.”

In truly creative organizations, there’s a recognition that power disrupts creativity often without even meaning to, said Heffernan. In-tune CEOs know how disruptive their power can be and keep out of the way, or there’s so little hierarchy that everyone’s voice can truly be heard.

“There is no hierarchy for great ideas,” said Heffernan.

And in organizations where there is trust, reciprocity and generosity between team members, those great ideas can emerge, develop and be implemented.

[Photo courtesy of Image Group LA]

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