Group Think is Thoughtless

In the 18th Century, the Vienna General Hospital had a serious problem. There was a high degree of infant deaths due to puerperal fever. Data for infant deaths became available in 1784. From 1784 to 1822 the infant mortality rate was about 2%. From 1823 to 1841 infant mortality was about 7% and from 1841 to 1846 it jumped yet again to nearly 10%.

Women plead not to be admitted unless they had to be, knowing their babies had just as good a chance at survival, outside the hospital as in. Physicians studied this phenomenon and could come up with no cause as to why. Doubly perplexing was that infants delivered by mid-wives had a mortality rate of 0.6% as opposed to the infants delivered by the physicians and medical students, which had the near 10% mortality rate.

In 1846 Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis agreed to a three year contract to work at the hospital, beginning that year. He became aware of the problem, pored over the data and learned that in 1823, pathological anatomy began at the medical school, where physicians and medical students would dissect and study cadavers. Midwives did not attend the medical school, and as such performed no pathological anatomy. The physicians and medical students would complete their anatomy classes and then attend to the obstetrics of the hospital, now being carriers of cadaverous contamination.

Upon recognizing this issue, Semmelweiz instituted the practice of hand washing in chlorine after a physician or medical student completed a pathological anatomy. This was instituted in 1847. Infant mortality rates from 1847 to 1858 were about 1.6%, significantly lower than the nearly 10% mortality rate before.

During the decades prior to the investigation of Semmelweiz, the physicians in the hospital could not begin to fathom that anything they were doing would be the cause of the increased infant mortality rates. This is a classic example of Group Think. Group Think is found in organizations (larger than one individual). Tunnel vision and myopathy are synonymous with group think, but can also apply to the individual.

I read a book once, entitled, "Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box," in which the example was given of an infant learning to crawl. The infant gets up on its hands and scoots around by pushing itself back. Eventually, it gets wedged against something and cannot scoot back farther, becoming trapped. Frustrated, it screams and cries and pushes back harder, but to no avail. The paradigm of the infant does not allow it to consider that it might be the source of its own problem. If it could see the problem, it may not be able to do anything, if much about it, because it may not have the capability to change direction without pushing back. Intervention is nearly always required.

This is the hallmark of Group Think, Tunnel Vision and Myopic thinking. That is why it is important to have the emotional maturity to allow someone else to challenge the thought processes we are engaged in. This is critical to a good investigation. Having someone on your investigative team who will challenge the process can get others to see and think about things in a different way. This is necessary to a robust and successful investigation.

Group Think is thoughtless.