Brian Martin
A book review published in The Whistle (Newsletter of Whistleblowers Australia), No. 119, July 2024, pp. 11-12
Matthew Syed has written several bestselling nonfiction books, both entertaining and informative. Before he became a writer and commentator, he was a top table tennis player, winning the Commonwealth championship three times. His first book, Bounce, published in 2010, drew on his experience. It is an accessible account of research on expert performance, covering what it takes to become a top performer in any field. The key is not natural talent but hard work and valuable opportunities.
After Bounce, Syed has continued to write about how to do better. One of his subsequent books is titled Rebel Ideas, which sounds, on the surface, especially relevant to whistleblowing. Rebel Ideas is about the power of diversity and the perils of not having enough of it.
The success of organisations, as well as societies, depends on harnessing our differences in pursuit of our vital interests. When we do this well - with enlightened leadership, design, policy and scientific insights - the pay-offs can be vast. (p. 245)
Sounds good. And who better to offer rebel ideas than whistleblowers, who are quite different from their co-workers in being willing to speak out in an attempt to help organisations and societies achieve their potential?
Alas, Syed never mentions whistleblowers. Still, there is much of value in his book, and in some ways more to learn from what he doesn’t address than from what he does. There’s a clue in the above quote, where he refers to “our” and “we.” More on this later.
Like other talented nonfiction writers, Syed addresses important points by using stories. His first story is about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the CIA. It was the CIA’s biggest failure. There were plenty of clues about the threat, and one of the problems was that those who raised the alarm about a looming attack were ignored or shut down. That’s a whistleblower sort of story, not addressed by Syed. His theme is diversity, and that’s what the CIA didn’t have. Its recruitment procedures aimed at hiring the best and brightest, but they were all middle-class white males. There were hardly any women or members of minority groups, and what Syed calls “collective blindness” was the result. The lesson: the best and brightest individuals, collectively, are less clued in than a workforce with diversity.
Here was my first quibble. The CIA sought to counter threats through surveillance of threatening groups, anticipating their plans and foiling them. That’s fine at one level, but there’s another way to look at this. Al-Qaeda and other terrorists don’t strike randomly. They are driven by perceived grievances, and many of their grievances result from US government actions, such as military interventions. One way to prevent terrorism is to address grievances, including by changing US policies from force and exploitation to being more supportive and cooperative. This was off the agenda before 9/11 and remains off the agenda. From the perspective of the spy agencies, this would be a rebel idea. However, Syed doesn’t mention this, instead accepting the CIA’s conception of its mission and methods without question, except to figure out how to do it better.
The power of diversity is shown in another phenomenon called the wisdom of crowds. Ask the world’s greatest expert on the share market what’s likely to happen in the next year, and compare this to the average of a group of good share market analysts. Which is better? Most likely the group. But sometimes groups go seriously wrong. Syed gives examples from British government policymaking. The idea of the poll tax turned out to be disastrous, triggering massive opposition. So how did a group of elite policymakers get it so wrong? The problem was homophily: the members of the cabinet were very similar in education and background, and they had no idea of what life was like for those less privileged. For a group to be good, there needs to be diversity in experience and worldviews. As an example of when group diversity by design led to brilliance, Syed tells of the British team assembled during World War II tasked with breaking the Nazis’ secret codes. Some of those recruited were top mathematicians. Others were experts at solving crossword puzzles!
Diversity in groups sounds good, so why is it so difficult to achieve? One answer is that those in charge care more about feeling good when they are with like-minded others. Is there more to it? Why don’t managers set up groups that include whistleblowers? That, surely, would help avoid disastrous decisions damaging to the organisation and the public.
Syed tells the story of a tragedy on Mount Everest. In May 1996, three teams were making the ascent, each led by one of the world’s leading mountaineers. Each team was composed of experienced climbers who had other occupations, so the teams were diverse in knowledge. One climber worked as an airline pilot, and he recognised a cloud formation as threatening a major storm. With decades of flying at high altitudes, he was used to interpreting the danger signs. But he didn’t say anything to warn others. Why not? Because he didn’t want to challenge the team leader, Rob Hall, who had impressed on the other climbers the need to always follow his instructions. It sounds plausible that everyone should obey the most knowledgeable person, the leader - Hall had ascended Everest four times previously - but Syed says that teams are more effective when communication channels are open, and junior members can contribute to decisions. This also applies to teams of surgeons and aircraft crew. Syed’s point is that communication among teams is more important than having the top talent as supreme leader.
However, the reality in many organisations is quite different. Not only is the leader less than perfect, if not incompetent, but contrary information is not welcome. Furthermore, the members of the organisation, the “team” if you like, are not united in their goal, because some of them are involved in dodgy activities. Those employees with different perspectives and a willingness to express them are seldom invited into the inner circle. Rebel ideas are not welcome. The odd thing is that most whistleblowers are not rebels, but just want to make the organisation live up to its own stated principles. In a sense, their ideas are not rebellious but conservative. All the stranger that they are so unwelcome to higher-ups.
Syed tells the story of Derek Black, brought up in the US by white supremacists and already in his teens one of the most articulate exponents of this racist perspective. His parents home-schooled him and were not worried that his views would change when attending university. To understand what happened to Black, Syed explains the difference between information bubbles and echo chambers. If you’re in an information bubble, you only hear one perspective and have no idea there are different ones. But that’s rare today outside of cults. If you’re in an echo chamber, you mainly hear one perspective but also hear contrary views - and are resistant to them. In an echo chamber, your adherence to your ideas is reinforced by the group, so hearing different views makes you more committed to the ones you have. Condemning white supremacists may only cement their views.
Derek Black could have gone to a large university, with tens of thousands of students, but his parents instead sent him to a small college with only hundreds of them. Now the counter-intuitive thing is that echo chambers are more likely on a large campus, because students can find exclusive groups in which they fit in. At New College in Florida, numbers were so small that Black, to have any social life, got to know students with different backgrounds and views. He was no longer in an echo chamber, and his views shifted.
These ideas can be applied to whistleblowing. When the leaders of an organisation are in an echo chamber, not only do they mainly hear one point of view, but they are actively hostile to contrary ones. What is a worker with an innovative idea to do? Maybe try somewhere else. A whistleblower comes with a doubly challenging idea. It might threaten managers because they are implicated in wrongdoing or condoning it, but the reports of problems also clash with the managers’ self-image of running a well-functioning operation. Well, I’m not sure how the idea of echo chambers applies to whistleblowing. Maybe Syed will write a book about whistleblowers as bearers of rebel ideas.
Most of Syed’s stories are about individuals involved in groups in which the goal is clear. The CIA wants to stop terrorism, climbers want to ascend Everest and company managers want to make money. They are all part of a “we” with a common aim. But maybe this is misleading because not everyone is on board with “our” goal. They have other priorities.
The subtitle of Syed’s book is The Power of Thinking Differently. If only whistleblowers had enough power to get others to take their different ideas seriously.Brian Martin is editor of The Whistle.
Brian Martin's publications on suppression of dissent