The Perils of Groupthink - and How to Challenge It

Boris Johnson gives evidence to the Covid-19 Inquiry

During those early months of 2020, when we were reeling from the impact of Covid-19 and lockdown, my coping mechanism was to research why we were apparently so unprepared, and why the government had moved so quickly from complacency at the start of March 2020 to panic three weeks later as it realised it was failing to contain the virus with disastrous consequences.

To occupy myself I attempted a history of decision-making, which was eventually published here, using material easily accessible on-line. In addition to this rudimentary research I had also served on the public inquiry into the Iraq War. So I was asked to comment on how I would approach an eventual Covid inquiry.

My main recommendation was that it should not be judicial:

‘There is no point in making a Covid inquiry of such potential range and complexity judicial. Interrogating witnesses may provide the spectacle but in this case most of the evidence can be gathered away from hearings. The hard work will lie in analysing the material, and in developing and applying an evaluative framework that can stand the test of time.’

Of course, and unsurprisingly, a judge, Baroness Heather Hallett, was appointed to lead the inquiry and much time has been spent interrogating witnesses. Nonetheless it has got on with its task and we can now evaluate its work with the publication of its first report.  

This only covers the period up to the outbreak of the pandemic. It is scathing in its assessment of the lack of preparedness. The relevant agencies were focused on the wrong type of pandemic (influenza); the institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning were labyrinthine in their complexity; the risk assessments were flawed; the only available strategy was outdated and lacked adaptability so did not survive its first encounter with the pandemic. Not only did the plan focus on only one type of pandemic it failed ‘adequately to consider prevention or proportionality of response, and paid insufficient attention to the economic and social consequences of pandemic response.’

I was particularly struck by this conclusion:

‘Ministers, who are frequently untrained in the specialist field of civil contingencies, were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options, and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers.’

‘The provision of advice itself could be improved. Advisers and advisory groups did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express dissenting views and suffered from a lack of significant external oversight and challenge. The advice was often undermined by ‘groupthink’.’

This reference to groupthink caught my attention, because, when the Iraq Inquiry was looking at the persistence of a flawed assessment of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it turned to a similar explanation. In our report we also expressed concern about how the pressure to stick with a particular view discouraged serious challenge.

References to groupthink are now common as it is a helpful term to describe a phenomenon we can recognise. We have all been in situations where groups have made poor decisions because they have left key assumptions unchallenged. Yet although groupthink has now become a familiar concept, and regularly identified as a problem, there is no agreed explanation about how it comes about, largely because it can take many different forms.

In this post I explore the idea further. First I look at the origins of the concept and what it can mean, and the various explanations for why it occurs, before returning to the cases of intelligence assessments on Iraq and expert advice on Covid to assess how useful it is as an explanation for what went wrong in these cases. I’ll conclude looking at the possible remedies suggested in both inquiries and some thoughts on how governments could avoid it in future.