Structured Not to Know
Why ignorance is not bliss
For over a year, the booster rocket engineer Roger Boisjoly and his colleagues had been worrying about rubber. Specifically, they were concerned with O-rings: How these massive rubber loops—which prevent searing hot, pressurized gases from leaking out of the joints—behaved in extreme temperatures. In 1973, NASA had contracted Boisjoly’s employer, Morton Thiokol, to produce boosters for its Challenger shuttle. In later tests, his team determined that while hot combustion gases would press the O-rings outward to form a tighter seal, cold weather could cause them to stiffen, potentially preventing the seal from closing when it needed to.
On January 28, 1986, the morning the Challenger was scheduled to launch, the temperature at Cape Canaveral, Florida, had dropped to 36 degrees. That was cold enough for sheets of ice to cling to the launch tower, where these rubber rings were about to be put to the ultimate test. The night before, Boisjoly and his fellow engineers begged their managers not to let NASA proceed as scheduled, but the bosses wouldn’t hear it. According to one report, NASA’s George Hardy was appalled at the recommendation to delay. Another shuttle program manager, Lawrence Mulloy, didn’t hide his disdain: “My God, Thiokol [engineers], when do you want me to launch–next April?”
The pressure was palpable, and the final decision to launch was made by Thiokol managers; the engineers were deliberately not given a vote. The engineers had done the math and knew the mission was doomed. The space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members.
Having access to the right information, the right people, and at the right time is a gift. But organizations are structured for ignorance when they don’t know, don’t want to know, or don’t want you to know something that might inhibit their view of success.
Teams that respond or react to pending challenges confront inconvenient truths early. Teams that ruminate or reduce friction prioritize comfort and calm ahead of clarity. They may slowly lose the ability to see reality before small risks become catastrophic failures.
Organizational Ignorance
Although not as catastrophic as the Challenger disaster, I once worked for a non-profit whose organizational culture was so siloed and fractured that the president was forced to resign after getting embroiled in a Ponzi scheme using company funds. By ignoring best practices in financial protocols, transparency, and board approvals, this president presided over multi-million-dollar losses resulting from repeated decisions that refused to heed the wisdom around him. Although the president might have had the best of intentions, the system around him was making way for unchecked authority that would ultimately cost everyone.
Agnotology is the study of how ignorance gets actively produced and maintained, often strategically. The term comes from the work of Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford. In the 1990s, Proctor was studying tobacco industry documents, in what we now know was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to manufacture doubt and confusion about the established health risks of smoking. Proctor distinguishes three types of ignorance, which I think also apply to organizations (examples in italics are mine):
Ignorance as a Native State: the condition of not yet knowing. We don’t know if the market will buy this new product because it’s new.
Ignorance as Lost or Selective Knowledge: when knowledge is ignored, forgotten, buried, or left unexplored. We know our main source of revenue won’t last forever, but we’re not going to do anything to fix it now.
Ignorance as a Deliberately Engineered Construct: ignorance deliberately constructed to serve interests. We are pursuing the mission set out by this CEO regardless.
In the wake of the Challenger disaster and the non-profit president’s financial misbehavior, ignorance was baked into the system, making it okay not to heed what the people and the data were saying. The system—the organizational culture—will continue to facilitate bad decisions until it is constructed or disrupted otherwise.
A Better Way
They say that knowledge is power, but ignorance might be even more powerful. That is the danger of organizational ignorance, which is the Antagonist in this story. Organizational ignorance is usually structural, not intellectual. Organizations naturally become better at seeing what helps them move and worse at seeing what threatens momentum. Over time, inconvenient truths become slower to surface and easier to disregard.
But once an organization becomes structurally incapable of seeing reality clearly, decline, disaster, or deceit become inevitable long before they become visible.
But there is a different path, and it is possible to reform bad organizational habits.
Put This Antagonist to Work
In my work with principals and their teams to overcome organizational ignorance, three things come to mind for defeating this Antagonist.
Watch for the moment when the room gets smaller. Whether it’s dismissing warnings from an engineering team and excluding them from the final decision, or the board of directors who fulfill the perception of good governance but are really just a rubber stamp, the culture will make way for what it already practices. Notice who gets excused from which conversations, and why. That’s where ignorance gets manufactured in real time.
Make it cheap to say the inconvenient thing. If raising a concern costs someone relational or political capital, no one can afford to be honest. Written pre-mortems, anonymous dissent channels, and a recurring question—like what are we choosing not to look at right now?—will lower that cost enough for the truth to surface before it is too difficult to acknowledge.
Watch what happens to the people who speak up. This is where the organization’s real values are tested. If the people who speak up get promoted, it signals the organization is willing to look at itself. If they’re marginalized or managed out, you’re teaching everyone else to look away.
Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist
Consider these questions for your own reflection or to spark a team conversation about some of the elements for confronting the organizational ignorance Antagonist.
What is your organization structured to ignore?
What does it over-emphasize that might be compensating for its ignorance?
How could you rally as a team to face more inconvenient truths?
The temptation to beat this Antagonist is to be an organization that just accumulates more knowledge. Not terrible, but not sufficient. You defeat this Antagonist by building a structure that can’t afford to look away.
The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?
Does this Content Resonate?
Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.
After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.
So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than five minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.