How The Abilene Paradox Affects Communication With Jamie Librot.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Negotiate Anything is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 3 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm Kwame Christian and I'm the director of the American Negotiation Institute. We're growing and I want to introduce you to our new team members and new trainers. This will help to give you new diverse perspectives on negotiation and conflict resolution. That's why I'm excited to let you know that Shane Martin, our head of sales and partnerships, is going to serve as co host of the show. From time to time. We are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, before we get into the episode, I want to remind you that our team conducts negotiation and conflict resolution trainings in the United States and abroad. Our trainings will give you the practical skills you need to resolve conflict, negotiate, lead and persuade with confidence. Click the link in the description below to learn how we can help to make your difficult conversations easier. And now let's get to the show. Jamie, thanks for joining us again, my friend.

Oh, thanks for inviting me, Kwame.

Yeah, I had no choice. The first episode was so good we had to bring you back.

Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Oh, it was a blast. It was a blast. And so, for our new listeners and some people who may have forgotten, can you let us know a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. My name's Jamie Leebro and I'm the director of talent management for Sabert. They're a billion dollar sustainable food packaging company that is saving the planet one beautiful meal at a time. And I'm an organizational psychologist. I worked for Gallup for 12 and a half years. So I'm really passionate about finding people's strengths, employee engagement, and really, topics that relate to social and organizational psychology.

This is great. Yeah. So essentially, you're living the dream that I had when I was a psych undergrad. So it's great. I'm living vicariously through you.

Oh, no. I dream of going to law school. I'd be in school forever. There's lots of degrees I'd like to get. Law is right up there, so we'll exchange one day.

Oh, that's great. That's great. Well, I'm excited for this. This is going to be a really fun episode because we're covering a topic that we haven't covered yet on the podcast. And it's a topic that's new to me too. So I am learning alongside with the listeners to a greater extent than usual. Today we're talking about the Abilene paradox. So tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's a really interesting story. So this was created by a researcher named Jerry Harvey. He was a management consultant associated with George Washington University, my alma mater, my, my undergrad alma mater. And he was from Texas. Abilene, Texas. And this was sometime in the 1970s. It was a really hot day, even hot by Texas standards. So you've been to Texas, you know how hot it gets. 104, 107. You see those tiktoks where people are literally trying to fry an egg on their car. And he was actually having a great time. He was sitting on the porch with his in laws. He had just gotten married, so he really liked his in laws. At this point, he and his wife were playing dominoes in the shade. They were sipping some iced lemonade. And then his father in law suggested, hey, why don't we drive 53 miles to Abilene, Texas and get some ice cream? And Jerry Harvey said, ugh, get in the non air conditioned car. Because this was the 70s, cars didn't have air. Some cars didn't have air conditioning. Drive two hours on a dust road for some pretty mediocre ice cream. But he was newly married, he wanted to impress his father in law. So what do you think he said?

He said yes.

He said yes. He's like, sounds. Not only did he say yes, he said, sounds like a great idea, dad. And his mother in law said, oh my gosh, let's do that. That sounds great. And his wife also voiced a lot of enthusiasm. What a great idea. Thanks so much for thinking of it. They get in the car, their legs are stuck to the seat, they're sweating on each other. They go into town, takes them two hours, they're covered in dust because they had to put the window open because there's no air conditioning. They go to the diner, they get some vanilla ice cream. They drive two hours back home and they look around and the father in law says, well, that was a terrible idea. And they're like, what? He's like, yeah, I mean, you know, I wanted to please you guys, but you know, I regret it. And Harvey said, what are you talking about? I only went because you wanted to go. And the mother in law said, well, I only said it was a good idea. I thought it was a terrible idea. But both of you seem so excited. And Harvey's wife said, well, only when all three of you made it seem like it was the greatest idea ever, I didn't want to disappoint anyone. So nobody wanted to go for ice cream. They all said what they thought everyone else wanted to hear, and then nobody got what they want. And that is what the Abilene Paradox is all about. Everyone does what they think everyone else wants, and in the end, nobody gets what they want.

Wow, that was an awesome story. Because it didn't happen to me.

I bet it has, honestly. Right.

It has. In other ways.

Yeah. In other ways. Yeah. Fortunately, you and I grew up in a time when there was more air conditioning in more places, but. Yes.

Right. And I think there's a lot that we can take from this. And listeners probably hearing this story, their mind is. Their minds are probably racing to times where something like this has happened to them. And the examples of this abound in the workplace. So let's make this practical. So how do we apply this to our everyday lives?

Let's start with a simple one. I see this happen all the time in scheduling, especially if people are in different time zones. I have a colleague in Australia and I was going to have a meeting with her at 10 o' clock at night so that it would be 8 or 9am for her. And so I wrote the time I thought she wanted and she agreed. And then a few days later, she sent me a note saying, I'm a mom, it's actually better for me to meet at night, my time, when my kids are sleeping, we meet in the middle of the day, your time, which was actually way more convenient for me. I didn't want to actually have a meeting at 10pm so even though I'm a practitioner of this and I teach it to other people, I still find myself making this mistake. And I said to her, my goodness, thank you so much for reminding me. I have to be more mindful of this and I have to. And I really thought after that, what are the ways that I could prevent this? Just knowing about the Abilene Paradox isn't enough. You have to consciously work with your partners to prevent it.

Absolutely. It sounds like, when we think about the risks, it sounds like miscommunications. That's the obvious one. But let's go a little bit deeper to really paint the picture to the audience. Other than miscommunications, what other risks exist when it comes to the Abilene Paradox?

Making a bad decision. One way to prevent this is sometimes if the boss speaks first, the boss might just be throwing out an idea and everyone says, oh, yeah, I think that's a good idea. And there's a little Albileen paradox. There's a little bit of social bias. I want you to like me, I want to support you because you're in power. So the whole team can just make a bad decision because the boss walks away saying, oh, everyone loved this idea. They thought it was great. We had a unanimous decision. Right. And really they did the wrong thing. I was just reading an example in NASA where there's a ship that was about to go off on a really cold night and NASA asked the engineers to go examine the ship and they reported nothing because that's what they thought, that NASA, they felt pressure. They thought that NASA really wanted to launch and so they reported nothing. And sure enough, there was a problem with the shuttle. And, you know, the, the crew never returned. So, yeah, I think that's the problem too.

Yeah.

You know, there's been plenty of times when some. So I used to coach executive teams that were in conflict very often and they were really in that storming phase and they would, they were trying to be nice and they would. When the boss would say, what does everyone think we should do? Instead of saying what they actually thought, they would look around the table and say, well, what do I think Joe wants to do? Let me show my support and give an idea that I think Joe wants. And then Joe looks across the table at Jose and says, gosh, I really like Jose. Jose was talking about something earlier. I'm going to push that idea. And again, it's so well intentioned. But if people don't say what they actually think and they guess what everyone else thinks, then the group can't make a good decision.

And tell me what you think about the coordination or the similarity between this concept and groupthink. Because I think a lot of people listening might say, oh, this is just groupthink. But how is this different?

The intention. So groupthink, you have mind police who are actively telling people, don't disagree, don't disagree. And there's consequences for disagreement, right? There's social pressure. If someone voices an opinion and the group shuts them down. Whereas in the Abilene paragraph, everyone has good intentions. They're trying to help other people be heard, they're trying to please other people. It's not motivated by fear, it's motivated by love. But it still leads to the same result as groupthink, where the group makes a bad decision and people's ideas and Expertise are wasted because they're not saying them aloud.

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Sure. And even before we go to strategies, you brought up a really good point, because the Abilene Paradox fits under a larger umbrella of managing agreement. So Jerry Harvey talked about this larger concept, managing so group think. Is it real agreement? Abilene paradox, Is it real agreement, Low psychological safety? Do we have real agreement? And the techniques that we can talk about apply to all three of these things. So one technique in managing agreement is the leader speaks last. The leader, or if the leader knows who in the room has the influence, who has the loudest voice? Ask that person to focus on listening first. Listen to everyone else, and you can say to that person, look, your voice carries so much weight. And you know, Josh in this group and Margarita, the two of them are really the experts in this topic. Can you make sure that you give them a voice before you give their opinion? So say it with love. Don't make the person feel bad, but make sure they leave room for other people to have a voice. So one way that you can manage agreement and make sure it's true agreement is to set up a meeting, a focus group, in the right way. So right from the beginning, control for this, set the rules at the beginning of the meeting, tell everyone, I genuinely want to hear your own opinions. So I'm on the board of a charity where we're trying to figure out where to spend the research money. So we got together groups of families whose children have this specific disorder, and we started the focus group by saying to them that that we want just their opinion, not to think about the other families in the room or the other families they know. We just want them to represent the true opinions of their family. There's no right or wrong answers. And they specifically had me lead the focus group rather than the president of the charity because her son does have this genetic disorder and my children don't. So I was able to say to them, I'm unbiased. You don't. Nothing you can say is going to please or displease me. This is about you. It's not about me. Because there's a tendency to want to try to guess what the facilitator or the boss or the authority in the room wants you to say. If you're someone who likes to collude with authority, you want to impress authority, then it changes. And again, I don't want everyone to agree. I want them to make it okay for them to represent just their ideas.

Yep. No, that makes a lot of sense. And so it sounds like one of the most important things for us to do is take some time to think about just how we're structuring this meeting.

Yes.

And who should and should not be in the meeting and who should and should not be leading the meeting and the impact of the structure on the productivity of the meeting.

That's a really good point. Absolutely. If someone's going to bias the group and they're going to guess, then maybe that person should sit out in the meeting. It's a really good idea.

Yeah. That's interesting. And now when we talk about the Abilene Paradox, let's talk about specific ways that we can manage that one, too.

Talk about the phenomena. So sometimes when someone gives an idea and you could see in their face that they're not really 100% passionate about it, I'll literally describe the Abilene Paradox. And I was. I just want to make sure you're not doing this. I want to make sure this is your idea that you really want, because you're an extremely nice person. Kwame, I don't want you to say what you think I want you to say or what you think someone else in the room wants. There's this phenomena where we try to be nice. We try to think, what does everyone else want? I really want to know, is this really what you want? Would this be the best thing for you? You know, like, let's say we're negotiating where, you know, and I want A and B, and I assume you want C. Then I'll say, kwame, we you know, I'll give you C, but I want A and B and C might not be that important to you, you know, or. So it's just a matter of really understanding which things do you actually care about versus guessing. Because, you know, I might say I want A and B because I think you don't care about those things, but really you care tremendously. And you're not going to ask me for A or B because you assume I want it, but I only took it because I thought you didn't want it. So it's having a conversation at the beginning of negotiation to say, we're two really nice people. Let's make sure that I want you. When you tell me what you want, make sure it's what you actually want, not what you think I don't want. I do this with my kids all the time. Like, they pick. There's only a couple of different, you know, ice pops. They pick the color they think their sibling doesn't want and because they're really sweet kids, but then no one gets the flavor they really wanted. I did that too. I was like, oh, I'll have orange. No one likes orange. One of my daughters, like, no, that's my favorite. Like, since when? You know? But this is what we do in real life negotiations too. And it's. There's more on the line than just popsicle sticks.

Yeah. Oh, it's really funny that this actually, this happened this morning, my 9:00am meeting. It literally happened. We were. We. We created a. We made a creative option that we thought was beneficial to the other side. We're like, oh, this is really charitable. They're going to love this. You know, we didn't have to structure it this way, but we will. They're like, we don't know why you structured it that way. We would actually prefer it to be flat. I was like, what? Then we ran the numbers. Like, this helps you, but okay, if.

You don't want that, you did what you thought they wanted.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's really interesting to see this, but I love the simplicity of the solution because when it comes to different. This is almost bias. Ish, in a sense. Ish. And it's like we make these assumptions subconsciously, and then we make decisions based on those assumptions as if they were factual. But simply bringing it to people's awareness is really important. When I do trainings on personality based persuasion, going through the different personality types, we talk about people who are very agreeable. One of the things that you can do to help them to voice Their disagreement when they do disagree is to reaffirm the relationship and let them know, hey, Jamie, we work well together. I really appreciate your insight here. And honestly, I can't do what I need to do as well as I would like to do without your input. There are going to be times where you disagree and I need to know that, and that's an important part of your function. So if you disagree, let me know. And feel free to say that it sounds like with this, we're essentially giving them permission to be vulnerable, to be honest, and letting them know that it's a necessary part of the process.

Absolutely. And that is not personal. That's not personal. So you're giving them, when you tell them, I value you and I value your opinions. And that's why I'm asking. I genuinely want to know. I don't want you to disagree with me or repeat something you heard me say earlier. I know what my ideas are. I want to know what your ideas are.

Yeah, And I think one of the things that. I wish there was a little bit more research on this because I think I find it fascinating. Just the science of momentum in life in general, but in difficult conversations in particular in sports, we can see a team starting to pick it up and it's like, I don't know what's happening, but this team's getting smashed right now. I don't know what went down. But then in these conversations too, sometimes these ideas, they generate momentum. And we can see with the original story of the Abilene Paradox, it's like we have one bad idea and then another person making that same bad idea to appease the other one is like, well, now I can appease two people with getting on board with this bad idea. And it just, just moves like a wave. And so I think one of the important things for us to do from time to time, especially when we're seeing bad ideas generate momentum, is find a way to stop the momentum. Like in sports, we call it timeout. It's like, I don't even know what the strategy is going to be, but I need to stop this from happening. Right. And so I think just calling a timeout and just saying, hey, listen, before we continue, here are some things that we might want to consider. Let's break some of this momentum, inject some rational thought, and then proceed with this decision making process a little bit later.

And I've done that before where I broke up the momentum. Sometimes you start having people vote aloud and you realize they're all voting the same. There's not one dissent. And I've called a timeout and said, no, no, no, there's no way. You all unanimously agree this is a controversial topic. We're switching to a blind vote. And maybe when it's a controversial topic, you should start off with a blind vote to begin with. Because if I say yes, people don't want to make me look bad. So, again, this is Abilene Paradox. This is well intentioned. They want to show my support, that they support me. They might not like my idea, but they like me. So they want me to look good and they want me to feel like someone's got my back. And you're my friend, so. But in a blind vote, they don't know what my opinion is, so they don't have to try to please me. And so that could really help. So if you start to see that, then you can call a timeout and say, let's switch this to a blind vote. There should be some, you know, when it's unanimous, you know, when it really shouldn't be unanimous.

Yes, absolutely. Oh, this is great, Jamie. It's always great having you on the show. Really appreciate it. Before you go, can you leave the listeners with one last piece of wisdom that they can use as it relates to the Abilene Paradox and any other things that we talked about today?

Today. Yeah. So I highly recommend Kim Scott's concept of radical candor because her whole book. And she's got a TED talk about being direct in a loving way, and she talks about ruinous empathy. So you think you're being nice, but you're not. And the classic example is your friend has spinach in their teeth. A real friend tells you you've got spinach in your teeth. But we try to be nice and we're ruining everything because everyone wants to win. We want to win as a team. And the best way for the team to win is for everyone to give their expertise, give their opinions, and be ready to debate and negotiate.

That's great. I love it. I love it. Well, Jamie, really appreciate it. Thanks again for coming on the show.

My pleasure, Kwame. Thanks for the invite. Take care.

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