How Organizations Silently Discourage Their Employees’ New Insights
And three tactics to bypass these suspicions in the workplace.
When the CIA tried to reduce analytical errors in its intelligence department in the 1990s, it strengthened its verification and justification processes.
Employees were forced to rigorously document and identify the probabilities of their assumptions. They became used to trusting the process more than their employees’ ideas. As a result, the new policy prevented important warnings from being passed on the authority, such as the attacks of September 2001.
According to Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t, there are forces in organizations that always seek to suspect and reject new ideas brought in by junior employees.
Even though they aim to filter the flow of ideas, they also prevent the consideration of information essential for the company to evolve and innovate.
Fortunately, there are ways to get around this repressive culture by giving employees a different voice and encouraging the creation of insights.
Here’s how four companies have done it.
