Intelligent Disobedience
Ira Chaleff
The central theme of this book is that people need to have a strong capability to resist the orders they are given – under some circumstances. Society, and any organization, requires a considerable degree of compliance from its members, but trouble arises when the compliance becomes unthinking and automatic. Throughout the book, the metaphor of a guide dog is used. The guide dog must follow the instructions of its person, but must know when to disobey because obedience will lead to the person’s harm.
- Understand the context and purpose of the organization. What are the values of the organization – and what are your values?
- Is the order you received consistent with the mission, goals and values of the organization?
- If the answer is no, will you follow the order anyway or will you attempt to create an acceptable alternative action?
- Assume personal accountability for your choice, recognizing that if you obey the order, you are still accountable regardless of who issued the order.*
The key point is that any person has the choice to obey or disobey, and they are responsible for that choice and its consequences.
The book contains many examples of people given instructions by people in authority, which would have led to disaster if followed. These come from the domains of medicine, military operations, flying planes and business operations. In studying these examples, Chaleff observes that people use the following guidelines in deciding when to obey.
- The system we are part of is reasonably fair and functioning.
- The authority figure setting the rule or giving the order is legitimate and reasonably competent.
- The order itself is reasonably constructive.
If any of these three conditions are missing, disobedience is a valid option. That doesn’t mean that disobedience does not have consequences, but it does mean that the disobedience can be explained – it is not just rebellion.
We are trained from a very young age to obey; mostly without question. Our parents tell us what to do and possibly punish us if we do not. We face a barrage of subtle and overt signals that favor obedience and disfavor disobedience. And then we go to school where we are further trained to be obedient. We stand in lines, wait our turn, talk only when permitted, and face an escalating system of compulsion when we ignore the signals. This emphasis on obedience has a strong benefit for both individuals and society. The cost of obedience is less commonly discussed.
The world is dangerous. You can die from falling in the water or off a cliff. You can be seriously injured (and may die) if you put your hand on a hot stove or run into the street. Learning to avoid these dangers does not really permit trial-and-error, so a focus on obedience is a survival strategy. But groups also benefit from structure and obedience. If individuals can’t agree on some norms and then obey those norms, they can endanger or inconvenience each other. “Random” behavior can undo the benefits of group cooperation. For business organizations, inability to follow organizational or societal norms and rules can lead to inefficiency (at best) and legal destruction of the organization (at worst). The examples of World Com and Enron highlight the destructive consequences from disobedience of the law. In settings where rapid coordination is required, like a response to an emergency, disobedience can lead to harm due to discoordination or action at cross purposes. There is a level of obedience in us that is deeply embedded such that we don’t really think about it (like most traffic rules) and this serves us well.
The challenge occurs when a habit of obedience replaces intelligent obedience. The book provides two examples that allow a stark contrast to be shown. The first involved a nurse in her first job after school. She was assisting a doctor in an emergency when a patient showing signs of a heart attack arrived. The doctor instructed her to administer some drug, but she had learned in school that that drug was dangerous for patients with certain other conditions. She mentioned her concern and the doctor repeated his order. She thought this was a problem but he was the doctor and this was her first job. She felt a lot of pressure. She decided that she would prepare the IV with the drug, but she would not start it. The doctor would need to start the IV himself. When the doctor was forced to start the IV himself, he recognized his mistake and ordered a different drug. Here the nurse recognized a case where following the order violated the “reasonably constructive” guideline and a bad result was averted.
In another case, the manager at a McDonald received a phone call from a man representing himself as a sheriff’s deputy. He said that an employee was being accused of stealing something from a customer’s purse. The manager could question and search the employee or they could arrest the employee. The manager chose to search her and at the instruction of the person on the phone strip searched her. Things escalated from there (a number of different crimes were committed against the victim) and eventually people went to jail over the incident. The call was a hoax. A few things stand out in the story. First, this incident was not isolated. About 70 fast foods restaurants were called in the same way – and most managers complied at least part way. So this is not a story about a single gullible adult following questionable instructions – many adults in positions of authority succumbed to the direction. The employee in question was a 16 year old girl and she was very badly treated through all of this. When asked later why she allowed the adults to abuse her, she responded that she had been taught to follow adult directions to the letter and to not talk back. The situation failed on two counts: the orders were not coming from a legitimate authority (this should have been 100% obvious) and they were not reasonably constructive. The case cited in the book may have the most extreme of the 70 cases, but it contained multiple people who just accepted and acted on orders that should have been rejected.
As mentioned above, people are trained from an early age to obey. Some people never learn differently and some do. Why is this? The book discusses a series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1950s and 1960s, when there was considerable interest in how ordinary people were able to act in horrific ways (like working at a concentration camp). The basic design was that a subject would be asked to help an experimenter train a person in a memory task. The subject was led to believe that the experiment was to test the role of negative reinforcement on learning. So every time the learner gave an incorrect answer the subject had to give them a shock. Initially a small shock, the shocks became progressively worse. If the subject resisted giving the shock, the experimenter reminded them that their job was to give the shock and that this was critical to the experiment. In reality, there were no shocks given to the learner who was an actor hired to portray the person being shocked. The subject was told that there were seven levels of shocks with the final level being 450V – not enough to kill, but extremely painful.
How did subjects perform in this process of increasing torture? Most became very uncomfortable as the “student” expressed more distress, but 65% of subjects went through the entire progression. The majority of people knew they were doing the wrong thing, but accepted the authority of the “experimenter”. What distinguished those who quit early was reference to an outside “authority”. For example, a religious belief or belief about social/moral values could trump the authority of the experimenter. If the subject was physically closer to the victim, they were more sensitive to their condition, but if the victim was moved out of sight of the subject, even higher percentages went all the way to the maximum shock. So, it is not ignorance of the “bad” behavior that permitted the subjects to harm others, but an impulse to comply.
To engage in intelligent disobedience is distinct from rebellion or civic disobedience because the disobedience is fairly specific and attempts to keep the structures of authority basically intact. The ideal of an intelligently disobedience act is to offer a superior alternative consistent with the overall goals and values. Intelligent disobedience is part of a practice of being a good follower. Most organizations emphasize having good leaders, but they also depend on having good followers. A good follower can ask themselves, “How can I play the follower role with integrity and strength?” It is followers who find the holes in leaders’ thinking, and good followers see this as a partnership opportunity. Unquestioning compliance is not good partnership.
Intelligent disobedience can be taught and the book provides an interesting example from the Army. A young lieutenant served under a captain that issued orders in the morning and expected them to be completed each day with no discussion. The captain made it clear that he made the decisions and they were to be obeyed. This is common in the Army. Then the captain was transferred and a new captain arrived. During the daily meeting, the new captain gave the lieutenant an order, the lieutenant said “yes sir” and turned to go. As I was facing the door, I heard the captain say, “Hold on a minute.”….”Did the order I just gave you make sense to you?” Naturally, I replied, “Yes sir!” He paused and fixed his eyes on me. “Did the order I just gave really make sense to you?” Now the lieutenant wasn’t sure and he did not know how to react. He had planned to go and execute the order because he had been trained to act that way – not to think about whether it made sense or not. His previous commander expected this. The order that captain had just given did not make sense and the captain was testing his officers for independent thinking. The captain focused on breaking the Army habit of always saying “Yes sir” and offering an alternate response. The captain told me, “I’m going to give you an order that does not make any sense and you’re going to tell me ‘That’s BS, sir.’” ….I said “Sir, I can’t say that.” The captain told me, “Yes, you can”. The lieutenant squeaked out a “That’s BS”, but with coaching and practice learned to say it with meaning and offer an explanation. Eventually, he had a real life instance to practice on and he realized that he now had the option and the ability to act on the option.
Saying “That’s BS” may seem a bit strong and overshoots the need, but studies of emergency situations provide a window on how weak objections can fail. Some airplane crashes have featured captains who ignored input from their co-pilots who used “mitigating language”. The mitigation comes from statements like, “I don’t know if this is right” or “maybe it is”. They increase ambiguity. In some contexts, this ambiguity creates potential to develop better understanding. In an airplane in trouble, direct language is required. A person giving a bad order needs to get unambiguous feedback that the order is bad- whether the situation is an emergency or not. The captain in the example above was teaching his lieutenant an unambiguous response. For pilots, the similar phrase might be “abort”. As will be discussed further, we are the product of an extensive and prolonged effort to make us obedient. To make us intelligently disobedient – we must practice assertively resisting bad instructions. This is now part of standard pilot training.
Emergencies give a special window on our behavior, but most examples of mindless compliance occur under “safe” situations, like fudging the books at WorldCom or Enron. Nobody was injured or killed, though a lot of harm was done. The book provides examples and notes that one characteristic in many cases is numerical targets. The need to meet a revenue (or some other numerical number) leads to requests to “adjust” the numbers one time (it won’t happen again, of course). Employees want to help their organizations and comply; this sometimes leads to a series of such actions. Years ago, the guru of Quality Management, W. Edwards Deming, warned us of this pitfall. He argued against tying job performance ratings and monetary rewards to numerical goals. These exert pressure up and down the system to make the numbers look good, instead of continuously improving the weak processes and systems to achieve true quality. These cases can be quite slow moving with plenty of time to stop and reverse bad decisions and actions. Some bosses are quite good at persuading people to go along and in the absence of an alternative training to intelligently disobey, the employees do. It is easy to suggest that the people who carried out these illegitimate actions were weak individuals. They were untrained in resisting, which is entirely different. Though fraud is one example of bad instruction, simple mistakes are much more common. It can be very hard to point out a mistake to a superior, and not all superiors are receptive to this information.
This summary has mostly talked about what other people have done, and it is easy to think that we are different from those people and that we would know and act intelligently when given illegitimate orders. One final observation from the Millgram experiment makes this less certain. Roles were changed so that the subject was the observer and had the job of telling the experimenter when to shock the person. Apparently, being one step removed from the actual flipping of the switch was distant enough for people to hurt others – and 90% when to the maximum shock. In organizations, this means that it is easier for us to pass along illegitimate orders that harm others – as long as we are not doing the harm directly. What we must conclude is that any of us are at risk of receiving orders that can harm others and that each of us must prepare to decide and act in accordance with our goals or values. We need to learn how to disobey intelligently and we need to learn how to teach others.
A significant part of the book details the ways in which obedience is taught in the school system. What was a somewhat haphazard approach to obedience in decades past is now quite sophisticated; a central part of teacher training is classroom management. The training teaches how to use vocal tone, body language, escalation of consequences, and specific instruction to dominate children and enforce obedience. Intimidation is part of the program. Since children spent thousands of hours in classrooms before they reach adulthood, it should be no surprise that obedience is deeply engrained.
Finding the right balance requires some counter-training. Guide dog training offers a window on intelligent disobedience. The first stage of training is to bond with the dog and develop basic obedience. The goal in this phase is to instill a general tendency to obey and to care for the person. Once this is in place, they take the dog onto a set of tasks that put the person at low risk. For example, the trainer will ask the dog to take them off a small ledge. When the dog obeys, the training stumbles and falls insuring that the dog is part of the fall. The trainer makes “pained” noises to show that they have been hurt. The dog notices the pain of the person they are caring for, and learns to avoid that pain. Similar training with moving cars, bicycles and so forth under controlled conditions teaches the dog begins to generalize the concept of disobeying dangerous commands. The dogs are then trained in a variety of increasingly complex problems to develop general problem solving ability. In reality, it is even more complex than this because these things are hard to learn. Trainers must be very careful to train without making the animal fearful or lose confidence. A good guide dog is mentally “strong” and a partner to their human. Of course, the humans given a guide dog also go through some intensive training. The partnership between human and dog requires understanding on both sides.
In organizations, it is much the same. If this loyal and competent employee is refusing to comply with the request, perhaps we should examine alternatives before proceeding. In many organizations, neither subordinates nor superiors (usually former subordinates) are trained in intelligent disobedience. The book suggests the following training process – based on the guide dog training process.
- Do role playing that requires a choice between obedience and disobedience.
- Praise the appropriate disobedient behavior
- When the subject fails to disobey appropriately, make them feel the failure’s consequences
- Repeat the exact same scenario to practice getting it right.
- Introduce opportunities for the subject to redirect the action – praise fruitful redirection
- Make the role play scenarios increasingly complex.
- Change roles so that people experience both the giving and receiving roles.
Some of the best examples of intelligent disobedience come from the world of emergency action. The book provides the example of a surfacing submarine that would have collided with a freighter except that an ordinary seaman noticed the freighter as the sub approached the surface and ordered an emergency dive. The sub suffered the loss of an antenna. The sailor had no time for discussion or checking the chain of command (which had already cleared surfacing) and the training of everybody aboard the ship meant that they followed the lowest ranking person’s orders instantly. Business rarely operates in such an immediate way, which means both that people have more time to recognize a bad order and more time to rationalize following it. To push back under these circumstances can feel dangerous and runs against the deeply engrained obedience we learn in school. This is why training of both employees and leaders is so important. For example, an organization set a target of a 6-month period with no safety incidents. A middle manager asked their subordinates to refrain from reporting “minor” incidents. Employees suggested an alternative: intensive investigation to find the root cause of each minor incident so that it could be eliminated. Over time, this would achieve the desired safety goal by actually reaching it instead of pretending to reach it. The alternative made the difference.
Most of the examples provided so far involve a person (dog) choosing to disobey an order from another person. A far more common circumstance for people is confrontation with a bad regulation or policy. Society has a huge number of rules, and most organizations have a huge number of rules. Most are reasonable and useful in most circumstances. But it is hard to find the people responsible for these rules in order to discuss exceptions. It is hard to find explanations that clarify intent. Some regulations are “blamed” on other regulations, thereby creating a bigger mess. And most organizations respond to problems that occur by creating more policies to prevent recurrence; they rarely note that existing policy may have been the root cause. Sometimes, this just increases complex but it runs the risk of creating “bad” rules. A practice of intelligent disobedience in an organization allows these rules to be identified and modified instead of being mindlessly followed.
The book ends with the reminder that we are responsible for the actions we take. We can’t use “following orders” or “following policy” to excuse illegal, immoral or illegitimate actions. We are individually responsible. If we have a chance to prevent a bad outcome and don’t take it – that is on us.
Comment and interpretation:
- I have a funny relationship with being told what to do – I generally resist. Yet any of my school teachers will tell you that I was well-behaved. As I got older (think late teens-to-early 20s) I began to resist being instructed by acting in a way that precisely followed the instruction and completely ignored the intent. My purpose was to get people to recognize when they were stepping on my autonomy. Apparently, I am not the only person to do this. The book makes particular mention of organizations that create too many rules and then attempt to enforce them completely. It breeds an atmosphere of malicious obedience. I’d like to think that I never acted maliciously, but I must acknowledge the periodic malicious thought as I considered my opportunities for “perfect” obedience in some settings.
- I was out for a walk in Amsterdam years ago. I used to travel there a lot and was familiar with the complex traffic in some areas. I was standing behind some backpackers, waiting for the light to change. The backpacker in front of me started to step forward, I reached out to grab his backpack to pull him back and he turned with a very angry look on his face just as the tram rushed by. He wasn’t so angry then. For me a couple of things are interesting. One, like most people, I do not touch random strangers, much less grab them. Two, action and not discussion were called for – in other words, there was no time to discuss options with the backpacker or even to get his attention. So I broke with a social and personal norm, and I did it at reflex speed.
- It would seem that trust would be a major topic in this book. But it really was not. I wonder if it is because trust is sometimes invoked to undermine intelligent disobedience. It is easy to imagine a person saying, “I knew that was a bad idea, but I trusted them to get it right.” The book touched a number of situations where people in authority positions made mistakes and trust in their judgment magnified the problem. This suggests that part of what training involves is a “trust but verify” mindset. For organizations trying to develop more agility based on trust, this creates a risk too.
- Obliquely, this book is all about responsibility. Responsibility and accountability are favored management topics, but interestingly policy seems to be something that seems to exist outside of the world of responsibility. Most policies seem to appear from nowhere with no person attached to them, and are then sustained by inertia. It is very hard to find the people who approved a policy and nobody seems to be responsible for flawed policy. It would be quite interesting if every policy had a manager assigned to hold responsibility for it. If a problem was found with a policy, you could identify the responsible manager and take the issue up with them. Most policy statements suggest that you consult with your manager, but it is not hard to learn that they have no better idea about what is going on than you do. I often think this is the modern non-fiction version of Catch 22.
*text in italics is directly quoted from the book
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