Every Voice Equal Archives - understand-culture

There Was No Rank

In Thirteen Days, his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Robert Kennedy wrote about the meetings of the president’s advisers: “We all spoke as equals. There was no rank, and, in fact, we did not even have a chairman.”

Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library from 1977 to 2000, later listened to the secret recordings of those meetings. He disputes Kennedy’s account. He notes, for example, that Secretary of State Dean Rusk “was one of the ExComm’s most regular attendees (19 out of 20 recorded meetings) and contributors.” Kennedy’s book says Rusk “frequently could not attend our meetings.”

The Vocabulary of the Level Table

There are no bad ideas. — Said at the start of a brainstorming session. Every idea is welcome.

Leave your titles at the door. — In this meeting, rank does not count.

Everyone has a seat at the table. — Everyone here has a voice in the decision.

That’s above my pay grade. — Someone more senior has to decide this.

The loudest voice in the room. — The person whose view wins because they speak the most.

The Silent Sex

In 2014 the political scientists Christopher Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg published The Silent Sex. They studied 87 school board meetings in 20 states. “When outnumbered, women used only 72 percent of their fair share of the speaking opportunities.”

Women spoke as often as men only when they held at least 60 percent of the seats. Mendelberg said: “You really need to get to a majority of women before you see a difference.”

HiPPO

“HiPPO stands for ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.'” In American business, the term is used for the opinion of the most senior person in the room, when it decides a question that data should decide.

Ronny Kohavi wrote that “Dylan Lewis at Intuit came up with the acronym HiPO back in 2006.” The analytics writer Avinash Kaushik heard it and blogged about it in October 2006. Kohavi’s team at Microsoft added the second P and the image of a hippopotamus.

No Criticism Allowed

Alex Osborn, a partner at the New York advertising agency BBDO, began group thinking sessions there in 1939. In his 1948 bestseller Your Creative Power, he wrote: “The early participants dubbed our efforts ‘Brainstorm Sessions.'” He set out the rules: “Judicial judgment is ruled out. Criticism of ideas will be withheld until the next day.” And: “‘Wildness’ is welcomed. The crazier the idea, the better.”

In June 1958 Donald Taylor, Paul Berry and Clifford Block tested the method. They compared real brainstorming groups with the same number of people working alone, whose ideas were then pooled. The people working alone “significantly outperformed the real groups.”

Justice, Interrupted

In 2017 Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers of Northwestern University published a study of interruptions at oral arguments of the Supreme Court. They found that male justices interrupted female justices “approximately three times as often as they interrupt each other.”

Over the last 12 years they studied, “32% of interruptions were of the female justices,” but “only 4% were by the female justices.” In the 2015 term, “65.9% of all interruptions on the court were directed at the three female justices.”

Amplification

Women on Barack Obama’s White House staff found that their voices in meetings were sometimes ignored, and that men could claim their ideas. They adopted a strategy they called amplification. “When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author.”

The Washington Post reported in September 2016 that this “forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.”

Way Up Here

In January 2003, during Columbia’s last flight, NASA engineer Rodney Rocha was worried about foam damage to the wing. At a meeting of the Mission Management Team, he did not raise his concern. He later told ABC News: “I just couldn’t do it.” The senior manager running the meeting, Linda Ham, “was way up here,” he said, raising his hand over his head, “and I was way down here.”

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board wrote: “All voices must be heard, which can be difficult when facing a hierarchy. An employee’s location in the hierarchy can encourage silence.”

First Among Equals

Justice Felix Frankfurter said: “The Chief Justice is primus inter pares.” The Latin means “first among equals.” Chief Justice William Rehnquist said that his vote “carries no more weight” than the vote of any other justice.

The chief justice still has real power. He speaks first at the justices’ conference and proposes a vote. When he votes with the majority, he decides who writes the opinion of the Court.

From the Commander to the Newest Private

The rules for after-action reviews at the Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center say the review is “not a critique.” It is “a professional discussion that requires the active participation of all attendees.” Army guidance asks leaders to “encourage people to give honest opinions.” A key rule is that “everyone gets a chance to enrich the discussion, from the company commander to the newest private.”

A 2007 report by the Army Research Institute found a limit. When senior leaders spoke first, it was “very difficult for junior personnel to think of anything new.” Starting with the lowest-ranking soldier “appears to elicit more responses.”