Question

organizational development: Compose a film/literature analysis "Into Thin Air"

The analyses should be between 500 and 750 words long. They should be well written, following standard rules of grammar and composition, and developing consistent, cohesive ideas over several paragraphs. The goal of each analysis is to integrate the course content with the characters, situations, and themes of the film/literature.

The film for this assignment is "Into Thin Air." Students are asked to contemplate reading content that pertains to: use of self, self awareness, groupthink, leadership styles, communication, preparation, and buy-in Organizational Development values and ethics

Answer 1

On May 10, 1996, five mountaineers from two teams perished while climbing Everest, we glance into what we will learn as business leaders from the tragedy?

What went wrong on Everest on May 10, 1996? That day, twenty-three climbers reached the summit. Five climbers, however, didn't survive the descent. Two of those, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, were extremely skilled team leaders with much experience on Everest. because of the world's mightiest mountain, Everest isn’t easy, 148 people have lost their lives attempting to succeed in the summit since 1922.

Newspaper and magazine articles and books—most famously, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: a private Account of the Everest Disaster—have attempted to elucidate how events got so out of control that specific day. Several explanations compete for human error, weather, all the risks inherent in citizenry pitting themselves against the world's most forbidding peak.

A single explanation for the 1996 tragedy may never be known, says HBS professor Michael A. Roberto. But perhaps the events that day hold lessons, a number of them for business managers. Roberto's new working paper describes how. Here follows an excerpt from "Lessons From Everest: The Interaction of Cognitive Bias, Psychological Safety, and System Complexity."

This study of the Everest case provides a framework for understanding, diagnosing, and preventing serious failures in all levels of organizations, it also has important repercussions for a way leaders can shape and direct the processes through which their organizations make and implement high-stakes decisions. The Everest analysis recommends that leaders must pay close attention to how they balance competing pressures in their organizations and the way their words and actions shape the perceptions and beliefs of organization members. moreover, the case provides insight regarding how firms approach learning from past failures.

The Everest case suggests that leaders got to engage during a delicate balancing act with reference to nurturing confidence, dissent, and commitment within their organizations. First, executives must strike a balance between overconfidence on the one hand and insufficient confidence on the opposite. Leaders must act decisively when faced with challenges, and that they must inspire others to try to so also. a scarcity of confidence can enhance anticipatory regret or the apprehension that individuals often experience before making a choice. High levels of anticipatory regret can cause indecision and dear delays. This anxiety is often particularly problematic for executives in fast-moving industries. Successful management teams in turbulent industries develop certain practices to deal with this anxiety. as an example, some leaders develop the arrogance to act decisively within the face of considerable ambiguity by seeking the recommendation of 1 or more "expert counselors," i.e. highly experienced executives who can function a confidant and a sounding board for various ideas. Naturally, an excessive amount of confidence can become dangerous also, because the Everest case clearly demonstrates. To combat overconfidence, leaders must hunt down information that disconfirms their existing views, and that they should discourage subordinates from hiding bad news. Leaders also must take care to separate facts from assumptions, and that they must encourage everyone to check critical assumptions vigorously to uproot overly optimistic projections.

Fostering constructive dissent poses another challenge for managers. As we see within the Everest case, insufficient debate among team members can diminish the extent to which plans and proposals undergo critical evaluation. Flawed ideas remain unchallenged, and artistic alternatives aren't generated. On the opposite hand, when leaders reach a final judgment, they have everyone to simply accept the result and support its implementation. they can't allow continued dissension to disrupt the trouble to show that call into action. As Cyrus the good once said, leaders must balance the necessity for "diversity in counsel, unity in command." To accomplish this, leaders must make sure that each participant features a fair and civil right to voice their opinions during the choice process, and that they must demonstrate that they need to be considered those views carefully and genuinely. Moreover, they need to clearly explain the rationale for his or her final judgment, including why they chose to simply accept some input and advice while rejecting other suggestions. 73 By doing so, leaders can encourage out-of-the-box thinking while building decision acceptance.

Finally, leaders must balance the necessity for strong buy-in against the danger of escalating commitment to a failing course of action over time. To implement effectively, managers must foster commitment by providing others with ample opportunities to participate in deciding, ensuring that the method is fair and bonafide, and minimizing the extent of interpersonal conflict that emerges during the deliberations. Without strong buy-in, they risk numerous delays including efforts to re-open the choice process after implementation is underway. However, leaders must remember the risks of over-commitment to a flawed course of action, particularly after employees have expended an excellent deal of your time, money, and energy. the power to "cut your losses" remains a difficult challenge also as an indicator of courageous leadership. Simple awareness of the sunk cost trap won't prevent flawed decisions. Instead, leaders must be vigilant about asking tough questions such as: What would another executive do if he assumed my position today with no prior history during this organization? 74 Leaders also got to question themselves et al. repeatedly about why they want to form additional investments during a particular initiative. Managers should be extremely wary if they hear responses such as: "Well, we've put such a lot of money into this already. we do not want to waste all of these resources." Finally, leaders can compare the advantages and costs of additional investments with several alternative uses of these resources. By encouraging the consideration of multiple options, leaders may help themselves et al. recognize how over-commitment to an existing project could also be preventing the organization from pursuing other promising opportunities.

The Everest case also proves how leaders can shape the perceptions and beliefs of organization members, and thereby affect how these individuals will interact with each other and with their leaders in critical situations. Hall and Fischer made a variety of seemingly minor choices about how the teams were structured that had a huge impact on people's perceptions of their roles, status, and relationships with other climbers. Ultimately, these perceptions and beliefs constrained the way that folks behaved when the groups encountered serious obstacles and dangers.

Leaders can shape the perceptions and beliefs of others in many ways. the leaders' words or actions send a clear signal on how they expect people to behave as an example, Hall made it very clear that he didn't wish to listen to dissenting views while the expedition made the ultimate push to the summit. Most leaders understand the facility of those very direct commands or directives. However, this case also demonstrates that leaders shape the perceptions and beliefs of others through subtle signals, actions, and symbols. for instance, the pay gap among the guides shaped people's beliefs about their relative status within the expedition, it's hard to believe that the expedition leaders recognized that their compensation decisions would impact perceptions of status, and ultimately, the likelihood of constructive dissent within the expedition teams. Nevertheless, this relatively minor decision did send a robust signal to others within the organization. The lesson for managers is that they need to recognize the symbolic power of their actions and therefore the strength of the signals they send once they make decisions about the formation and structure of labor teams in their organizations.

Often, when a corporation suffers a terrible failure, others plan to learn from the experience. Trying to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past looks like an admirable goal. Naturally, some observers attribute the poor performance of others to human error of 1 kind or another. They blame the firm's leaders for creating critical mistakes, sometimes even going thus far on accusing them of ignorance, negligence, or indifference. Attributing failures to the flawed decisions of others has certain benefits for outdoor observers. especially, it can become a convenient argument for those that have a desire to start an identical endeavor. By concluding that human error caused others to fail, ambitious and self-confident managers can convince themselves that they're going to learn from those mistakes and succeed where others didn't. This research demonstrates a more holistic approach to learning from large-scale organizational failures. It suggests that we cannot believe the individual, group, and organizational levels of study in isolation. Instead, we'd like to look at how cognitive, interpersonal, and systemic forces interact to affect organizational processes and performance. System complexity, team structure and beliefs, and cognitive limitations aren't alternative explanations for failures, but rather complementary and mutually reinforcing concepts, leaders normally recognize that mutual consensus characterizes many situations. Leaders should understand that there are some ways to reach an equivalent outcome. However, we've got a natural tendency responsible people for failures, instead of attributing the poor performance to external and contextual factors. We also tend to pit competing theories against each other in many cases and check out to argue that one explanation outperforms the others. The Everest case suggests that both of those approaches may cause erroneous conclusions and reduce our capability to find out from experience. we'd like to acknowledge multiple factors that contribute to large-scale organizational failures and to explore the linkages among the psychological and sociological forces involved at the individual, group, and organizational system level. To conclude, all leaders would be well-served to recall Anatoli Boukreev's closing thoughts about the Everest tragedy: "To cite a selected cause would be to market omniscience that only gods, drunks, politicians, and dramatic writers can claim."