Order Out of Theoretical Chaos?
Causes of Successful Versus Unsuccessful Outcomes
Leaders of governments, major business corporations, and other large organizations typically make policy decisions with the expectation that the outcomes will be sufficiently successful to achieve fairly well the objectives they have in mind. But all too often they are bitterly disappointed. Obviously, several different causes contribute to unsuccessful outcomes.
Unforeseeable obstacles to effective implementation and uncontrollable events, such as countermoves by adversaries or competitors, can drastically interfere to such an extent that the policy does not work out as intended. Another contributing cause of unsuccessful policy outcomes consists of the leaders' oversimplified beliefs and ideological stereotypes that give rise to faulty assumptions about the requirements for a good solution or about the consequences of their choice. Even when policymakers are open-minded and conscientious about obtaining factual information pertinent to the policy question they are grappling with, the available evidence may be too ambiguous to indicate that their assumptions are wrong. In other instances, the cause of a policy fiasco can be attributed mainly to misleading information that the policymakers had no way of knowing was erroneous because it came from seemingly dependable intelligence reports or the testimony of experts, with no signs of contradictions or lack of consensus. Then, too, there are unknown and chance factors that can adversely affect the outcome, commonly called "bad luck." Nevertheless, among the major causes of unsuccessful outcomes is one that is very much under the leaders' control: poor quality of the decisionmaking procedures used either to arrive at a new policy or to reaffirm the existing policy.
Defective procedures -- entailing, for example, inadequate information search, biased appraisal of consequences, and lack of contingency planning -- do not guarantee that a policy decision will turn out to be a fiasco. The net influence of the uncontrollable, unknown, and chance factors can occasionally result in "good luck." But the likelihood of failure is substantially less if sound procedures of information search, appraisal, and planning are used. (Evidence bearing on this important point will be presented later, in Chapter 6.)
Some of the causal sequences that lead to defective policymaking procedures in government, business firms, and public welfare organizations are well known to practically all executives. For example, when a chief executive is provoked to anger, or becomes extremely apprehensive or extremely elated in response to a sensational event, he or she might decide impulsively to make a drastic change in policy, while dominated by the mood of the moment, without consulting any advisors who could point out flaws and suggest better alternatives to be considered. Or, after a fair amount of information search and deliberation about fresh alternatives to an old policy that has turned sour, the members of an executive committee might conform to powerful social pressures from the chief executive. Sometimes policy advisors assent to what they regard as an inferior choice rather than facing the damaging personal consequences of arguing against the chief's pet initiative. These and a number of other, less wellknown, pathways to failure will be elaborated in detail in this book. The defective pathways will be contrasted with a pathway embodying high-quality procedures that increase the chances of successful outcomes. Much of the inquiry will focus on multiple causes for deviating from the latter pathway. Special attention will be given to the preconditions, precipitating events, and catalysts arising from the current situational context, which play a significant role in determining whether executives will use good or poor procedures to arrive at a major policy decision when vital interests of the nation or organization are at stake.
Avoiding Policy Disasters That Could Be Lethal
In a comprehensive review of research on "leadership and power," Edwin Hollander points out that a president who is popular can carry out the main functions of a policymaker expeditiously, with a minimum of resistance from other powerholders, but the president's policy decisions can turn out to be very poor ones that result in disastrous losses. The same can be said about top-level leaders in any organization. Among the defective pathways that lead to disastrous policy decisions are those that fail to correct avoidable errors -- rectifiable misperceptions, refutable false assumptions, resolvable ignorance, and remediable lapses in judgment concerning the probability or magnitude of expected costs and benefits. Those pathways can prove to be destructive in several ways: The outcome can turn out to be lethal for the careers of the responsible leaders, for the continued existence of the organization, and sometimes for the very lives of large numbers of people who are affected by a major policy decision.
Conventional wisdom says that there is only one answer to the question, "What needs to be done if the top-level leaders repeatedly make poor policy decisions that turn out to be detrimental to vital interests of their organization?" The well-known answer is that they should be fired before they cause such lethal damage that the organization itself cannot survive. But there is evidence suggesting that this bit of conventional wisdom is seldom heeded? William Starbuck, a specialist in management studies who has investigated the survival rates of governmental agencies and business firms, has this to say about what often happens to top-level leaders and their organizations:
Many organizations drift along, perceiving that they are succeeding in stable environments, until they suddenly find themselves confronted by existence-threatening crises? Most of the organizations my colleagues and I have studied did not survive their crises, but in every case of survival, the reorientations included wholesale replacements of the top managers, and we infer that survival requires this....
...Crises evidently afflict all kinds of organizations, although they may be more likely in bureaucracies that have recently enjoyed great success? Some organizations facing crises...replace their top managers, reorient, and survive More organizations...die. Thus, nonadaptiveness turns organizations into temporary systems, nearly all of which have short lives? The 50-year-old corporations represent only 2 percent of those initially created, and 50-year-old Federal agencies only 4 percent (Starbuck & Nystrom, 1981)....Approximately 30 percent of the 50-year-old corporations can be expected to disappear within ten years, as can 26 percent of the 50-year-old Federal agencies. (Starbuck 1983, pp. 100-101)
Starbuck's conclusion is that "because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years."
Even if the extremely low survival rates emphasized by Starbuck are somewhat exaggerated, the general thrust of his conclusion may prove to be well warranted for business firms and nongovernmental welfare organizations, such as hospitals, clinics, schools, legal aid societies, social service, child welfare, charity, and philanthropic institutions. Jeffrey Pfeffer and other leading scholars in the field of management studies concur that a substantial percentage of organizations in the private sector go out of existence every year, most notably among small retail and service firms in highly competitive areas. Many of those failures probably are the result of defective policymaking by the owners or managers, but at present there are no dependable data on the percentage of such instances. Very large business corporations like Lockheed and Chrysler have been brought to the verge of bankruptcy by poor policymaking at the top, but such organizations are likely to be saved at the last moment by a combination of political and economic actions on the part of the federal government to prevent massive unemployment, disruption of military procurement schedules, or other undesirable consequences that national leaders want to avoid. Nevertheless, "there is clear evidence,'' according to Pfeffer, that firms of all sizes "do disappear" and, unlike those that reappear under a new name following a merger, their disappearance is permanent; many simply do not survive.
Fred Fiedler starts off his well-known book on Leadership with the assertion that "an organization's success or failure, indeed its very survival, depends in large part on the leadership it is able to attract." Commenting on the same phenomenon, Gordon Donaldson and Jay Lorsch attribute the relatively high rate of bankruptcy and death of corporations, large and small, during the initial years of the 1980s to the failure of top managers to respond adequately to the upsurge of foreign competition, the higher costs of basic raw materials, fluctuations in interest rates, and other changes in the business environment. Those corporations that remain healthy, they conclude, have leaders capable of making adaptive policy changes in response to the environmental changes. To do so requires overcoming various constraints that make for a potentially lethal form of inertia:
The movement of a business organization across the decades, as it seeks to escape one increasingly hostile industry environment and relocate in a more benevolent one, can be likened to the journey of an interplanetary spaceship....At first economic, organizational, and psychological forces tend to resist the move; the parameters...are dictated by the existing corporate environment just as the parameters of flight are dominated by the forces exerted by the spaceship's existing planetary environment. But the guidance system of the spaceship is...the responsibility of the human beings who operate it. So too for the corporate managers: they must anticipate when the existing environment will become incapable of supporting life as they wish to live it and what new environment holds the prospect of better conditions....
Like spaceships, corporations can only travel toward their objectives if they have skilled pilots at the controls. By dealing with the objective and psychological constraints they face, these executives are able to create the window for independent action and for the strategic choices that ensure their organization's health and survival. Unless corporate managers understand these constraints and develop the distinctive corporate thrust necessary to overcome the limitations they impose and to set a new course, they cannot hope to assure the passage of the enterprise into the next century. (Donaldson & Lorsch, pp. 173-74)
Over and beyond deleterious effects on the organization's health and survival, defective policymaking can be lethal in the literal sense of the term for an industrial plant's employees and for people in the local community when the company's policymakers decide to ignore serious problems of preventing industrial accidents and pollution. Avoidable fatalities are likely to result from their decisions to continue using relatively cheap but dangerous ways to dispose of toxic chemicals or other wastes that pollute the air, the water supply, or the food chain for local produce, despite experts' impressive warnings about cumulative effects expected to become disastrous in subsequent years. More widespread loss of life results when local and state governments, federal regulative agencies, and public health organizations fail to arrive at sound policies to prevent pollution that causes lead poisoning, asbestos poisoning, silicosis, cancer, severe radiation sickness, or other fatal diseases.
Early in the 1970s it became apparent to large numbers of scientists and policy planners that the continuation of increases in industrialization, exploitation of limited natural resources, and applications of new technologies throughout the world, if unregulated by sensible national and international policies, would sooner or later exact intolerable costs in the form of ecocatastrophes. Experts pointed out how certain of those avoidable disasters could be lethal for tens of millions of people, if not for the entire human race. One of the emerging threats, widely publicized at the time, was depletion of the ozone layer of the atmosphere resulting from the chlorofluorocarbons emitted by jet aircraft, aerosol cans, refrigerators, and air conditioners. The available evidence indicated that if unchecked, the depletion of the ozone layer would result in overexposure of people all over the world to ultraviolet rays, which produce dangerous skin cancers along with other disastrous biological effects. The few minor steps that were then taken, such as banning chlorofluorocarbons in spray cans in the United States, have proved to be grossly insufficient. By the late 1980s the threat once again emerged as a problem for all nations, and much more serious than a decade earlier as a result of the discovery that a vast hole in the ozone layer at its fullest seasonal expansion is growing at an alarming rate.
Leaders of all nations have also continued to neglect the threat of other ecocatastrophes that were among those prominently publicized in the 1970s. These include the dangers posed by deforestation, especially of the tropical rain forests that are being transformed into grazing lands or urbanized, and by the "greenhouse effect," from excessive heat in the atmosphere generated by industrial production all over the earth, which can produce drastic changes in climate resulting in melting of the polar ice caps and ultimately the destruction of the entire life-sustaining global environment.
In An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, which includes a summary of the warnings by environmental scientists, Robert Heilbroner referred to "the ultimate fatal pollution of an overheated atmosphere" as "an ecological Armageddon." He forecast a series of local catastrophes from this and other sources of uncontrolled pollution that will become more and more devastating in the foreseeable future "as we breach now this, now that edge of environmental tolerance," which could "overwhelm the slender human capabilities for planned adjustment to the future." In order to work, according to Heilbroner, the planned adjustment will require new policies to bring about a massive slowdown of industrialization and economic growth among all nations, along with strict regulatory measures to protect the environment. But the necessity for drastic policy changes to protect the global physical environment from being destroyed raises a depressing question about whether in the process drastic changes in the global political environment might result in democracy being destroyed: Can the policies necessary for global survival be adopted and implemented, he asks, without "the eventual rise of `iron governments''' that resort to authoritarian measures to exercise coercive power?
Heilbroner's answer is that the only realistic source of hope is sound leadership by policymakers who have sufficient power and influence to counteract the powerful economic forces that maintain the status quo. To use their power effectively, these policymakers must also have the knowledge and foresight to prepare carefully devised plans well in advance for preventing the environmental dangers that lie ahead:
The preservation of democratic forms can only come about as a result of intellectually farsighted and politically gifted leadership. Paradoxically, it is only through leadership that authoritarian rule can be minimized, if not wholly avoided. (Heilbroner, p. 164)
In 1982, William Bevan's presidential address to the American Psychological Association once again warned that fundamental policy changes are needed to deal with potential dangers that continue to be neglected, including "environmental degradation" and "climatic change" as well as various threats of worldwide economic disasters, nuclear proliferation, and the nuclear arms race, all of which pose issues "of transcendental importance." "A conviction is emerging from all sides," he said, "that we now need a major advance in the quality of our political, economic, and social strategies if we are to have any hope of success."
Obviously no such advance will occur if the leaders of the superpowers and other nations table the issues and sit back waiting for Godot in the form of technological fixes from future scientific breakthroughs. In the meantime, heat pollution and all the other environmental contaminants continue to accumulate and stockpiles of lethal weapons continue to multiply. But, of course, the problems are doubly, triply, and quadruply confounded because, in addition to all the constraints that interfere with working out policy changes that will be acceptable within each national government, there is yet another set of political constraints that interferes with collaborative policymaking by the leaders of rival nations who would have to relinquish some of their sovereignty in international agreements. Here again, the chances of high-quality solutions to the problems are not very great unless extraordinarily inspiring and talented leaders emerge to give direction to collaborative policymaking in the context of one or more international organizations.
Leaders of the countries that have (or soon will have) arsenals of nuclear weapons are confronted with a policy issue that is generally regarded as most urgent of all for the survival of civilization and perhaps of all human beings: How to avoid a lethal nuclear war? Three different policy problems can be differentiated, each of which requires collaborative work to arrive at policy solutions:
-- How can the nuclear arms race be curtailed and reversed?
-- What can be done to keep clashing interests of the nuclear superpowers from mounting, to prevent confrontations that create dangerous crises?
-- Whenever a crisis does occur, how can it be managed from the outset to prevent it from spinning out of control and escalating to nuclear war?
To devise viable policy solutions for the problems of arms control, crisis prevention, and crisis management, policymakers will have to draw upon whatever knowledge can be brought to bear from the scientific and other scholarly communities, as well as from governmental intelligence agencies, specialists in command and control, experienced negotiators, statesmen, and stateswomen.
David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has emphasized that to deal effectively with the problems posed by the threat of nuclear war, it is essential "to mobilize the best possible intellectual, technical, and moral resources over a wide range of knowledge and perspectives." One pertinent area of inquiry has to do with the processes of arriving at crucial policy decisions, including analysis of the conditions under which miscalculations, faulty implementation, inadequate contingency planning, and other such errors are most probable. That is the area dealt with by this book.
Knowledge about when, how, and why avoidable errors in policymaking and crisis management are most likely to occur should prove to be useful for executives in all kinds of organizations, from the smallest family business and medical clinic to the largest corporation and government. It could help them to improve their own decisionmaking procedures so as to avoid mistakes that might be damaging to their own careers and to vital objectives, including survival of their organization. For top-level leaders responsible for policy decisions concerning pollutants and nuclear weapons, it could also help avoid mistakes that might have widespread lethal outcomes -- for human lives in the workplace, in nearby communities, across entire continents, and ultimately everywhere on earth.
Disagreements Among Social Scientists
If we had a valid theory describing linkages between procedures for arriving at policy decisions and good versus poor outcomes, we could extract valuable prescriptions for improving the quality of policymaking in government, business, and public welfare organizations. Do we have anything approaching such a theory at present? Unfortunately not. What we do have are numerous unintegrated hypotheses supported to varying degrees by empirical evidence, much of which is subject to debate and disagreements among social scientists. Nevertheless, there are scattered pieces of research that can be used to evaluate and consolidate hypotheses from the work of psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, economists, historians, management scientists, and scholars in other social science disciplines. So far as the development of theory is concerned, this area is still at a very early stage. There are all too many contending theorists, some of whom clash head-on while others simply ignore or bypass their rivals without bothering to analyze points of divergence or convergence, all of which creates an atmosphere of theoretical chaos.
One of the few generalizations about which there is fairly general agreement is that the making of policy decisions is a very fuzzy business. Practically every social scientist who has studied policymaking in government or in the private sector emphasizes that it is pervaded by uncertainties, doubts, and all sorts of complications stemming from conflicting vested interests. The uncertainties are often augmented by misguided efforts to reduce the fuzziness by relying on simple rules of thumb. When outside experts are consulted by policymakers, they almost invariably disagree.
It is not a very closely guarded secret within the social sciences that much the same can be said about what you find when you consult the writings of experts in management, political science, and other social sciences. Those experts have a great deal to say about how policy decisions are made and why they might be better if they were made differently. But within and across these disciplines, the experts certainly do not agree with each other.
I believe that despite all the fuzziness, disagreements, and chaotic lack of integration that currently characterize the relevant social science disciplines, we already have at hand substantial pieces of established knowledge on which to build. Those pieces provide the essential building blocks, as I shall try to show, for constructing a general theory that specifies the conditions under which leaders use sound procedures to arrive at policy decisions that are likely to have successful outcomes rather than severely damaging, if not lethal, ones.
Prospects for Developing an Integrated Theory
Here and there one can discern that some order has already been created out of the widespread chaos in the "policy sciences" and it does not seem to me premature to start developing an integrated theory. Perhaps it is unrealistic to aim for a valid theory that will enable us to predict which particular course of action any individual or group of policymakers will choose for each policy decision. But many of the diverse strands of existing theory and research might be brought together in the not-very-distant future to develop an integrated set of propositions concerning social and psychological factors that play a significant causal role in determining whether policymakers will use effective or ineffective procedures to arrive at a policy decision. Although too limited to explain all important aspects of policymaking, such propositions could have considerable diagnostic and prognostic value by specifying the conditions under which individual executives and policy-planning groups are most likely to make avoidable errors that greatly reduce the chances that a new policy will be successful. Those propositions about causal factors, if verified, could also be expected to have considerable practical value by indicating what executives can do to reduce the likelihood of avoidable errors when making vital policy decisions.
Political scientists have been particularly vocal in bemoaning the lack of a comprehensive theory about psychological processes that might account for the frequent failures of the leaders of national governments to arrive at sound policy decisions. For example, Richard Ned Lebow, in a pioneering analysis of international crises containing many insights about errors in policymaking, asserts that research on foreign policy decisions is impeded because "there is as yet no integrated statement of psychological principles and processes that could be considered to represent a paradigm of decisionmaking. There are instead several different schools of thought, each of which attempts to explain nonrational processes in terms of different causation."
The traditional theory of decisionmaking, Lebow points out, is no longer tenable. That theory describes the process of arriving at a policy decision as essentially rational: Policymakers are rational actors who generally deal with policy problems by trying to find the best alternative, the one that emerges from thorough information search and careful deliberation as most likely to succeed in attaining the goals or values they want to maximize. Lebow calls attention to research from several different disciplines indicating that the rational actor model does not stand up very well as a descriptive theory. What has replaced the traditional model is a "variety of models and approaches," which makes us aware of the multiplicity of personal, social, and political factors that shape the process of decisionmaking. But "no one perspective provides a satisfactory explanation of decisionmaking." Each theoretical approach, Lebow concludes, "offers its own particular insights and is more or less useful depending upon the analytical concerns of the investigator and the nature of the decision involved."
Despite all the fragmentation and lack of agreement to be found in the research literature, it seems to me that many bits of theorizing and pieces of sound empirical evidence can be fitted together to form a fairly coherent view of decisionmaking processes. In my opinion, the time to start integrating the seemingly divergent theoretical perspectives is already at hand. Perhaps the pessimists are right when they tell us that we shall never have a comprehensive theory that encompasses fully all the complicated psychological, sociological, political, and economic factors that influence the making of consequential policy decisions. But I see no reason for being inhibited about taking steps in the direction of bringing more order out of the chaos of clashing concepts by sketching a rough outline of an integrative theoretical framework that describes the social and psychological sources of error in policymaking. In any case, that is what I attempt to do in this book.
Main Components of a Theoretical Framework
Most of the components for the type of theoretical framework I have in mind have long been common knowledge among astute political observers. Here are typical comments by two such observers -- one an Italian journalist, Luigi Barzini, a member of parliament in the Italian government after World War II who became well known as a newspaper correspondent and author in America; the other, an eminent, late nineteenth-century English historian, Lord Acton, who served as a member of parliament in the British government and is quoted approvingly by Barzini:
There is, at all times and in all countries, a behind-the-scenes brutal truth which shocks the uninitiated when they discover it; great decisions are never entirely noble; great leaders in all fields are by no means as witty, handsome, magnanimous and farsighted as their official biographies make them out. As Lord Acton (who saw such things clearly, as he was born in Naples, the grandson of a Neapolitan prime minister) put it in a letter to Gladstone's youngest daughter Mary: "Most assuredly, now as heretofore, the men of the time are in most cases unprincipled and act from motives of interest, or passion, or prejudice cherished and unchecked, of selfish hope and unworthy fear." (Barzini, p. 177)
Contemporary psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists have expanded in considerable detail on the reasons why policymakers so often deviate from moral, humanitarian, and rational principles. A great many studies over the past half century have informed us about the causes and consequences of self-interest and of unprincipled actions in the struggle against rivals within a governmental or corporate bureaucracy for status and power; the role ofpassions that hamper sound judgment, especially when decisionmakers facing a stressful crisis are dominated by fear; and, above all, the way ideology, group loyalties, and organizational norms give rise to ignoble prejudices that remain "cherished and unchecked." Most recently, psychological research on the overuse of judgmental rules of thumb or heuristics that partially compensate for cognitive limitations of the human mind has helped to explain why policymakers, even at times when they are striving to be rational problem solvers, so often fail to be as farsighted as they would like to be.
Most of the ignoble and short-sighted considerations that Barzini and Acton talk about -- the self-interests, the passions, and the prejudices -- are, in effect, powerful psychological constraints that interfere with effective problem solving on the part of executives who have the responsibility to deal with the threats or opportunities confronting their organization. Top-level policymakers, including chief executives, sometimes make policy decisions with an eye toward oneupmanship in current power struggles or toward purely personal goals, such as enhancing their own income and prestige, rather than looking ahead to the effects on the organization. In addition to their own emotional needs and personal motives, which operate as internal constraints, executives are also subject to the influence of powerful external constraints, such as threats of social disapproval from colleagues and limitations of time or of other organizational resources. These and other such restrictions are emphasized by experts on management as major obstacles to sound and innovative policymaking.
Considerable evidence has accumulated indicating that limited informational resources, group pressures, prior commitments, bureaucratic politics, and a variety of other organizational constraints often lead to defective policymaking. Without engaging in careful search and appraisal, executives sometimes make their choices primarily on the basis of "acceptability" within the organization. Stagner points out that corporate decisions are not always made by seeking for a solution that will be in the best interests of the organization. A chief executive sometimes settles for a "second-best" decision because of the threat of opposition and even sabotage on the part of those employees who have to be counted upon to implement any new course of action. Of course, acceptability within the organization is one of the essential requirements for a sound policy decision because without it the decision would not be implemented in the way intended. But the inappropriate, dominating intrusion of bureaucratic pressures and other organizational constraints constitutes a major reason why top-level policymakers often avoid instituting major changes in policy, no matter how badly needed.
In his insightful analysis of presidential decisionmaking, Alexander George calls attention to the "ever-present constraints" that often require the chief executive to consider "trade-offs" in "the search for high-quality decisions in foreign policy, as in domestic policy." He discusses many different kinds of constraints, almost all of which can be classified into one or another of the three main types in Figure 1-1. In order to take into consideration the requirements posed by any of the constraints represented in the figure, policymakers generally have to make a trade-off in the form of sacrificing something that reduces at least slightly the quality of the decisionmaking process -- for example, in order to take account of a deadline that imposes a time limit, the search for relevant information is likely to be much less extensive than desired; in order to take account of the need for acceptability among powerful factions within the organization, a very good alternative might have to be eliminated even though it looks like the best solution to the policy problem.
Cognitive constraints, represented in the box in the lower left of the figure, include all the salient external factors that restrict cognitive inputs (such as limited organizational resources for intelligence gathering and analysis) as well as internal factors (such as the executive's own limited knowledge about the ramifications of the technological issues involved in a problem such as nuclear arms control) that restrict the amount and quality of cognitive activity that executives can devote to working on a given policy question. George asserts that the president cannot allow "the search for a higher-quality decision on one policy question...to consume a disproportionate share of the manpower, and the analytical and intelligence resources that must be available to attend to other urgent policy questions." Internal constraints on problem solving become salient when a chief executive realizes that he or she or anyone else might be wasting time and other resources trying to find a good solution because of being handicapped by the enormous complexity of the policy issues and by uncertainties about the expected consequences of alternative courses of action.
Affiliative constraints, represented in the box in the lower right of the figure, include all the various kinds of needs arising from the policymaker's affiliation with the organization as a whole, with a particular division or section of the organization, or with whatever face-to-face committees or informal work groups he or she belongs to. Some of those needs become strong enough to influence the way an executive deals with a policy issue because they are spontaneously mobilized as a result of powerful internal motives, such as the need for approval or anticipatory shame from failing to live up to prior commitments. Others are elicited by external social pressures, and role demands.
One of the ubiquitous role demands that imposes an affiliative constraint on any top-level policymaker is to avoid disrupting the organization by initiating or approving a policy change that will meet with widespread opposition from department heads or lower-level executives whose acceptance is necessary for effective implementation. The affiliative constraints imposed by the need for acceptability are usually accompanied by other common affiliative constraints, such as those stemming from the need for policy legitimacy involving constitutional-legal considerations and the need for social support from fellow members of a policymaking group, even when the policy decision is being made by the chief executive.
A number of other considerations that George discusses pertain to the president's emotional needs and personal motives that can also play an influential role in the policymaking process, although they are "extraneous to the values associated with even a very broad conception of the national interest." This category, which I refer to as "egocentric constraints," is represented in the central box in Figure 1-1. It includes essential personal needs that chief executives share with other people -- to realize personal ambitions, to counteract frustrations, to avoid damage to self-esteem, and "to cope with the anxiety, fear, or guilt that they experience from time to time" when dealing with decisional dilemmas.
George's account of the potentially detrimental effect of emotive and other personal constraints on the quality of U.S. presidential decisionmaking, despite all the organizational safeguards designed to curtail the misuse of power for personal ends, probably applies equally to all levels of executive decisionmaking in all types of organizations, inside or outside of the government.
[Personal motives and interests] may lead the president in the same direction as his objective conception of where the national interest lies. But it must be recognized that they also are capable of diluting, if not distorting, his search for a high-quality decision based on the criterion of national interest. At the same time, however, various safeguards against such possibilities do exist. In the first place, the president must justify his foreignpolicy decisions with reference to the criterion of the national interest in a manner that is credible to his associates, to Congress, and to public opinion. His awareness of this necessity can serve as an important brake on the tendency to allow personal needs or political interests to dilute his search for quality decisions. Then, too, much of presidential decisionmaking is institutionalized in ways that reduce or contain such tendencies. The operation of organizational, procedural, and staff arrangements in support of presidential decisionmaking serves to structure and discipline a president's choices; thereby, they reduce -- though certainly they do not eliminate -- the possibility that personal motives and interests will intrude into and distort his judgment. (George 1980, p. 4)
All of the factors included in the three categories of constraints shown in Figure 1-1 influence the way policy decisions actually are made. Therefore, all of them need to be taken into account in any theory about how policy decisions are made that purports to be descriptively valid. In this book, I attempt to do so by integrating many disparate segments of theory and empirical evidence in a preliminary theoretical framework that is intended to be useful for guiding research, for analyzing the sources of error when policy failures occur, and for deducing prescriptions for improving the quality of policymaking. Like most other analyses of organizational behavior, this framework can be directly applied when the focus is upon the individual executive as the unit of analysis. But, as will be seen in Chapters 7 and 8, it is also applicable when the unit of analysis is an executive committee or any other group of powerholders who work or fight together in striving to arrive at a policy decision.
The preliminary framework could be said to span different levels of analysis in that it takes account of various contextual variables, such as structural features of the organization as a collectivity, as well as smaller units. It draws upon the work of cognitive and clinical psychologists who investigate the decisionmaking processes of individuals, social psychologists who study small face-to-face groups of decisionmakers, sociologists and management scientists whose research focuses on large nongovernmental organizations, and political scientists, macroeconomists, and historians who examine national governments and international systems. In effect, the proposed theoretical framework represents an initial attempt to bridge the different levels of analysis by taking account of a broad range of diverse determinants that have emerged from the different approaches to research on policymaking, including the individual psychological context, the group dynamics context, and the organizational and political context, which are typically treated by most scholars as separate and unconnected.
Plan of the Book
My exposition of the main assumptions that enter into the preliminary theoretical framework includes cogent evidence and illustrative examples gleaned from studies of how top-level policymakers in many different types of organizations have attempted to manage major challenges requiring policy decisions. The first assumption, which was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is that the quality of the procedures used to arrive at a fundamental policy decision is one of the major determinants of a successful outcome. Until recently there has been practically no dependable evidence bearing directly on this assumption and social scientists have debated its plausibility because some have expressed doubts as to whether any substantial relationship will be found between the quality of the decisionmaking process and its outcome (see Chapter 6).
A second assumption is that most top-level leaders in government, big business corporations, and public welfare organizations are capable of carrying out the procedures that are essential for high-quality policymaking. (Those essential procedures, which I refer to as "vigilant problem solving," are described in Chapter 5.)
A third assumption, which is quite familiar to social scientists and widely accepted, is that policymakers generally make no effort to use high-quality procedures for arriving at a policy decision if they regard the issue as relatively unimportant in terms of what is at stake for the organization or for themselves personally. For issues perceived as unimportant -- irrespective of whether or not that judgment is objectively correct -- policymakers typically resort to what is sometimes called "quick-and-easy" decisionmaking, also commonly referred to as a "seat-of-the-pants" approach.
The fourth key assumption, unlike the first three, is a new one that has not yet been debated in the social science literature. It has emerged from my own current comparative case-study research on American presidential policymaking during international crises, which bears out suggestive surmises by other social scientists. The new assumption pertains to the constraints represented in Figure 1-1: Even when policymakers are dealing with an issue that they regard as extremely important because vital interests are at stake, one or another of the constraints, under certain specifiable circumstances, can dominate the policymakers' thinking to such an extent that they rely upon simple decision rules to deal with it. In such instances, which seem to occur fairly frequently, what the policymakers do is tantamount to giving the constraint top priority; they do not engage in adequate information search or appraisal of alternatives and fail to carry out other essential steps of effective problem solving.
In the next three chapters, I shall describe the typical quick-and-easy approaches that top-level policymakers commonly use and the various simple decision rules they rely upon to deal with each of the three types of constraints shown in Figure 1-1. Most of the cognitive and affiliative decision rules discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 involve well-known phenomena that I reformulate in terms of coping with constraints -- such as the popular C.Y.A. (cover-your-ass) rule, which makes for conformity in response to the affiliative constraint imposed by threatening social pressures. Other decision rules to be described deal with less familiar phenomena -- such as what I call the elated choice ("Wow! Grab it!") rule, which accompanies an emotional state of reactive elation following a period of intense frustration (discussed in Chapter 4 along with other egocentric rules).
Chapter 5 gives a detailed account of vigilant problem solving, the high-quality procedural strategy for arriving at policy decisions, which top-level executives seldom use even though most of them may be quite capable of carrying out all the essential steps competently. (This is the high-quality approach represented in the top box in Figure 1-1.) When the policymakers adopt a vigilant problem-solving approach, they do not ignore the various constraints (represented in the other three boxes in Figure 1-1). On the contrary, vigilant policymakers are likely to take full account of all the apparent constraints and even go out of their way to obtain more information about them. But, instead of dealing with one or another of the constraints by giving it top priority and resorting to one or two simple decision rules to cope with it, the policymakers using a vigilant problem-solving approach treat whichever constraints they are aware of as additional requirements to be met in their search for a sound solution to the policy problem they are grappling with.
Evidence is presented in Chapter 6 indicating that the high-quality approach to policymaking is an endangered species and that special efforts should be made to nurture and preserve it if we wish to preserve our global habitat. More specifically, the chapter is mainly devoted to describing the findings from a systematic correlational study that two collaborators and I have recently completed in which we carefully examined the available reports about United States foreign policymaking during the major international crises since the end of World War II. In that study, we used a standardized content-analysis procedure to make blind ratings of the quality of the policymaking process and we obtained blind ratings from outside experts of the outcome of each crisis, so as to investigate the relationship between process and outcome. The findings, as will be seen, strongly support the first of the four key theoretical assumptions. They indicate that the poorer the quality of the decisionmaking process, as manifested by failures to carry out essential steps of vigilant problem solving, the poorer the outcome of the policy decision. In this study a poor outcome was defined in terms of two separate dimensions: failure to attain U.S. objectives pertaining to vital national interests and failure to attain any degree of resolution of the international conflict (that is, escalation or persisting conflict rather than de-escalation).
Chapter 7, which is the heart of the book, presents a preliminary theoretical model embodying the four key assumptions and several ancillary assumptions that are discussed in detail. I propose the preliminary model as a first approximation of an overarching theory of policymaking. This theory, when more fully developed along lines that I shall indicate, might synthesize and integrate many seemingly diverse concepts and research findings from different fields in the social sciences.
A theoretical framework of the type to be presented can be expected to generate at least a few new hypotheses about when, how, and why good versus poor policy decisions are made. Even though incomplete as a theoretical structure, it might also be able to meet other important needs of present-day research on policymaking. For example, it could perhaps start serving as a conceptual model for diagnosing and explaining what has gone wrong whenever a particularly damaging policy failure is investigated, and for suggesting prescriptions about what can be done to prevent repetitions of the same errors. By providing a set of interrelated concepts and general explanatory propositions constituting a core that can be built upon to develop a more complete theory, it could ultimately become a "genuine new paradigm," replete with an extensive research agenda for the future, including many new puzzles to be solved.
Chapter 8 highlights the research implications of the theoretical model for subsequent basic studies of policy successes and failures and for practical investigations intended to lead to improvements in policymaking procedures so as to avoid miscalculations. In that chapter, I examine values and limitations of the theoretical model and specify what can and cannot be predicted when the model is used to analyze the policymaking behavior of an individual executive or group of executives. I indicate how the model enables predictions to be made pertaining to (1) whether the policymakers' procedural strategy will be a vigilant problem-solving or a seat-of-the-pants approach and (2) whether the policy decision they arrive at is likely to have a satisfactory outcome from the standpoint of meeting the organization's or nation's objectives. Included is an account of how the model can be used in two different types of studies: (1) practically oriented investigations by troubleshooters seeking to find the probable causes of an organization's policy failures and (2) basic research by social scientists seeking for generalizations that help to explain the probable causes of ill-conceived policies in all kinds of organizations. For both types of investigation, as will be seen, the model is applicable not only to top-level policymakers but also to lower-level executives who actually help to shape the organization's policies (even when they are officially given no leeway to do so in the policy directives from the top-level echelon) by the way they implement the directives. The chapter also calls attention to what may be a new type of research inquiry that is needed to make the model more complete, which could enable predictions to be made about the particular decision rules policymakers are most likely to rely upon in different circumstances.
The last two chapters explore the implications of the model for the research agendas of social scientists. Thirty-seven testable hypotheses are derived from the model, all of which suggest prescriptive guidelines for improving the effectiveness of policymaking in governmental, business, and public welfare organizations. One set of implications -- the 17 hypotheses discussed in Chapter 9 -- pertains to a central question about individual differences among executives in personality and other dispositions. The hypotheses are pertinent to the selection of personnel for policymaking positions: Who is most likely and who is least likely to be an effective policymaker? The second set of implications -- the 20 hypotheses discussed in Chapter 10 -- pertains to a fundamental question about leadership practices: What does it take, according to the theoretical model, to function as an effective executive who practices and promotes highquality decisionmaking on policy issues that affect the vital interests and survival of the organization or nation? These hypotheses warrant high priority on the research agendas of social scientists. If confirmed, they will point the way for executives who want to improve their policymaking by cutting down on common sources of error.
The research that I draw upon in all the chapters that follow encompasses a broad spectrum of causal factors, including those that influence information processing, probability estimates, scenarios about outcomes, ideological preferences, emotional biases, affiliative loyalties, and conformity to organizational norms and operational codes. Focusing mainly upon what is known about sources of avoidable errors, I try to construct an assemblage of major determinants of effective and ineffective policymaking. Included in the interdisciplinary assemblage are concepts and generalizations from the work of sociologists, economists, management scientists, political scientists, historians, and three types of research specialists in the field of psychology -- cognitive, clinical, and social psychologists.
As in the assemblages by Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, and other masters of modern art, the diverse components brought together in a successful work must be organized into a coherent and satisfying pattern in which all the bits and pieces are integrated into a unified whole. This is not an easy requirement to meet when one is trying to develop theory in the social sciences. Even more difficult are the other requirements for any "good" theory of complex human behavior, notably that it should provide valid explanatory insights, account for prior empirical findings more adequately than any rival theory, make novel, nontrivial predictions that are testable, and suggest new prescriptions that are worth investigating. I hope that I am not pushing my optimism beyond reasonable limits when I allow myself to expect that within a few years we shall have a dependable answer as to whether the theoretical framework presented in this book can be developed to meet all these essential requirements.
Copyright © 1989 by The Free Press
Using cogent evidence and illustrations from studies of top-level policymakers in government, business, and public welfare organizations, Janis shows how the likelihood of failure is substantially reduced if sound procedures of information search, appraisal, and planning are used. He alerts executives to the preconditions, precipitating events, and catalysts that create situations where the most dangerous error of decision making—relying on simplistic decision rules—often occurs.
By following the four essential steps outlined by Janis, policymakers can adopt “vigilant problem solving,” the high-quality procedural strategy for arriving at policy decisions When policymakers utilize the vigilant problem solving approach, they are likely to take full account of the various constraints involved in a situation and may even seek out additional information about them. Consequently, the risk of failure, especially in critical situations, is substantially lowered. Janis’ highly acclaimed decision making strategies give a powerful advantage to managers in all kinds of organizations, from the smallest family business to the largest corporation and government agency.