The Asch conformity experiment is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page.  Students were asked which of three lines matched a fourth line in length.  Super simple – less than one percent error rate.

Until you put the student with a group of fellow students (actually actors) all saying the wrong answer.  Then, 75% of students got at least one wrong, conforming to the incorrect group opinion.

But wait – as the late-night pitchman says – there’s more.  When there was a “true partner,” a fellow truth-teller, the error rate dropped below five percent.  Just one ally made almost all the difference.

A recent whistleblower brought this to mind.  I speak, of course, about Signe Swenson, who revealed the MIT Media Lab’s fundraising coordination with convicted pederast sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.  (Why?  Which whistleblower did you think I meant?)

She was a development employee who raised concerns to her boss, but was told that part of her job was to anonymize and obscure donations Epstein made and directed.  It got to the point that when Epstein visited…  well, she of course tells it best:

“We were told beforehand that this would need to be a very confidential visit and to keep things quiet. But we were warned ahead of time that Epstein never goes anywhere without two women at his side. And they looked young, definitely looked like models. And we just knew, given the track record, that there’s a possibility this was not their choice, that they are not traveling around with him voluntarily. We made sure that, you know, if they needed anything, we were there. And, you know, we tried to make them feel safe enough to say something and, you know, to the point that we actually checked the trash to see if they had written anything on a napkin.”

She quit.  And told.  And still evinces some guilt, saying “I’m not proud of having protected a pedophile from scrutiny” about the time that she kept MIT Media Lab’s secrets.

She’s in the 25%.  Despite what everyone else did, she kept her own counsel and told the truth.

We all hope we would be this type of person.  But the odds are 3-1 against.

If we know something is wrong, there’s more than just psychological pressure pushing us to say silent and complicit.  There’s what Christopher Buckley called the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense: “I have to pay my mortgage.”  In fact, some organizations use this pressure to create the environment they want.  It’s rarer than it used to be, thank goodness, but still some canvassing agencies pay rock-bottom wages with incentive clauses.  In order to put food on the table, canvassers thus make sales however they can… and quality suffers to the point that you can tell the organization’s pay policy just by looking at the retention numbers.

There’s also the best interest of the organization defense – we all have missions we believe in so strongly we don’t want to tell anything that could harm the mission.  Thus we think we need to protect secrets.  We must remember that a scandal that plays out in the media is only the second-worst scenario.  The worst is that the secret is kept.  Not only does this allow bad people to continue doing bad things, but keeping the secret corrupts those it touches in a way I would say is like a cancer…

…except that’s unfair to cancer.  Cancer corrupts the body; complicity corrupts the soul.

So what do we do?

As individuals, we can practice for the big ones.  Telling uncomfortable truths is like holding your tongue in only one way: both are habits.  If you think the outer envelope should be blue and everyone else thinks it should be red, speak your piece (except maybe pick something that matters).  Your fundraising will be better for your voice of dissent when dissent is needed.  And since we only ever know if it is needed after the fact, we must act on our beliefs.

As colleagues, we can be that just one ally.  You do not even need to agree with the person standing against the consensus – all you must do is support their right to be heard.  You can create the space that turns 75% conformity into sub-five percent.  And that person might be there for you later; we all need an ally from time to time.

As leaders, we can question, poke and prod.  All our organizations were born of dissatisfaction – the belief that the world should not be thus when it is in our power to change it.  We betray that vision when we are fully satisfied.  There is always another comfort to disrupt, another hill to climb.  The status quo is something to fix, not to use as a hammock.

As organizations, we can strive for psychological safety.  There’s a lot of mocking of safe spaces for snowflakes nowadays, but no less an organization than Google, after two years of study, found creating psychological safety was the #1 thing they could do to make teams effective.  Hopefully, no one on your team will even face a moral quandary in your team like what Ms Swenson faced.  But this safety – the ability to take risks without judgment or embarrassment – works for efforts big and small.  When things go wrong, instead of blame, we can seek to learn – to be curious.

And our organizations can cut it out with the “cultural fit” bull.

Yes, we shouldn’t hire someone who doesn’t share the values of the organization.  But “they won’t fit in here” is so often used to mask sexism, racism, or various other isms and phobias.

I once sat through a presentation of a pre-hire survey that assessed the psychology of a potential hire and compared them to the goal psychology for the position.  When asked how people with autism might fare on such a test, the presenter told the crowd not to worry – because there was a correlation between their test and work performance, it could legally make sure “those people” don’t get hired.  That’s cultural fit.

That incarnation of cultural fit should be burned to the ground, then the earth salted so it can’t grow.  Vu Le recommends some ways to break this down, articulated better than I have or will.

Even when “they won’t fit in here” isn’t a fig leaf, it still deprives your team of varied experience, knowledge, and worldview.  This is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for varied thought – even a varied team won’t function well if there’s no psychological safety.

But if you have five people in a room who always have the same outlook, four are unnecessary.  Such a team will always work to reinforce what exists with tiny tweaks – whether the building is collapsing around them or there is a game-changing idea just out of reach.

There may come a time when the very existence of your organization will hinge on the conditions you have created for people to choose speech over silence.

Nick