Group Think

[Ted Reesor]

What do you consider "group think"?  As a former Nurse Manager of acute medicine and MBA grad, I could talk your ear off about how poor decisions are burying the healthcare system.  

I just came across an interesting abstract today (it sounds a little heavy, but I like the phrase "Zombie Concepts"): 

Shearer, Allan. and Liotta, Peter. "Zombie Concepts and Boomerang Effects: Risk, Technology, and Security Intersection through the Lens of Environmental Change" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES, Hilton San Francisco, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA, Mar 26, 2008 
Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Abstract: Focusing on the challenges of environmental change, the authors consider how different mindsets or mental maps lead to alternative risk responses and, consequently, alternative prioritizations of different kinds of security. The uncertainties associated with environmental change are difficult to quantify, yet the impacts may be severe. We argue that we cannot so reduce the uncertainty of the science that can definitively end debate about appropriate policy. Instead, we must learn to integrate uncertainty into decision making processes and consider how our near-term actions enable or constrain future options. To examine the relationships among security, technology, and risk, we draw on three dominant metaphors: First, the tenets of traditional security are critiqued vis-vis Ulrich Beck's "zombie concepts" of modernism which emphasize the state and fail to engage the multiple and interdependent processes of change we now face. Second, building on
 Anthony Gidden's manufactured uncertainties, we discuss broadly how new solutions beget increased risk and how new knowledge yields greater uncertainty. Finally, using P. H. Liotta's "boomerang effect" we look more narrowly at how policies intended to address some specific dimension of security can undermine other dimensions. When these metaphors are considered as a set of related ideas, it becomes apparent that the world is now confronted with socially-produced and human-centered vulnerabilities. Further, the potential for local and localized risk has mutated into systemic risk that affects both the developing and developed parts of the world. Responses to climate change must therefore accommodate thinking in terms of multiple facets of security.

Ted Reesor, RRT
Burlington, Ontario, Canada