How to Think Like an Idiot: One-Step Thinking Like Mubarak

I don’t normally post on Fridays, but I’m in the middle of writing a series about how to think like an idiot, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak just made himself the poster child for one of my favorite forms of poor reasoning: one-step thinking.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Mubarak just had his government shut down all Internet access, mobile phone service, and SMS messaging inside Egypt and between Egypt and the rest of the world. I don’t claim to be a leading expert on Egyptian politics, but if you’re trying to hold on to power, shutting down the Internet access, mobile phone, and SMS access of every one of your citizens seems like a poor approach. It sticks a finger in the eye of all the electronically-connected citizens who were sitting on the sidelines and turns them into your opponents. If I’m an Egyptian who didn’t have an opinion about Hosni Mubarak before, and I woke up and discovered I can’t access the Internet, use my mobile phone, or text my friends, I have an opinion now. Since there are 55 million mobile phone subscribers in Egypt (out of a total population of 80 million), that’s a lot of people he just antagonized and probably drove into the streets. Oops!

The question is: how do mistakes like this get made? Easy. One-step thinking.

Hosni Mubarak must have had a conversation with his Interior Minister that went something like this:

Hosni Mubarak: How are these demonstrations being organized?

Interior Minister: They are communicating using mobile phones, SMS, and the Internet, Mr. President.

Hosni Mubarak: OK. Cut off all mobile phones, SMS, and Internet access. That way they won’t be able to organize.

Interior Minister: Yes, Mr. President.

And away they go. The problem, of course, is that they didn’t think beyond the first step of the immediate and intended consequence of their action (blocking would-be demonstrators from communicating electronically on Friday) to the second step of the follow-on unintended consequences of their action (angering the enormous majority of the population that has not yet participated in demonstrations, increasing the total number of demonstrators in the street, and possibly causing the entire government to collapse, which was the exact outcome they were attempting to prevent). They also aren’t thinking about the fact that people have other ways to communicate and organize such as word of mouth.

You don’t have to be an authoritarian leader to make this kind of mistake. You can do it right in the comfort of your own office as an ordinary product or project manager. My favorite recent example from high technology was when AT&T briefly stopped selling iPhones to purchasers who lived in the San Francisco or New York ZIP codes. How did that mistake get made? Easy. One-step thinking. Somebody at AT&T probably had a conversation like this:

Pointy-headed AT&T vice president: Where are our problems with iPhone connectivity the worst?

Hapless AT&T product manager: San Francisco and New York City, Mr. Vice President.

Pointy-headed AT&T vice president: OK, stop selling iPhones on our web site to people in those ZIP codes. That way, we won’t be making the problem worse.

Hapless AT&T product manager: Yes, Mr. Vice President.

(For the record, the pointy-headed AT&T VP might have been female for all I know, but we’ll assume that this particular business genius was male for the moment.) Of course, this didn’t work the way the pointy-headed vice president had expected. People noticed that they were suddenly unable to purchase iPhones at the AT&T online store if they lived in San Francisco or New York City. They blogged about it. This led to press stories and bad PR. Plus, it totally failed to prevent people in San Francisco and New York City from buying iPhones since they could still go to the Apple Store in either city and buy one anyway. A policy that is not helping your problem at all but is generating bad PR and calling more attention to your problem is pure stupidity. Predictably, AT&T had to backtrack and resume selling iPhones in their online store to people in San Francisco and New York City. Net result: they had completely failed to do anything about the problem they were facing, but they’d earned a PR black eye and drawn additional public attention to their problem with network capacity. Absolutely brilliant! Verizon couldn’t have devised a better promotion to highlight AT&T’s network problems. Even more embarrassing, this outcome was 100% predictable and preventable if AT&T had thought beyond solving their current problem to the new problems they were about to create by their attempted solution.

Outcomes like this are more likely in several common situations:

• People inside the company don’t feel free to voice their opinion. I suspect that there were sensible, intelligent people inside AT&T who realized in advance that this policy was stupid, ineffective, and doomed to fail. They may have been afraid to voice their opinion for some reason. This situation often develops because high-level managers discourage, belittle, ignore, or punish input from lower-level staff. People are smart. They learn from experience. If someone tries to question a proposal or make a suggestion and is punished or belittled as a result, everyone in the room (and everyone else who hears the story) will learn the lesson: Don’t question proposals or make suggestions. When people don’t feel free to speak up (whether in an authoritarian regime or a large company), bad ideas don’t get challenged and survive to get implemented, and the whole organization suffers the consequences. Preventing this is easy. Create a culture of openness, encourage people to speak up, and treat people with respect even if they make a bad suggestion.
• Groupthink sets in. A more insidious problem occurs when the people who are evaluating a proposal are too similar to each other and too isolated from outsiders and all begin to think alike as a result. In this situation, a bad idea may never get challenged because no one in the room “thinks different” enough to notice it’s bad in the first place. To reduce the risk of this problem, build teams who have diverse backgrounds in every way, diverse interests of their own, and who are well connected to others outside the organization.

Moral of the story: think about all of the consequences of a proposal, both unintended and intended, both undesirable and desired, before enacting it. Think about all the grief AT&T has received because its network occasionally drops a call. Egypt’s network is currently dropping EVERY call, text message, and browser page request. What kind of a day do you think that Hosni Mubarak is going to have?