Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [273]
It’s a large subject why some groups (or individual leaders) followed one of the paths to failure discussed in this chapter, while others didn’t. For instance, why did the Inca Empire succeed in reafforesting its dry cool environment, while the Easter Islanders and Greenland Norse didn’t? The answer partly depends on idiosyncrasies of particular individuals and will defy prediction. But I still hope that better understanding of the potential causes of failure discussed in this chapter may help planners to become aware of those causes, and to avoid them.
A striking example of such understanding being put to good use is provided by the contrast between the deliberations over two consecutive crises involving Cuba and the U.S., by President Kennedy and his advisors. In early 1961 they fell into poor group decision-making practices that led to their disastrous decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, which failed ignominiously, leading to the much more dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. As Irving Janis pointed out in his book Groupthink, the Bay of Pigs deliberations exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions, such as a premature sense of ostensible unanimity, suppression of personal doubts and of expression of contrary views, and the group leader (Kennedy) guiding the discussion in such a way as to minimize disagreement. The subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making, such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to be freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally leaving the room to avoid his overly influencing the discussion himself.
Why did decision-making in these two Cuban crises unfold so differently? Much of the reason is that Kennedy himself thought hard after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and he charged his advisors to think hard, about what had gone wrong with their decision-making. Based on that thinking, he purposely changed how he operated the advisory discussions in 1962.
In this book that has dwelt on Easter Island chiefs, Maya kings, modern Rwandan politicians, and other leaders too self-absorbed in their own pursuit of power to attend to their society’s underlying problems, it is worth preserving balance by reminding ourselves of other successful leaders besides Kennedy. To solve an explosive crisis, as Kennedy did so courageously, commands our admiration. Yet it calls for a leader with a different type of courage to anticipate a growing problem or just a potential one, and to take bold steps to solve it before it becomes an explosive crisis. Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule for acting before it becomes obvious to everyone that some action is necessary. But there have been many such courageous, insightful, strong leaders who deserve our admiration. They include the early Tokugawa shoguns, who curbed deforestation in Japan long before it reached the stage of Easter Island; Joaquín Balaguer, who (for whatever motives) strongly backed environmental safeguards on the eastern Dominican side of Hispaniola while his counterparts on the western Haitian side didn’t; the Tikopian chiefs who presided over the decision to exterminate their island’s destructive pigs, despite the high status of pigs in Melanesia; and China’s leaders who mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable leaders also include the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and other Western European leaders, who decided after World War II to sacrifice separate national interests and to launch Europe’s integration in the European Economic