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these experiments a naive subject was asked to give progressively higher levels of
electric shock to a supposed ‘learner’ (actually a confederate of the experimenter
who therefore never actually received any shocks) every time this learner made
a mistake in remembering a list of paired words. The subjects in this experiment
certainly did not enjoy doing this, and indeed the majority of those who con-
formed (about 65 per cent of those participating) protested strongly and urged
Milgram to stop the experiment and check that the learner was not suffering
unduly (the learner was located in another room so that there was only an audio
connection between the teacher and the learner). Despite these protestations,
however, Milgram’s command – ‘you must continue’ – was enough to persuade
the majority of participants to progressively increase the level of shock given to
the learner to a massive 450 volts. Essentially these participants were conform-
ing to the demands of an authority figure – in this case a university professor in
a prestigious US university, Yale – and inflicting (or at least believing that they
were inflicting) pain and suffering on another human being.
Applying this to the issue of collaborative knowledge generation, if individu-
als conform to an authority figure they may refrain from questioning decisions
or refrain from sharing their own knowledge, if this conflicts with the ideas of a
leader. Thus, the group will not utilize the collective knowledge of its members,
and the potential synergies arising from having people with different ‘thought
worlds’ working together will not be exploited. For example, imagine a team
of people with diverse backgrounds (engineers, accountants, natural scientists,
social scientists, ethicists and IT professionals) brought together from within an
organization to explore options for reducing energy waste. These individuals
will likely have rather different ideas about how to do this, based on their dif-
ferent backgrounds. But if the team leader is perhaps an accountant who has for
some reason decided that the best thing to do is turn down the temperature in
offices and does not allow any real discussion of other options, then the team’s
diverse expertise will go unused. In this case the team fails to operate even multi-
disciplinary (i.e. does not look at the problem or opportunity from different per-
spectives), never-mind trans-disciplinary (i.e. does not integrate these different
perspectives to come up with novel solutions); but instead ‘agrees’ with the ideas
of the authority figure. Of course, an authority figure may have good ideas and
his/her knowledge base may itself be broad, but this may not necessarily be the
case. Moreover it is likely that the collective would have the potential for even
more creative solutions, were conformity not an issue.
In a group situation, the problems of conformity can be particularly acute, as
evidenced by the phenomenon of ‘groupthink’, considered next.

Groupthink
Perhaps the most well-known team-working problem is the problem of group-
think identified by Irving Janis, who studied high-level strategy teams in the
United States which had made some seemingly non-rational decisions in relation
to crisis situations, for example the Cuban missile crisis (Janis, 1982). He found

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