The Abilene Consensus: The Trip Nobody Wanted
“I’m done pretending we’re fine.”
Pretending to be fine can carry a whole family somewhere none of them wanted to go.
I never wanted to go.
I didn’t want to go either.
I only went to keep you happy.
I’d rather have stayed here.
“Let’s drive to Abilene and have dinner at the cafeteria.”
“Sounds like a great idea. What about you, Ann?”
“Of course. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”
“Well, if everyone else wants to go, I’m ready.”
“Great trip, wasn’t it?”
“I’d rather have stayed here. I only went because you were all so excited.”
“I didn’t want to go either. I only went to please you all.”
“I only went to keep you happy. You’d have to be crazy to go out in that heat.”
“I never wanted to go. I just thought you folks might be bored.”
Everyone said yes. No one meant it.
What each said, on the porch
her father
“Let’s drive to Abilene and have dinner at the cafeteria.”
her husband
“Sounds like a great idea. What about you, Ann?”
Ann
“Of course. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”
her mother
“Well, if everyone else wants to go, I’m ready.”
1 of 2: What each said, on the porch
Under the surface
The story. The management writer Jerry B. Harvey told it in 1974. A Sunday afternoon in Coleman, Texas: dominoes and lemonade on the porch, a fan turning, 104 degrees outside. His father-in-law suggested driving to Abilene for dinner, 53 miles each way in a 1958 Buick with no air conditioning. Everyone agreed. Back home, hot and tired, each of them admitted they had never wanted to go.
How four people agree to something none of them want. No one disagreed out loud. That was the trouble. Each of them privately ran through the same three thoughts:
- "What I really want (staying home) is out of step with everyone else."
- "The kind, cooperative thing is to go along with what they seem to want."
- "So I'll keep what I want to myself."
When all four do this at once, the group acts on a preference that none of them holds. Harvey called it the Abilene Paradox: a group can fail not because people disagree, but because they each hide that they do.
Not the same as averaging. Nobody averaged anything here. Each person concealed a preference, and the spoken agreement stood in for four private ones. The Air Force cockpit in The Average Fits No One fails differently: nothing was hidden there; a summary of 4,063 bodies described none of them. Both lose something important about the people involved, for different reasons.
Source. Jerry B. Harvey, "The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement," Organizational Dynamics, Summer 1974.