Intelligent Disobedience: A Followership Skill Critical to the Safety and Success of Leaders and Groups

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

Intelligent disobedience is a non-negotiable requirement in guide dog training: the dog must be able to resist orders that put the team (dog and human) in danger. One of the pioneers in followership studies used this principle as the basis for a new ground-breaking book and this workshop. The classic research on social constructs that reduce obedience to harmful orders and the contemporary methodologies in use to activate Intelligent Disobedience in mission critical situations will be presented. Through dialogue and experiential exercises, participants will gain awareness and skills for practicing and teaching intelligent disobedience. Directions for future research will conclude the session.

Detailed Abstract

The Courageous Follower Model is a description of five sets of behaviors that constitute courageous followership. The fifth behavior is the courage to take a moral stand.

In The Courageous Follower book, there is a hierarchy of actions one can take when faced with a morally problematic situation. What the model does not do, however, is explore why people comply with harmful orders in the first place: how has society created the conditions for this to occur, what internal processes take place that override the individual’s innate moral sense, and what can individuals and groups do to elicit morally and operationally appropriate responses?

This workshop will review the elements of Intelligent Disobedience as they apply to leadership and followership development.

1. The first task is to define terms and their values. What is obedience? When is it appropriate? What is disobedience? When is it appropriate and, therefore, intelligent? What is civil disobedience and how are its uses different from those of Intelligent Disobedience?

2. Most people believe they would not follow harmful orders. Research and history show unequivocally that the opposite is true. Why is this so? We will interactively examine the multiple vehicles through which society requires obedience and installs it as the default response to authority. (charting exercise).

3. Guide dog training shows us that after young dogs are thoroughly socialized to obey all required commands, many can be trained to discern when obedience would be harmful and how to resist those orders. Through video and narrative we will analyze the core elements of how this higher level training is achieved and what we may extrapolate from it for use in human development. (transposing exercise, applications in aviation and medicine)

4. All students of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior are familiar with the experiments performed at Yale by Dr. Stanley Milgram using simulated electric shocks that demonstrate that two thirds of adults will obey orders they believe may be lethal if given by supposedly legitimate authority. For the purposes of leader and follower development it is more important to focus on the variations to the experiment in which Milgram found ways to reduce inappropriate compliance to as low as ten percent. We will examine these and discuss ways to create social constructs that use these findings. (transposing exercise)

5. Milgram identified a critical sequence that occurs internal to the individual receiving orders that violate the recipient’s values of right and wrong behavior. We will apply this sequence to a number of situations to practice resolving the discomfort ethically. We will discuss how this can be applied to leadership and followership development programs. (Simulation and debriefing)

6. We will do exercises in which the leader gives an order that would result in harmful outcomes if obeyed. We will practice the follower resisting the order, shifting to the lead role by offering safer alternatives that do not violate core values, and reassuming the follower role when the danger has been avoided. (Simulation and debrief)

The session will end with a discussion of how the material presented may be further developed for purposes of leadership and followership development, and what research opportunities exist in this newly defined follower-leader space.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Development

Presenter

• Ira Chaleff, The Courageous Follower