Eating Out

Jerry Harvey published "The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management" in 1974 (you can read the story at the bottom of this entry) to describe a common type of group decision making when a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of any of the individuals in the group. I know I have this experience regularly when my colleagues and I try to decide where we will have lunch as we stand around waiting for the elevator. You know the conversation:

Person 1: Where do ya'll [this is Texas, remember] want to eat today?

Person 2: I don't care. What's everyone up for?

Person 3: Anything's fine with me.

Person 4: Not pizza, but other than that I don't have a preference.

and so on. Eventually, we drift towards some non-descript chain that probably doesn't offend anyone, but is also probably not particularly good.

Nobody really wants to take responsibility for the decision and so we all just go along.

What does The Abilene Paradox have to do with The Davhee Repore? It decidedly does NOT describe the way Davis acts when his group needs to choose a place to eat. Last Thursday evening they were headed to a restaurant that they had agreed upon, but that no one had ever patronized. It was, in my opinion, a pretty risky choice.

I talked to him about this on the phone before hand. When I heard that they had decided on a Mexican food restaurant, I let my regional bias show by remarking something like: "Good luck with that."

He wanted to know what I meant, and I said, "Well, you can always have fajitas." He got a little huffy and asked me to clarify further. I responded, "I've never actually eaten at a Mexican restaurant east of the Mississippi that I would go back to. I'm thinking maybe you'll have the same problem in Rochester, especially if no one has tried it out beforehand."

He said, "You probably don't use a good algorithm when you choose restaurants you're unfamiliar with. I look at the menus on the internet." I pooh poohed that suggestions, telling him that seeing the list of menu items didn't say anything about what they would taste like.

Davis patiently explained that I didn't need to look at the menu items per se. I needed to focus on the menu style. Apparently there's an On-the-Border-style menu with clever descriptions of each item, an emphasis on painting a culinary picture of the food, and a delineation of what is healthy and what is tasty. There's also a Gina's-style-menu (which, frankly, has always seemed just fine to me, but I think in and of itself may not indicate much about the quality of food) and a taqueria-style menu. Davis explained that if you go to restaurants with a taqueria-style menu, the food has to be good because you know the owners aren't in business because they went to business school or because they are adept marketers. Ergo, the only thing left is for them to serve tasty food.

I'll let you know if he found empirical evidence to support his theory.

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The Abilene Paradox

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene [53 miles north] for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time."

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, "I wasn't delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you." The wife says, "I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that." The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

Harvey, Jerry B. (Summer 1974). "The Abilene Paradox and other Meditations on Management". Organizational Dynamics 3 (1): 63.