Breaking the Obedience Habit Through Intelligent Disobedience

Nearly every week we read about a tragedy or scandal that could have been prevented if individuals had said no to ill-advised or illegitimate orders. In Intelligent Disobedience, Ira Chaleff explores when and how to disobey inappropriate orders, reduce unacceptable risk, and find better ways to achieve legitimate goals. The following excerpt has been excerpted from Chapter 3: “Breaking the Habit: It Takes More than you Think.”

My work on Intelligent Disobedience is a natural outgrowth of my earlier work on courageous followers. Courageous followers form relationships with their leaders in which they are both supportive of the leader and willing to give the leader candid feedback on the impact of the leader’s actions thereby bolstering the relationship between leadership and followership. For those interested, there is an overview of the topic in the appendix.

I was in Los Angeles giving a presentation on courageous followership at the International Leadership Association. ILA is an interesting group that was formed to bring together scholars, educators, and practitioners of leadership so they can enrich one another’s work in the field. I have since become a member of the ILA’s board of directors, but then I was simply a conference attendee and presenter.

After my presentation, a former army officer introduced himself to me and began telling one of the most fascinating stories I had ever heard on how to break the habit of too much obedience to authority. I’ll share that story with you in a minute. I promised to say a little more about courageous followership, so let me do that first.

In some cultures, such as in the United States, tremendous value is placed on being a leader. Anyone who applies to college, for example, knows that you are asked to list all the leadership roles you have played. It can make high school students frantic if they are aiming for admission to competitive schools. They run around trying to be the captain of the team of their spring sport and captain of their fall sport, president of this student group and that student council, and leader of a couple of outside volunteer groups on top of it. Do these same college applications ever ask about roles in which you have provided excellent support to a leader? They do not.

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Yet, what is the one thing a leader needs in order to lead? The answer: a follower. If no one is following, then no matter how brilliant the individual may be, he or she is not leading. If it is the follower who makes the individual into a leader, why is it that only the leader role is honored?

It turns out that the answer to this is at least partly explained by our culture labeling “follower” as a personality type. Just as validly, and often more validly, “follower” can be thought of as a role. If the captain of the baseball team and the basketball team also likes to play hockey, he knows he doesn’t also have to lead the hockey team. He doesn’t have the time and energy for that additional role and maybe also lacks the skill. So he gives his support to the hockey team captain and becomes a strong follower in that situation. If he could never follow anyone he would, in fact, be a disruptive presence on the team.

Looked at in this way, being in the follower role is not a sign of weakness. Think about it. Is a vice principal a follower or a leader? The answer: she is both. Is the school principal a follower or a leader? She had better be both. If she doesn’t lead, her school will suffer. If she can’t follow, the county administrator of schools will become frustrated with her, and the principal will have less influence in contributing to the administrator’s thinking and planning.

The correct question is not whether it is okay to play a follower role, but How can I play the follower role with integrity and strength? Courageous followership explores the ways to build a strong relationship with leaders that becomes a partnership. Partners support one another in their mutual efforts to succeed. They respect one another’s agreed on roles in the partnership. They also talk honestly about what the other is doing that could interfere with success, even if one is in a junior role to the other.

That very brief description of courageous followership brings us back to the ex-army officer’s story. A courageous follower speaks “truth to power” regardless of whether the leader invites him or her to do so. But a smart leader knows there are very strong social forces at work that inhibit the person in the follower role from speaking candidly. This is similar to the situation with the service dog we looked at in the last chapter. A lot of training has occurred to ensure obedience. What does it now take to break the habit and use intelligent disobedience when it would be unsafe to follow an order?

The former serviceman who approached me in Los Angeles gives us a vivid illustration of just how much it can take to break the obedience habit. Note carefully: we are not interested in weakening obedience to the legitimate, ethical, and productive uses of authority. After all, this is the military, which even more than other institutions relies on an agreed upon use of authority. We are talking about transforming the habit into a conscious choice of whether to obey or to dissent in a specific situation.

At the time, the officer was a young lieutenant. You can picture him stationed at one of the large army bases scattered around the United States. They are worlds unto themselves, stretching for many square miles inside a fenced perimeter. The soldiers train and work there. The married soldiers’ families live there. It’s the soil they deploy from on overseas missions and return to when their difficult missions are complete. Everyone on the base knows his or her rank relative to everyone else on the base. Breaches of protocol are taken seriously. Reputations are formed and tend to stick. You don’t step out of line lightly. This is the story he told me.

At the time I was working for a captain who had a rigid, authoritarian style. I reported every morning for my daily orders. He always had a list of the ten things he wanted done. If I mentioned there was something else that needed doing that day that wasn’t on the list, his gruff response was “You do the ten things on my list and then you can do yours.”

Note that the item on the lieutenant’s list may have been more important to the base than all the items on the captain’s list. The captain couldn’t care less. What was important to him was his authority and your compliance with it. Fortunately, this lieutenant had enough commitment to the base and to his fellow soldiers that he got the eleventh thing done anyway, which at times was the true priority. By doing so, he probably saved the captain from looking bad to his own superiors without the captain ever knowing or acknowledging it. Given the captain’s total insistence on obedience, things might have worked out very differently to the detriment of everyone concerned.

Eventually, the captain rotated out and a new captain took his place. I reported as usual the morning of the new captain’s arrival. After a few pleasantries, the captain gave me an order that he wanted done that day. I said, “Yes, sir!, saluted, and turned to leave.

As I was facing the door, I heard the captain say, “Hold on a minute.” I swiveled around and the next thing he said took me by surprise, to say the least. “Did the order I just gave make sense to you?”

Naturally, I replied, “Yes, sir!” He paused and fixed his eyes on me. “Did it really make sense to you?” he repeated.

Suddenly, I was in a very awkward situation. Did the captain’s order really make sense to me? The directness of his question and intensity in his voice wouldn’t let me fudge an answer. I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t sure if it made sense.

What was going on in the lieutenant’s mind? Of course, he didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with his new superior officer. So his mind started jumping through the social calculations of the effect of different answers he might give, just one of the ways that differences in rank can distort the natural flow of communication. More problematically, how is it that this bright, willing young officer wasn’t sure if the order made sense to him, yet he was leaving to execute it anyway? That’s a deeper level of internal self-deception, disowning his own accountability for acting rationally and responsibly. Right here we have a window into the mechanism that has at times allowed otherwise decent military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel to commit acts that violate the standards of their profession and human decency.

Apparently, the lieutenant had been so conditioned by the last captain’s “no-thinking-for-yourself” style that his power to judge the sense of an order had gone into a state of suspension. It had caused him to move further along the spectrum from a rational and responsible individual to the state we instinctively fear — that of the automaton. The automaton seems to be acting on its own but is actually following a programmed set of instructions for which it is not responsible. In the human version, because the individual is implementing a strict set of instructions given by another individual with formal authority, they do not feel responsible. We are right to fear this disassociation from self-accountability.

In the lieutenant’s case, the last captain’s order was just the most extreme expression of the expectation of unquestioned obedience. Whoever heard of a superior officer asking the question Did the order I just gave make sense to you? The lieutenant was so used to obeying orders in general, and obeying the last captain’s orders to the letter, that he hadn’t given conscious thought to the content of the particular order he had just received. A dangerous state of affairs for anyone, but particularly for military personnel trusted with high-powered armament and national honor and security.

The captain, for his part, had set up the lieutenant. The order he had given really didn’t make sense. It was a test to see if he could trust his subordinate to exercise sufficiently independent thinking to question the order — intelligent disobedience. If the lieutenant questioned the order, the captain would be able to trust him. If the lieutenant blindly tried to execute the order, the captain would have a concrete, real-time example to help expose the habit to the lieutenant himself.

What did the lieutenant do?

I said something to the effect of “Sir, the order may not have been fully clear to me given our current situation.” As I said this, I realized I had doubts about the wisdom of the order, given the context in which it would be executed.

“Lieutenant,” the captain said in a very serious tone. “I cannot afford to have you go off and execute something in my name if you are not clear what the order is or if, from your knowledge of the situation on the ground, you do not think it is a smart thing to do.”

I said, “Yes, sir!” thinking that would be the end of the matter. But the captain wasn’t ready to let it go.

He said, “We’re going to practice how to deal with the situation if what I tell you doesn’t make sense.”

This is a crucial juncture. The new captain, having witnessed the lieutenant’s conditioning to please and obey, recognized that this last “Yes, sir!” was just one more expression of that conditioning. In itself, it was not a meaningful demonstration of the lieutenant’s capacity to “unlearn” the conditioning.

Unlearning the habit was going to take some work. We don’t know from this story where the captain developed his appreciation for the need to break the mindless obedience habit. Perhaps he had a mentor who helped him break it. Perhaps he saw the consequences of unthinking obedience earlier in his career and was determined to never let that occur again on his watch.

The captain then told me: “I’m going to give you an order that doesn’t make any sense and you’re going to tell me ‘That’s BS, sir.’ ”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! This was the army. No one said “that’s BS” to a superior officer without predictable and unpleasant consequences.

I said “Sir, I can’t say that.”

The captain told me, “Yes, you can” and proceeded to give me an order that wasn’t well thought out and could have pretty negative consequences.

I didn’t want to disobey the order to tell him that was BS, so I said as softly as I could — in sort of a whisper, “That’s BS, sir.”

We’re witnessing a clever piece of habit-breaking ju-jitsu here. The captain was trying to break the habit of mindless disobedience. This same programming to obey would allow the junior office to break with his conditioning so he could practice telling his superior that his order was BS. He had been given a direct order to do so!

The captain heard me and said, “Alright, now let’s try that again a little louder. I had to do this over and over until I could say “That’s BS, sir!” as effectively as I could say “Yes, sir!” when responding to reasonable orders.

The captain was applying the techniques of good training. Repeat the skill being learned until it can be performed with confidence and strength.

Several weeks went by. Each morning I reported and received my orders, careful to make sure I understood them and could responsibly execute them. Everything was going fine. Then one morning I reported to the captain and found the colonel in the office with him. Here’s where it got really interesting. The colonel had a nephew who was also stationed on the base. Apparently, the nephew had taken a military vehicle without authorization. The military police had caught him, and the colonel had come to the captain to see if they could work out something to get his nephew off the hook. The captain explained to me what they were trying to do and asked for my help.

This was the moment of truth for the lieutenant. Would he revert to the safety of his primary training to obediently comply? The presence of the colonel raised the stakes. His own superior understood the need for candor from his troops, but did the colonel? Was this a time to apply the new training the captain had insisted on giving him? Note that the lieutenant had moved from mindless obedience to being aware that he had a choice in the matter. This is the primary condition for intelligent disobedience. He made his choice.

“Sir, that’s BS, sir.” And I said it in a clear, strong voice.

The colonel went nuts. His eyes bulged. His eyebrows shot up. His face turned red. There was a look of astonishment on it. He pointed a trembling finger at me and stammered in a loud voice: “What . . . what did he just say!?”

For me it was a surreal moment. The colonel looked like he was going to explode. I froze. Fortunately, the captain had the presence of mind to intervene. He took a step to place himself between me and the colonel. He raised his arm toward the colonel, sort of like he was a blocker using a stiff arm to protect the runner from a tackle. He said in an equally strong voice, “It’s alright sir. I’ll take care of this.”

He took a couple of quick steps toward me, put his arm around my shoulder, and sort of hustled me out of the room. As he did so he said softly, “Well done. You did well.” And then, after another couple of steps he continued to say softly, “Now get out of here before the colonel kills you!”

The lieutenant passed the test. This was not another set up by the captain to see if the lieutenant would obey when he shouldn’t. This was the real thing. The captain, who should have known better, fell into the cultural trap of obeying his superior officer when he shouldn’t have. We’re all human. Fortunately, the training he had given the lieutenant at the outset of their relationship saved the captain from going down the unethical road with its potential consequences to everyone involved. The lieutenant had been inculcated with an alternate response to blind obedience. This had permitted him to break the personal and culturally expected habit to obey and exercise intelligent disobedience.

Then the captain took the opportunity to do something critical: reward and thus reinforce the behavior. Imagine if he had been critical of the lieutenant for having spoken up in front of the colonel. This, most likely and understandably, would have undermined the lieutenant’s willingness to disobey an ill-advised order in the future. If we need our team to exercise Intelligent Disobedience, and I think you’ll agree that we do, then we need to be consistent in rewarding its display and certainly avoid penalizing it.

Did the captain have to be so dramatic in training the lieutenant to say, “That’s BS!”? Couldn’t he have trained him instead to respectfully question the order? Sure. And that probably would have worked, too. But perhaps the outrageousness of telling your superior officer “That’s BS!” more radically broke through the thick neural connections that years of conditioning had developed. It would, of course, be healthy for the lieutenant to develop a wider repertoire of how to question or dissent. “That’s BS” was the fire-axe that broke the chains of obedience. The axe could still be kept in reserve, while a finer tool kit was acquired that served the same purpose with less risk of eye-popping fireworks!

We also hope that the lieutenant passed on this coaching to the noncommissioned officers who reported to him and they, in turn, to the enlisted soldiers. I did not, at the time, have the presence to inquire about this. That would be how a culture is changed.

This excerpt about courageous followership was published with permission from Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do is Wrong (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2015).