If anyone wants a case study on how groupthink and homogenous teams can completely roadblock problem solving, go check out The Ripper on Netflix. It’s about the utter failure of the West Yorkshire police in finding the Yorkshire Ripper from 1977-1981.

It takes a lot to get me riled up about stuff like this, but the insane arrogance those leaders had in locking into one initial idea resulted in over a dozen victims and a total lockdown of the state for women.

3/ this isn’t bashing those cops that conducted 100s of 1,000s of hours of investigating. Their leaders were closed to new ideas and even when cops on the ground interviewed the killer, they were forced to release him over and over again because he didn’t the fit the mold.

4/ closed minded leaders with no diversity of background, gender, or race led to needless deaths. And they only caught the killer essentially by accident.

5/ the moral of the story is diversity and open-mindedness help our organizations to become stronger and smarter. Anything short of that is accepting failure and inefficiency. /end