In October 1962, US surveillance found evidence of Soviet Nuclear Missile bases on the island of Cuba. What followed was the most heated confrontation of the Cold War, a tense episode of eyeball-to-eyeball brinkmanship that brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than it had ever been before or has been since. When the Soviets finally agreed to withdraw the missiles (in return for a US promise not to invade Cuba), the whole world breathed a sigh of relief.

This is the setting for Graham T. Allison’s classic study of organisational decision making The Essence of Decision: Explaining The Cuban Missile Crisis (now available in a revised second edition, co-authored with Philip Zelikow, with expanded theoretical development and additional information about the crisis from the Soviet perspective). Allison’s idea is simple – if there was ever a situation that demanded undivided attention and would brook no error, if there was ever a decision in which narrow political or personal motives could play no part, it was the US decision on what to do about Cuba. After all, with the threat of nuclear holocaust ever present, the very future of mankind was at stake. By looking carefully into why the US responded the way it did, and how that response was arrived at and implemented, Allison hopes to achieve a better understanding of the process by which large decisions get made in organisations, and examine to what extent these decisions can be thought to be ‘rational’.

He does this by adopting a Rashomon-like approach to describing the decisions taken by the Kennedy Administration during the crisis. In the first section he chooses a ‘rational actor’ lens, assuming that nations act like fully rational individuals in making their decisions – examining all the alternatives open to them, weighing the pros and cons of each and finally choosing the path that seems the optimal, all things considered. Allison thus lays out the various options considered by the Americans, including an air strike, a ground strike, an embargo, etc. and explores the strategic implications of each of these moves as seen by the decision makers sitting in the Oval Office. This is classic game theory, a la Schelling – probabilities are calculated, likely counter-moves are considered, costs, both human and diplomatic, are carefully weighed. Based on all this, Allison provides a seemingly strong description of why the US chose to impose an embargo on Cuba, and why it was finally able to force the Russians to back down.

So far so good. Where Allison really comes into his own, however, is in the next two sections, where he re-examines the events already described to demonstrate the rich labyrinth of organisational and political dynamics that underlay what on the surface seemed so well thought out a decision. There are many rich insights in the book, but Allison makes, in my view, three key points.

First, that the information made available to the decision maker is almost always conditioned by the perspective of those working out the details. For example, one of the reasons that the US decided against an air strike was that the plan put together by the air force for such a strike required too many planes and was too complicated for the decision makers to feel comfortable opting for it. One reason for this, Allison points out, was that the air force’s priority was to bring all its pilots back safely, so that even their ‘bare minimum’ plan involved attacking surface-to-air missile basis in Cuba, thus more than doubling the size of the offensive. Had Kennedy and others been aware that a much smaller strike could have taken out all the strategically critical nuclear bases, albeit at higher pilot cost, would they have opted for it over an embargo?

Allison’s second point is that the very routines that make organisations efficient also leave them prone to failure when the unforeseeable happens. At one point during the crisis, for instance, a US U-2 plane flying over Siberia, happened to stray into enemy airspace, and a couple of US fighters were scrambled to bring it safely back to base. This was standard protocol. What was also standard protocol, because US forces were on high alert at the time, was for these fighters to be armed with fully activated nuclear weapons, ready to take off instantly, should a nuclear conflict begin. As a result of this combination of directives, however, there was a point when US planes carrying fully armed nuclear devices were flying over Russian airspace, ready to engage with the enemy. And the decision makers sitting in the Oval Office had no knowledge of this!

What makes this scary is that this is a case of the world been brought to the brink of nuclear conflict not because of some crackpot general with a conspiracy, but by responsible, rational men and women following stipulated guidelines. Allison’s point is that this is unavoidable. For an organisation (the air force) to function effectively and efficiently, every micro-decision taken cannot possibly be referred back to the supreme decision maker (the Oval Office) – on the contrary, the most high-performing organisations are precisely those where actions are carried out almost automatically, with the minimum amount of interference or supervision. Yet this distancing of the details from the overall decision can have consequences that are both unforeseen and unintended.

An implication of this, as Allison points out, is that it is often erroneous to infer rational thought behind the actions we see organisations taking, or to assume that what is actually happening on the ground is what the key decision makers actually wanted to happen. During the crisis, for instance, US strategists believed that the Soviets had placed their missiles in Cuba as a deliberate provocation, because little attempt had been made to hide the missile bases from aerial surveillance. The truth, it turns out, was that the Soviet engineers setting up the bases had never before set up bases outside Russian soil and had no authority to go around changing the set templates used to set up missile bases in Russia. They therefore simply went ahead and constructed the bases as they always had (in shapes familiar to US experts), making them easy to spot from the air.

Finally, Allison discusses the political forces at work in the making of the decision. This is not politics as we traditionally understand it (some of the people Kennedy worked most closely with during the crisis, and listened most closely to, were Republicans) but the interplay of genuine differences of opinion, which led various parties in the discussion to try and influence the others by forming camps and coalitions within the group to push for one proposal or the other. Thus the final decision was ‘rational’ only in the sense that it represented the view of those who were best able to convince others (and eventually Kennedy) of their point of view. Ideology also continued to play a role. One of the reasons, Allison claims, that Kennedy was reluctant to launch an air strike was because such a strike would have to be without warning to be successful, and to launch a surprise air strike just 20 years after Pearl Harbor was something the US President was reluctant to do.

The entire book teems with a myriad such details, all tied together with a clear theoretical analysis, providing a comprehensive picture of just how complex the decision process actually was, and how far the actions eventually taken strayed from what, in hindsight, would have been considered the optimal strategic course. Overall then, Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision is a fascinating study of organisational decision making, a non-fiction classic that provides convincing evidence that, contrary to standard economic assumptions, organisations do not act as rational strategic agents, and that any study of how businesses and governments behave must pay close attention to the structure, systems, processes and group dynamics at play within that organisation.

(For more on the Cuban Missile Crisis see here)

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