The Ultimate Introvert-Friendly Workplace?
In a new book, Robert Hannigan looks back at the unusual working conditions at England’s super-secret spy hub Bletchley Park, which broke Nazi codes during World War II. Introverts thrived there.
What sort of working arrangements allow talented introverts to do their best work? Unintentionally, an experiment along these lines proceeded during World War II, when England battled against the Nazis. A secret intelligence gathering and code-breaking organization took shape some 50 miles northwest of London. Women and men who were recruited for their skill at mathematics, engineering, crossword puzzles, chess or classical languages threw everything they had against a task for which none of them had been trained. Their collective success offers some lessons about managing introverts and other “difficult, brilliant people.”
That last phrase comes from the book Counter-Intelligence: What the Secret World Can Teach Us About Problem-Solving and Creativity by Robert Hannigan. Formerly a director of GCHQ, the UK’s counterpart to the US’s National Security Agency (NSA), Hannigan notes that England’s wartime code-cracking organization, Bletchley Park, had a disproportionate percentage of introverts. This remarkably un-corporate, un-military, un-hierarchical organization unleashed their reasoning and imaginative efforts, with extraordinary results.
Let’s look at some of the introvert-friendly factors Hannigan discusses as contributing to Bletchley Park’s eventual triumphs over Nazi codes.
1. The secrecy. At all costs, those who knew what was going on at Bletchley Park had to keep mum about it. It was thus safer to keep people on if they were having trouble fitting in than to let them go. So the organization kept management reins loose, compared to other workplaces of its day. Team members worked hard but wore what they liked and behaved as they liked – holing up at their desk without socializing, for example, if that suited them most.
2. Diversity of personnel. Hannigan points out that many of the most gifted code-breakers would have been verboten to the Nazis because they were homosexual, Jewish, overwhelmingly young or civilians who would not eagerly snap to attention with superiors. The German military chased out or persecuted many who had the most talent. They also failed to reach out to civilian academics who might have pointed out and corrected the systemic intelligence weaknesses that the British team discovered and exploited. Furthermore, because the Germans sliced their military into separate departments that didn’t cooperate with one another, they lacked a holistic picture of how British intelligence operations were misleading them.
3. Diversity in approach. Intelligence work demands a divergent, unregimented style of thinking in which insights come from unexpected directions or from making unconventional connections. At Bletchley Park, some key breakthroughs had to do with unobvious aspects of coded German transmissions. Hannigan cites a popular British game show called Only Connect as exemplifying the difficulties of identifying patterns – in the enemy’s operations as well as on the show. I watched an episode of Only Connect on YouTube. Two three-person teams competed in saying what seemingly unrelated items actually had in common. The mumbled thinking-out-loud on these challenges clearly showed the benefit of wide-ranging knowledge on the teams and agility in pursuing multiple angles of attack.
4. Lay-low leadership. Meetings, which tend to irritate introverts, were kept to an absolute minimum at the British code-breaking headquarters. In contrast to the Germans’ top-down regimentation and pervasive fear of mistakes being exposed, at Bletchley Park people were allowed to pursue unlikely avenues and unconventional hypotheses. In Hannigan’s words:
“The young men and women who broke codes on an industrial scale in Buckinghamshire had the advantage of low expectation from the outside but high ambition within… Even those who believed that the job was possible were not sure how it would be achieved; they had little to lose, intellectually at least. And at its best, Bletchley constructed a system where self-disruption was made as easy as possible… [with] an openness to challenge and improvement… and a constant flow of new, young recruits who were taken seriously when they suggested things might be different.”
Hannigan muses about a few other personality characteristics of successful counter-intelligence operatives that fit nicely with introvert tendencies. One is the ability to disagree with co-workers. He notes that “groupthink,” where opinions converge and dissent withers, is a huge danger in complex endeavors that have many unknowns. Introverts are less motivated by the pleasure of consensus and generally find it easier than extroverts to swim against a current of agreement.
Additionally, he observes that in an intelligence service, individuals’ excellent performance can’t usually be publicly acknowledged, let alone acclaimed. So staff need to find the work its own reward. This too suits introverts, who often dislike bragging and don’t mind achieving bold goals that only a select few ever know about. Even within an intelligence organization, the brightest mind might belong to “someone in the corner,” in Hannigan’s words, who is reluctant to speak up until specifically consulted – an introvert.
Finally, Hannigan points out that even now, with more widespread understanding of personality differences, organizations don’t readily embrace introverts. “Most recruitment processes favor quick-firing, articulate bluffers,” he writes. Plus there’s “the natural bias of extroverts to assume that people who say little have little to say.”
After exposure to the benefits of the loose controls at Bletchley Park, would today’s executives still favor the regimentation that conventional minds seem to find comfortable? If so, that would represent an unfortunate loss.
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