Who Wanted This Trip, Anyway?
I once drove all the way from Colorado, in the US, back to Nova Scotia, in Canada. Five days of driving, taking it easy, stopping frequently, and avoiding driving at night. We stayed on the US side of the border all the way until Maine, where we finally crossed into Canadian roads.
I also had the opportunity to drive from Ontario to Nova Scotia once, and from Nova Scotia to Quebec several times. I may not have seen most of the highways and roads in North America, but I have seen enough to say with some authority that North American gas stations and highway stops have nothing on the Brazilian ones.
Even on not-so-important highways in Brazil, every few hundred kilometres, maybe less, you will come across gigantic gas stations with an unbelievable ecosystem around them.
There is usually a turnstile at the entrance that dispenses a bar-coded hard token you can use to buy things and pay only at the exit. Inside, you will find buffets, snacks, drinks, à la carte restaurants, bathrooms with showers, hotels, and gift shops. There are facilities for pets and families, and sometimes even large department stores. Any not-so-great gas station in Brazil will dwarf the Canadian Irving “Big Stop”, so you can understand what I am talking about.
When I was a kid, there was this gas station about 150 km, or around 100 miles, from our home that served feijoada on Saturdays. It was just fantastic, and a few times, when we were driving back home from wherever, we stopped there. But there were also at least a couple of times when I remember my dad taking the entire family on a long drive during the Brazilian summer just to get us to that restaurant.
I don’t know what everybody else thought about taking that trip, but I loved it every time. I remembered it today while reading about the Abilene Paradox.
The story goes that a family was playing dominoes on their porch on a hot day during the Texas summer when the father-in-law, mostly trying to break the perceived boredom, said, “Hey, let’s go to Abilene and have dinner at the cafeteria.” The wife turned and said, “Sure, if my husband wants.” Of course, he agreed, under the condition that the mother-in-law was OK with it. She immediately confirmed she was on board and looking forward to it.
The trip was miserable. Hot, dusty, and exhausting, without air conditioning in the car. The food was terrible, and four hours later, they were back home. Somehow, they started discussing the trip and realized none of them had actually wanted to go. The father-in-law was just uncomfortable with the silence and said the first thing that came to mind. Everybody else thought the other three people were really excited about the trip.
There is an entire dynamic in collective decision-making that can lead to failures like this one, where everybody agrees on something that, in the best case, is sub-optimal and, in the worst case, really detrimental.
The interesting part is that the problem is not conflict. Nobody is fighting. Nobody is blocking the decision. Nobody is being difficult. On the surface, the group looks aligned. Everybody nods, agrees, and moves in the same direction. But that alignment is fake because it is built on assumptions, not on what people actually believe. Each person privately thinks, “I don’t really want this, but everyone else seems to,” and by the time the group realizes what happened, they are already halfway to Abilene.
In organizations, this is especially dangerous because it can appear to be good teamwork. A leadership team may agree to fund an R&D project nobody really believes in because each person assumes someone else must have better information. A team may escalate a policy, create a committee, or launch a process because no one wants to be the one to say, “This is unnecessary.” A project may keep going long after the warning signs are obvious because everyone assumes the lack of objection means support.
The meeting ends with consensus, but not conviction.
That is what makes the Abilene Paradox different from the usual problem of disagreement. The dysfunction does not come from people arguing too much, but from people arguing too little. It is not the loud conflict that damages the decision. It is the quiet, polite, unmanaged agreement. And the larger the organization, the easier it becomes for people to hide behind roles, hierarchy, processes, and “alignment” instead of saying what they actually think.
I once joined a call where the compliance and security teams were pitching a specific tool to mitigate a potential, but still unproven, attack vector. That tool would be placed in the middle of the developers’ workflow, restricting which features they could use in a system. There would be a whitelist properly enforced at the tool level. Everybody on the call seemed to agree that this was a good idea, either by agreeing directly or by staying silent.
The problem, though, was that because things worked the way they did, there was no way to force the developers to use the tool. It would be used on an honour system.
That made me scratch my head, but nobody was saying anything except agreeing.
I decided to ping a few of the other participants on the side via Slack and asked if they had any idea what the heck those people were talking about. It turned out I was not the only confused one.
So I spoke up and asked1, “Well, since they have to use this tool on an honour system, why don’t we skip the tool altogether and just tell them to restrict the features they use, also on the honour system, and save us the hassle and money?”
And surely, others agreed and interjected with their own similar ideas. I don’t know what happened next, as I left the company before the next meeting. I am still curious.
The lesson for me was not that I had some brilliant insight nobody else had. I did not. The point was much simpler: I was just the first person willing to say the awkward thing out loud.
That is often all it takes to break the trip to Abilene. Not a dramatic confrontation. Not a speech. Not a heroic act of dissent. Just one clear question that gives everyone else permission to admit they were thinking the same thing.
Thinking back to those childhood trips to the gas station restaurant, I think that is why the Abilene story stayed with me.
On paper, the two stories are similar. A family gets in the car, drives a long distance, eats a meal, and comes back home. But the difference is everything. In my case, at least as I remember it, the trip had a point. We wanted to go. The feijoada was worth the drive, the stop was part of the experience, and even the long road felt connected to something we had chosen.
The problem with Abilene was not the distance. It was not the heat, the dust, or even the bad food. The problem was that nobody had really chosen the trip. They had only chosen not to object.
That is the part organizations need to watch for.
Long drives are fine. Hard projects are fine. Expensive tools, complex processes, and ambitious plans can all be fine. But only if people understand why they are getting in the car, believe the destination is worth it, and have had a real chance to say, “Actually, I don’t think we should go.”
Otherwise, sooner or later, everyone ends up tired, annoyed, and quietly wondering who wanted this in the first place.