Lorynn Garcia
April 30th, 2015
Echo Flight
Groupthink Essay
Groupthink is occasionally tied in with the term, normalization of deviance. Normalization of deviance is a process of reclassifying defects as acceptable. This process can potentially put others in harm’s way, make the mission a possible failure, and ruin the shared values and traditional norms of an organization. Many individuals may groupthink because they were overly ambitious, or simply because they wanted to get their mission done without realizing the possibility of a negative outcome. One example of groupthink and how it has affected NASA’s other space shuttle the Columbia, launched in 1981, which was destroyed while entering Earth’s atmosphere due to a breach in the thermal…show more content… This was planned to occur during Eisenhower’s presidency, however, it was left for President Kennedy to deal with later on. Dulles explained the operation to Kennedy, stating that this was an attempt to overthrow Communist leader Fidel Castro by training Cuban exiles who would invade the island which in turn contains Communist influence. Numerous people questioned how 1,000 exiles could defeat an army of 200,000. The expectation was that the fighting between the Cuban exiles and Cuban army would create a general uprising on the island. Senator Fulbright, chairman of the SFRC, pleads Kennedy to cancel the operation through a letter. President Kennedy went through with the Bay of Pigs operation anyways. The failure of this operation led to the Cuban missile crisis and more. Groupthink was a major contribution to the failure of this operation due to some factions, the CIA and the military, were more informed about it than the rest of the members. It also failed because it did not specify what was the agenda, factions had their own individual agendas in mind, and because there was no set standards for members to question. The failure of the Bay of Pigs operation could have been avoided through correct management and proper communication skills; ensuring that each member of the operation is equally informed. It could have also been avoided through assigning individual roles in order to keep the operation