It was a July afternoon in Coleman, Texas, population 5,607. The Walgreen’s Rexall Ex-Lax temperature gauge read 104 degrees, and the wind was blowing West Texas topsoil through the house. Still, on the back porch there was a fan, cold lemonade and a game of dominoes. Jerry Harvey, visiting his wife’s parents, thought it had the makings of an agreeable Sunday.
Then his father-in-law said, “Let’s get in the car and go to Abilene and have dinner at the cafeteria.”
Harvey thought, “What, go to Abilene? Fifty-three miles? In this dust storm and heat? And in an unairconditioned 1958 Buick?”
His wife spoke first. “Sounds like a great idea. I’d like to go. How about you, Jerry?” His own preferences, Harvey decided, were out of step with everyone else’s. “Sounds good to me,” he said, and added, “I just hope your mother wants to go.”
“Of course I want to go,” said his mother-in-law. “I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”
The heat was brutal. Dust stuck to their sweat. The cafeteria food, Harvey wrote, was fit for an antacid commercial. Some four hours and 106 miles later they were back in Coleman, sitting in front of the fan, saying nothing.
To break the silence, Harvey said, “It was a great trip, wasn’t it?”
Nobody spoke. Then his mother-in-law, a little irritated: “Well, to tell the truth, I really didn’t enjoy it much and would rather have stayed here. I just went along because the three of you were so enthusiastic about going.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Harvey said. “I only went to satisfy the rest of you. You’re the culprits.”
His wife was shocked. “Don’t call me a culprit.” She had just gone along, she said, “to be sociable and to keep you happy.”
Then her father: “Hell!” He had never wanted to go to Abilene either. “I just thought you might be bored. You visit so seldom I wanted to be sure you enjoyed it. I would have preferred to play another game of dominoes and eat the leftovers in the icebox.”
Four sensible people had taken a trip none of them wanted. In Harvey’s words, they had done “just the opposite” of what they wanted to do.
In 1974 Harvey told the story in the journal Organizational Dynamics. He had seen organizations take the same trip, he wrote, at far greater cost. His summary of the paradox: “Organizations frequently take actions in contradiction to what they really want to do and therefore defeat the very purposes they are trying to achieve.”