The Leaderless Group Project

When the War Office Selection Boards were set up, it was believed by many that both the supply and the quality of officers was falling off and must continue to fall off as the war went on. There was certainly very little doubt that that belief was true in so far as it referred to the past. But as the senior psychiatrist called in to advise on selection and methods of selection, I pointed out that there was no reason why this statement should be regarded as an axiom. It could be maintained that in a nation at war the supply of leaders could be made to increase, and their quality, thanks to the compulsion of national need, could be made to improve. For this to happen, selection of candidates would have to be at least as careful as the selection, in forestry, of trees to be converted to timber.

The proposals put forward to bring this state of affairs to pass, over the whole field of selection and not merely at the War Office Selection Boards, were rejected and need detain us no longer. It became necessary to confine our activities to the selection of candidates from among those who appeared at the Boards.

The essence of the technique which was evolved, and which has since become the basis of selection techniques in many different fields, was to provide a framework in which selecting officers, including a psychiatrist, could observe a man's capacity for maintaining personal relationships in a situation of strain that tempted him to disregard the interests of his fellows for the sake of his own. The situation had to be a real-life situation. The situation of strain, and the temptation to give

full rein to his personal ambitions, was already there: the candidate arrived prepared to do his best and get himself a commission, and, naturally, he feared the possibility of failure. Furthermore this was a real-life situation. The problem was to make capital of this existing emotional field in order to test the quality of the man's relationships with his fel