The Cuban Missile Crisis: Fixing Groupthink With Process

Eighteen months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, one of the worst foreign-policy decisions in American history. He had brilliant advisors, and the plan was still catastrophic. Post-mortems revealed textbook groupthink: advisors swallowed their doubts, nobody was tasked to find flaws, and disagreement felt disloyal. When Soviet missiles appeared in Cuba in October 1962, Kennedy faced higher stakes with roughly the same people, and he changed one thing.

For founders and operators, this case sharpens how you structure your own high-stakes decisions, especially when a smart team converges on confidence it has not earned. It reframes bad outcomes not as a failure of talent but as a predictable output of process design. What Kennedy changed, and how he engineered conflict into the room, is the move the app reveals once you work through it.