Groupthink hiding in plain sight is holding you back; here is how you can break through...

In February 2003, I was settling in for what was scheduled to be a lecture on Statistics and Probability when our professor stormed into the hall, slammed his notes on the podium, and loudly blurted out a string of profanity-laced disgruntlement that essentially boiled down to: “Well, they did it again.”

            It was the weekend after the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board. The lecturer was a retired NASA engineer who immediately suspected what would later be verified by an internal investigation: That, much like the Challenger disaster 15 years prior, this tragedy was avoidable and at least partially the result of poor decisions made by NASA. At the root of this folly, the lecturer surmised, was the blatant disregard of warning signs because of the paralyzing phenomenon of groupthink.

            Groupthink is the practice of making decisions as a group in a way that, in order to maintain harmony or enforce conformity, discourages creativity, disregards conflicting data, and avoids individual responsibility. It is a rampant problem anywhere important decisions are made. Employees rarely publicly disagree with their boss. Forceful, loud arguments masquerade as confidence and tend to bully less certain team members into agreement. And sometimes, the notion that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” stands in the way of improvement. And while the stakes are rarely life-and-death, as they were with NASA, the results can be disastrous for any business.

            Groupthink hides behind many masks. When I worked among the Fortune 500 years ago, the tool of groupthink was PowerPoint. (In fact PowerPoint was the tool of choice at NASA and prominently featured in the investigation.) Everywhere there were c-level people in IT and finance who walked around with their decks of slides ready to pronounce their stance and lay out their argument. These folks weren’t hacks. They were diligent and sincere in their desire to make good decisions. Their facts and data weren’t incorrect or even out of date — but they were often incomplete. People have a way of cherry-picking facts to fit their arguments. Laid out on these decks, the thinking calcified. If there were initial successes to point to, challenges or conflicting data became anathema to productivity (If it worked once, why wouldn’t it work again?). Educated opinion gradually became accepted fact. And positions became institutionalized. Eventually the decision makers stopped making decisions.

            These days, Tableau, Power BI and other dashboard platforms have mostly replaced PowerPoint, but the results are the same. In fact, dashboards can be even more susceptible to groupthink in some insidious ways:

Parting the Clouds of Groupthink

The key to cutting through the quagmire of groupthink is creating an environment that fosters openness and creativity. This must come from the top down, through fearless leadership — starting with the boardroom and the executive suite, all the way down to team leaders — that will encourage participation and thoughtfulness while banishing the negativity of rejection. To be more specific, here are five suggestions to combat groupthink:

  1. Be Curious: When leading a meeting or a team, avoid the trap of unintended suggestions. Try to use blind information-gathering whenever possible. For instance, at the beginning of the meeting introduce a discussion point and give everyone five minutes to type out and print or send their knee-jerk take. The team members may still only be telling you what they think you want to hear, but you’ll at least have insight into the framework of their thinking. Repeating this exercise at the end of the meeting can show you how their position changed — or at least, where they stopped listening.
  2. Embrace the Devil’s Advocate: No one wants their conference room or Zoom call to turn into a battlefield; and there is certainly a time when discussion needs to end so the team can proceed on a unified front. But there needs to be a clear and safe space for dissenting opinions, contrary views, and just plain calling out BS when discussing any topic. In fact, it can often be advantageous to purposefully encourage constructive assault on even the most widely accepted viewpoints. Think back to high school debate, when you were forced to argue positions you might not have personally agreed with. Find the counterpoints to each argument, if only to strengthen established positions. Remember, complacency is usually a telltale symptom of groupthink.
  3. Protect the Messenger: It’s natural to be defensive of yourself and your ideas. (And corporate competition is definitely a THING.) But when a team member comes to you respectfully with a constructive, well-thought-out criticism or concern, it’s wise to hear them out and not squash their contribution. Remember they are risking your reaction and maybe even their long-term relationship with you to tell you something. And if you dismiss them and their ideas out of hand, you are not only shutting them out, but you are also implicitly discouraging others from sharing ideas they think you might not like. Then, you might as well not have a team at all.
  4. Listen for the Quiet Voices: Now more than ever, people seem to think that being louder and more forceful (or TYPING IN ALL CAPS on social media) makes them right. And there is such a thing as extravert bias — a charismatic argument can be difficult to resist. But just because a team member doesn’t speak up during a meeting, it doesn’t mean they agree with what’s being presented. Likewise, just because a person has difficulty articulating their idea, it doesn’t mean that the idea or an element of that notion doesn’t have merit. In fact, an introvert’s reticence might mean that, rather than just waiting for a window to interject their hot take or prepackaged talking points, they were actually listening.
  5. Be Transparent in Decision Making: We have spent a tremendous amount of time in this article trying to highlight the value of contrary positions. In a world awash in opinion and varnish thin analysis, it is imperative that, if you are going to practice fearless leadership, you need to make sure that your team is arguing facts. If you haven’t shared the data behind your decks and reports then your team is forced to argue their opinion from your analysis. Strive to provide your team with the data they need to come to their own conclusions. It is the only way you will get a contrary argument based on thoughtful examination of facts — you must make the facts accessible.