Groupthink is one of the greatest obstacles to successful innovation. Many teams arrive prematurely at a mistaken course of action and are seemingly unable to incorporate new information and modify their approach. This may be due to the presence of team members with similar backgrounds, a powerful leader who doesn’t encourage debate and shuts down dissent, limited sources of data and other input, or group members with a strong desire to conform to team norms. Maureen Dunne provides one description of common groupthink symptoms:
“Symptoms of groupthink include a high and unbalanced level of cohesion among group members, a lack of critical evaluation of ideas and alternatives, an illusion of invulnerability, an illusion of morality, stereotyped views of out-groups, direct pressure on dissenters, self-censorship, and a shared illusion of unanimity.”
We commonly think of unconscious bias as an individual challenge, but it is actually far more powerful among groups of people who reinforce each other’s opinions and perceptions. The biases covered by the CIAO model—confirmation bias, insider bias, attribution bias, and overconfidence bias—for example, are often present in team contexts. Groupthink tends to sweep up individuals who may have a wide variety of personal views or ideas and pressure them to adhere to a more uniform group perspective, confirming questionable assumptions, favoring insiders, casting blame on others, and fostering undue confidence in mistaken views.
Highly visible corporate fiascos have resulted from groupthink, not to mention the quieter failures of so many teams to create new approaches or products through innovation. A team at Tesco evidently concluded, for instance, that a special promotion of smoky bacon Pringles would be a good way to help celebrate Ramadan, while neglecting to consider Islam’s prohibition against pork.
There are many similar instances of the negative consequences of groupthink. The common denominator among them is a failure to take into account a sufficiently broad set of evidence and its implications. For example, Sanofi-Aventis failed to test Ambien, its popular insomnia treatment, with women, resulting in overdoses that caused significant harm; Google’s initial rollout of GoogleGlass was halted after criticism, not from users, but from members of the general public who felt that this product invaded their privacy. Another larger-scale manifestation of groupthink is CEOs and military leaders who may be “trying to fight the last war” using outdated strategies. It takes time for leaders and institutions to absorb the implications of newer technologies such as drones, artificial intelligence, or miniature satellites and to determine how best to adapt.
Groupthink impacts workplace recruiting practices, meetings, promotion decisions, and definitions of corporate culture, as well as a team’s efforts to create a new product or process. Here are three ways to counter groupthink’s effects and arrive at actions that are based on facts and genuinely creative thinking.
Systematically applying a diverse set of perspectives, or “perspective-taking,” is helpful in solving most difficult problems. The members of any team need to consider what perspectives they already have available to them and how to draw these out, along with what points of view or expertise they might be missing.
In the previously mentioned Tesco example, the team neglected an important tenet of Islam while trying to reach Islamic consumers, and could have benefited from a prior discussion with followers of this religious faith. Similarly, the R&D team that created Ambien needed to incorporate the perspectives of women physicians along with test data and feedback from female patients. Diverse representation in clinical trial research is increasingly becoming both a regulatory and an ethical requirement; cultural competence has become essential as well in clinical environments where many physicians, nurses, staff, and patients may be from different countries and speak different languages.
In other corporate R&D efforts, cross-functional teams that include both engineers and marketers usually have a better opportunity to bring a viable product to market than teams dominated by a single functional perspective. Additionally, there are numerous cases of neurodiverse individuals who have contributed their unique insights to change whole industries, such as Dr. Temple Grandin’s innovations in handling cattle.
Of course, it is impractical for a team with challenging goals and deadlines to consider every perspective and point of view. However, it is possible for team members to regularly ask, “What are we missing here?” or “Whose voice are we missing?” and to deliberately apply key perspectives relevant to the tasks at hand. This is true of each stage in the innovation process: idea generation, prioritizing and planning, and implementation.
A number of facilitation techniques have emerged over time that counter groupthink by bringing out the contributions of group members with different perspectives. We recommend selecting several that are best suited to your team and either developing in-house expertise to deploy them or bringing in an external facilitator. Such techniques include:
With most innovation initiatives, there is usually a funnel that proceeds from idea generation to implementation. Diverse contributions are more welcome at the top end of the funnel, when ideas are still taking shape, but teams naturally have to apply greater focus and discipline as they move toward implementation. Too much divergent thinking during the implementation phase may lead to confusion and lack of alignment among team members, with a failure to converge around a common solution.
At the same time, teams without channels for ongoing review and dissent may wind up failing due to unforeseen obstacles or changes in the market landscape. There are many ways teams can invite new information and allow for modifications and course corrections, including informal progress check-ins, skip-level meetings with frontline employees, regular assessment of targeted metrics, periodic reviews at each rollout stage, after-action reviews of team performance for possible improvements, and independent third party reviews.
In the automotive industry, for instance, by the time a vehicle is being produced on a factory assembly line, it has already gone through at least several years of meticulous design, planning, and testing before the company converges on a particular model. The average car has 30,000 parts (electric vehicles have less), and altering one set of specifications, particularly after manufacturing begins, could cause a ripple effect that requires other expensive and time-consuming changes. Toyota’s factories nonetheless allow production line workers to pull the so-called “Andon Cable” when they see a problem that could compromise vehicle quality. If the worker and supervisor cannot resolve the issue within a limited time frame, the production line will ultimately stop. This enables continuous feedback and improvement throughout the vehicle production system, even during its implementation on the factory floor.
Avoiding groupthink is seldom easy. Humans are social animals, and there are many temptations for each of us to go along with the group and/or to agree with the senior person in charge, particularly in national or organizational culture settings that value hierarchy. Executives may confidently say they have created an environment of psychological safety without realizing that an employee’s sense of “safety” can be achieved for all the wrong reasons: in some organizations, it is actually safer to be agreeable—to not raise uncomfortable or unwelcome questions, to defer to others above you in the hierarchy, and to mimic the words and ideas of senior leaders. Common expressions such as “Don’t rock the boat,” “Go along to get along,” “I’m not going to stick my neck out,” and “Let’s ask the boss” reflect this version of safety. The underlying emotion among employees in such a setting is often fear—fear of being judged negatively, a poor performance appraisal, an embarrassing project failure, being excluded from the team, facing career derailment, or losing their job.
Achieving authentic psychological safety requires a deep understanding of groupthink and deliberate efforts to mitigate its effects. Leaders can set the tone by genuinely welcoming ideas from others and not penalizing employees who take reasonable risks. They often need to step back and let others express their ideas first in order not to exert undue influence on their team’s direction while modeling a continuous openness to fresh sources of information and a readiness to learn. The three recommendations outlined above provide a more comprehensive toolkit for leaders and team members to draw upon. Potential benefits of leveraging these recommendations include increased engagement from team members, greater creative capacity, and innovations that go far beyond the work of teams still locked in groupthink.
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