arm fuzzy business words:
 

• Common objectives
• Commitment
• Sense of belonging
• Unity
• Shared values

The items on this partial list are among the traits exhibited by high performing teams.

Of course the list is incomplete. That’s because our topic today is groupthink, a disease with strong immunity against open-mindedness, logic, and other traits required of high performing teams. Living in a bubble or the echo chamber are phrases du jour describing groupthink.

My little list are collective traits of what John Tooby calls a coalition; not exactly the same as a team, but close. Tooby should know; he’s a professor of anthropology and the co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara. His main thesis is that humans need to belong to a coalition. A coalition, as he defines it, has, “…propensities to act as a unit, to defend joint interests, and to have shared mental states and other properties of a single human agent.”

His research shows the need to belong is a primary survival instinct. Two heads are better than one in matters of problem solving. Or in Tooby’s grim terms , “The primary function which drove the evolution of coalitions is the amplification of the power of its members in conflicts with nonmembers.” And, “...ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency...”

For better and for worse, we’re blessed with, and stuck with, the cooperation instinct. It’s in the DNA. Notably, Tooby doesn’t say we need to belong to a coalition whose values match ours. No. We just need to belong. Our behaviors and opinion are malleable compared to this need, which is why groupthink is such a risk.

Preventing Groupthink

The LSS practitioner is asked to navigate that which is unseen because groupthink is cultural. (Have you noticed that cultural issues are a theme of LSS work?)

A team can have groupthink without damaging your project, but once you do recognize it impacting your project, obviously, it’s already there. At that point, an LSS facilitator has a tough choice.

Test your thinking with a hypothetical scenario:

• You: If we develop a forcing function, it will make it easier to do the right thing. Designed well, it would reduce the cognitive load, result in higher reliability, and blend into the workflow seamlessly.
• Seasoned team member: Our department doesn’t need any more work to do. We’ll train our people how to avoid these defects. We train regularly. Training will be fine.
• You see faces of agreement all around you supporting this low-reliability thinking.

Do you:

A) Abandon the high-reliability principle? The temporary attention paid, in the form of training, will likely have a brief positive impact. By the time the metrics drifts back to the status quo, you’ll be on to another project.

B) Correct this low-reliability thinking? The team has accepted this declarative statement, Training is fine . There was no invitation to rebut this unassailable fact. Your data is no match against groupthink. Any argument will likely be twisted into a global ad hominem attack on the department.

C) Go back in time and prevent this situation from ever occurring.

As you can see, it’s not good enough just to recognize groupthink. At that point you have few good choices. An artful facilitator can turn the ship around, but it’s best to avoid those waters altogether. Just as it is proper to use universal precautions to prevent the spread of infection, facilitators can use the following precautions to prevent groupthink.

Before you find yourself in a difficult situation, define groupthink to disarm it.

1. Define groupthink at the beginning of your work with the below common symptoms and label it as a poison to progress. Groupthink is something only fragile teams require.

2. Speak up. Ask everyone to watch out for the common symptoms.

3. Use process. Explicitly establish and consistently use this standard process.

• Follow the methodology
• Use data to develop analysis to spark critical thinking
• Listen to the voice of the customer

Our methodology and LSS foundational principles are not enough to prevent groupthink, it requires facilitators to take these important preventative steps for each project. Follow these when the team is newly formed, before you find yourself in a difficult situation.