e48 Combating groupthink

Products and teams can fail not only if they are not aligned, but also if they are too aligned. In this case, being in agreement is more important than considering different perspectives, ideas, and sometimes even new data that contradict the existing status quo. This is the danger of groupthink.

Photo by Maria Kovalets on Unsplash

☕ Combating groupthink

Products might fail for many reasons. One of them is if the team ignores feedback or evidence and goes all in on an idea that, in the end, was not the right one. While there could be approach or organisational issues, a reason for failure is also if the team focuses too much on internal agreement, that is, groupthink, in their decisions.

Groupthink is a phenomenon of social decision-making, when the group members value internal harmony and lack of conflicts higher than great outcomes. Because agreement can be based, for example, on the loudest voice or the lowest common denominator, this can lead to mediocre decisions, a lack of innovation, and ultimately wasted resources.

The need of humans to be accepted by their groups makes this phenomenon extremely common in situations where disagreement might lead to social rejection. Since product development is usually a high-pressure situation, there are quite frequent opportunities for friction between team members in almost every step of the process, like interpreting research results, brainstorming ideas, prioritising, or reviewing design choices.

Why the group ends up with a mediocre choice is best understood from social dynamics, deadlines are tight, there is a lot of external pressure, there are dominant personalities in the team, dissent or disagreement isn’t encouraged, or the team is lacking diversity of thinking.

While designers are not always responsible for facilitating disagreements, since by its nature, design questions highlight internal problems, they often find themselves trying to figure out the group consensus.

Besides finding themselves in these situations, the nature of the design process also lends itself to facilitating discussions. Alternating convergent and divergent thinking is a key piece of handling groupthink. When there is space to analyse data and mature ideas outside of conversations (divergent thinking), it’ll be much easier to articulate new ideas or connect the dots in a discussion (convergent thinking).

The convergent — divergent thinking is not our only tool. Holding structured critiques helps in better discussions, not only in design, while advocating for user centricity helps understanding and accepting how data from outside of the immediate group can be helpful, for example, via user research.

As a side note, while a team’s decision-making processes are important to scrutinise, groupthink might start much earlier, when teams are formed. When designers hire other designers like them (focusing on similar skills or a similar background), it can lead unintentionally to a group that rarely looks for information from the outside and falls into the groupthink pattern. A purposeful hiring process is the first step to avoid this.

Fostering psychological safety is a tool for leaders to improve decisions. This makes giving a fair stage to every viewpoint part of the culture. There are a few things any leader can start doing:

• Leadership’s role is to be a role model for being open and respectful to opinions other than their own.
• Encourage dissent by not only providing a space, but explicitly asking for opposing ideas, as that makes it easier to articulate things that go against the majority opinion. Workshop plays like pre-mortems help solidify the point that failures need to be discussed.
• Blameless post-mortems, after something happens, focus on learning from mistakes.
• Celebrate constructive conflict by recognising how challenging ideas and having a healthy debate about options lead to better outcomes.
• Empower junior team members, since they might be reluctant to speak up and question more senior members.

However, the above only works if the team’s roles are set up to do this.

• Facilitation needs to be a clear role, to have someone who guides the discussion and makes sure everyone gets to talk. Rotating the facilitator (like having it on a schedule, or choosing randomly at the beginning of the session) helps work on problems with different discussion patterns.
• Devil’s advocate can be defined as a role tasked with challenging ideas or coming up with counterarguments.
• Cross-functional participants provide new perspectives and generally improve collaboration across teams.

These tactics won’t easily solve all problems with groupthink; besides being mindful when creating team practices and rituals, it’s also a continuous effort that needs leadership. However, open dialogue and diverse perspectives are powerful tools to create truly impactful products.

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🍪 Things to snack on

Groupthink by Wikipedia Wikipedia, as always, has a good overview of the topic, adding some history too, including the insight that the effect is not that well researched and understood, but has plenty of anecdotal evidence. There is also a longer section on prevention, with some really nice advice, like inviting experts from outside the group to get a different, out-group perspective. Diversity of all kinds is also instrumental in preventing groupthink. Individuals with varying backgrounds, thought, professional and life experiences etc. can offer unique perspectives and challenge assumptions.

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Groupthink: when collective decisions go wrong by Dr. Hannah Rose A few more general examples of how groupthink impacts our daily life, and strategies to avoid it (for example, assigning some group members to play devil’s advocate). As in work situations, in non-business contexts it also helps to put a little structure into decisions, like treating ideas as something transitional, but not the final solutions, until the other members can articulate concerns. Groupthink can be responsible for collective decisions that are irrational, risky or even illegal. In a group setting in which cohesion and a positive social opinion of the group are highly valued, members put a lot of energy into ensuring harmony within the group.

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Groupthink in UX Work by Samhita Tankala A nice summary of symptoms of groupthink in design contexts (collective rationalisation, illusion of unanimity, self-censorship, and direct pressure on dissenters), with some guidelines to prevent it in UX activities. The guidelines are grouped by various scenarios (like during ideation or in remote environments), which in itself also describes the common situation where groupthink can arise. Groups benefit from hearing diverse perspectives. For that to happen, group members have to feel comfortable in sharing their thoughts. We need to intentionally build awareness around groupthink, acknowledge that it occurs in group settings, and create a work environment that prevents it from happening.

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Common-Knowledge Effect: A Harmful Bias in Team Decision Making by Evan Sunwall While team decisions are generally better, the diversity of perspectives is often wasted, as team members are more comfortable discussing information they all already understand (the common-knowledge effect) and underutilise information only a few members know. One result of this phenomenon is groupthink. The article has a nice example scenario of how this happens, what biases are in play, and what some strategies to mitigate the effect. As counterintuitive as it seems, increasing the number of people involved in a difficult decision will likely decrease decision-making quality. Whatever unique knowledge individuals could offer to deliberations often goes unshared or disregarded.