Don’t let groupthink hold you back

Imag­ine a group of investors who are plan­ning to open a gourmet restau­rant. They are hold­ing a meet­ing to choose a head chef from three final­ists. But, there’s a catch. What they don’t know is that there is an objec­tive­ly cor­rect choice. Whether they find the best pos­si­ble can­di­date and elim­i­nate the oth­er two depends on how well they man­age to resist the pres­sure of group­think.

The task was part of an exper­i­ment con­duct­ed by Dr Col­in Fish­er, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don School of Man­age­ment. The par­tic­i­pants of the exper­i­ment all received some shared infor­ma­tion. But to see the full pic­ture, they would have to bring their indi­vid­ual pieces of infor­ma­tion togeth­er to cre­ate a whole.

The way we make deci­sions as groups is fun­da­men­tal to fam­i­ly life, pol­i­cy­mak­ing and the way busi­ness­es oper­ate. When it comes to dis­rup­tive times, such as a pan­dem­ic, this mat­ters more than ever. It is help­ful to look at the psy­chol­o­gy of deci­sion-mak­ing, specif­i­cal­ly explor­ing the issue of group­think and how busi­ness­es over­come com­mon pit­falls.

How to reveal hidden information

“When infor­ma­tion is held by all or most group mem­bers, it is espe­cial­ly like­ly, as a sta­tis­ti­cal mat­ter, to be repeat­ed in group dis­cus­sions,” accord­ing to Cass Sun­stein and Reid Hastie in Wis­er: Get­ting Beyond Group­think to Make Groups Smarter. The oppo­site is true for insights that only one per­son or a few peo­ple have.

To coax group mem­bers into shar­ing infor­ma­tion, behav­iour­al sci­en­tists have come up with inter­ven­tions. In Fisher’s gourmet restau­rant exam­ple, the exper­i­ment leader makes a point of telling the group: ‘‘I’d like to give you some advice about how to con­duct your dis­cus­sion. Try to share as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble before com­ing to a deci­sion; hav­ing all the infor­ma­tion avail­able will help your team to make the best choice.”

Pri­or to the dis­cus­sion, 19 per cent of par­tic­i­pants made the right choice. When groups received this sim­ple reminder before their dis­cus­sion, they made high-qual­i­ty deci­sions in 42 per cent of the time. What Fish­er dis­cov­ered was that not only the inter­ven­tion itself mat­tered, but its tim­ing mat­tered too. If groups were told to share their infor­ma­tion either five min­utes or fif­teen min­utes into a half hour dis­cus­sion, they made high-qual­i­ty deci­sions 63 per cent of the time. It’s there­fore more effec­tive to remind groups to share infor­ma­tion once they’re in the process.

Is it worth appointing a devil’s advocate?

Group­think orig­i­nat­ed as an aca­d­e­m­ic con­cept in the ear­ly-1970s, when Yale psy­chol­o­gist Irv­ing Janis analysed the Bay of Pigs fias­co, an ill-con­ceived US inva­sion that aimed to over­throw Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba.

The prob­lem was that while Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy’s advis­ers had pri­vate doubts about the inva­sion, they failed to voice them. Why? Because of group­think. As Arthur Schlesinger, who was one of the advis­ers, put it: “Our meet­ings were tak­ing place in a curi­ous atmos­phere of assumed con­sen­sus.” There was strong pres­sure to con­form.

Try to share as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble before com­ing to a deci­sion; hav­ing all the infor­ma­tion avail­able will help your team to make thebest choice

To counter this ten­den­cy, boards can appoint a devil’s advo­cate, who is tasked with chal­leng­ing the group’s con­sen­sus. For larg­er groups of more than sev­en mem­bers, for exam­ple, some stud­ies rec­om­mend two devil’s advo­cates to avoid iso­la­tion.

But Fish­er says rather than appoint­ing a devil’s advo­cate, make it a “devil’s inquir­er”. Their aim should be to ask for infor­ma­tion that is counter to the pre­vail­ing view­point. That’s dif­fer­ent from advo­ca­cy, which tends to result in con­flict, where peo­ple focus on their opin­ions. “Where­as this inquiry tends to get peo­ple talk­ing about infor­ma­tion, rather than fur­ther entrench­ing the posi­tions they have,” he says.

What’s the best and worst scenario?

There’s anoth­er way of broad­en­ing the pool of infor­ma­tion. Gary Grif­fiths, co-founder of ven­ture cap­i­tal fund Wis­dom and a board mem­ber of his port­fo­lio com­pa­nies, rec­om­mends ask­ing: “What’s the worst that could hap­pen?” He says: “I was recent­ly engaged in a deci­sion regard­ing a law­suit for wrong­ful ter­mi­na­tion. The com­pa­ny had already spent sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars on legal fees, with sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand ahead of them before tri­al.”

To find the answer to the worst-case sce­nario, he did some basic research and dis­cov­ered the max­i­mum set­tle­ment for cas­es of this type was far less than the fore­cast legal costs. “So, the deci­sion was straight­for­ward: stop retain­ing coun­sel, let it go to tri­al and accept the set­tle­ment.”

The corol­lary is ask­ing: “What’s the best that could hap­pen?” And again, Grif­fiths rec­om­mends assess­ing the best pos­si­ble out­comes cou­pled with some “knee-jerk” sta­tis­tics, as opposed to an exhaus­tive analy­sis. “Often, it becomes clear that the best pos­si­ble out­come is not worth the time and effort,” he says.

The medium and the message

Deci­sions are cur­rent­ly being made on Zoom. Any­time we change media, it’s going to take a more proac­tive approach to make sure the deci­sion-mak­ing process is pro­duc­tive, cau­tions Fish­er. Stan­dards might slip, as Zoom par­tic­i­pants wor­ry about their hair, now they can see them­selves on cam­era, or board mem­bers jug­gle hav­ing a dis­cus­sion while mak­ing sure oth­ers haven’t frozen or acci­den­tal­ly mut­ed their mic.

“The cur­rent envi­ron­ment for most boards is com­plete­ly new, which means you now need to think care­ful­ly about exact­ly what data you’ll require to tack­le a prob­lem,” says Fiona Hathorn, chief exec­u­tive of Women on Boards UK. “So, to avoid group­think, I believe it is often best to start with an infor­ma­tion map to encour­age your prob­lem-solv­ing mind­set to enable teams to see dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives as opposed to sim­ply hear­ing the loud­est voice.”

She says boards are learn­ing how to use Zoom’s white-board fea­tures and under­stand the need to allow all par­tic­i­pants to take turns at speak­ing, some­thing boards with­out a good chair may find it dif­fi­cult to do. As COVID-19 con­tin­ues to change the way we work, boards have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to revamp their deci­sion-mak­ing process and ban­ish group­think once and for all. 

---