How to overcome groupthink

Groupthink is the term used to describe poorly thought-through ideas and suboptimal decision making made by groups due to assumed consensus and institutionalised thinking.

Crucially, in the UK, it was seen as a decisive factor impacting the early response to Covid.

Organisations are grappling with huge challenges in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

• The difficulties with supply chain and raw material constraints

• Solving the backlog in healthcare treatments

• Shifts in consumer behaviours impacting hospitality, retail and consumer goods sectors

• Our expectations from digital experiences in education, retail and services have been reshaped by Covid

• Hybrid and flexible working demands impacting how we work

• The need for novel solutions to meet net zero sustainability goals

For each of these significant challenges, you need to watch out for Groupthink.

As innovation practitioners, we spend a lot of time getting people to step outside their fixed ways of thinking when tackling problems.

Here are four practical tips to help you avoid Groupthink as you grapple with these problem-solving challenges.

1 Diverse minds

At the centre of Groupthink is a collection of like-minded people.

As Einstein famously said, 'You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it'.

Any expert team gets fixed views of how things should and shouldn't work. Our brains have evolved to make mental shortcuts. With experience, you can look at a dilemma and instantly think, 'Ah, the solution is....'

However, when faced with disruptive and unexpected challenges, you need to inject fresh viewpoints from people who have different backgrounds and expertise. They're essential to give you the necessary jolt to generate unusual insights and ideas.

These might be people within your organisation known for their creativity, folks from other teams and functions, or external partners and collaborators. Include design thinkers, i.e. people-centred innovators, and technical experts who understand what can / cannot be achieved in the desired timeframe.

So the first step is to proactively seek out and include diverse minds in your problem-solving challenge. Clashing these varied perspectives will help avoid Groupthink.

Tough challenges require people from diverse backgrounds and expertise to solve them

2 Lateral thinking and creativity

Creativity can be easily dismissed when solving a decisive challenge because surely it requires logic, analytics, expertise, and data. Of course, why wouldn't it? All the above are necessary to understand the different aspects of your problem.

Yet, without creative problem solving, you'll come up with the obvious incremental solutions driven by Groupthink that will scratch the surface of the problem.

De Bono coined the term lateral thinking, which addressed Einstein's point: you need a new perspective when solving a complex problem.

At the heart of lateral thinking is the notion of provocations, deliberately used to help people reframe the puzzle they are solving by injecting inspiration and stimulus from unexpected sources

So, build time for provocation exercises into the rhythm of your project.

The watch-out is that these become random brainstorming sessions — which often aren't productive, poorly run by inexperienced facilitators and get bad press. To avoid this provocations need to be directed at a problem or opportunity.

Use your analysis to identify where to focus your efforts. Then direct your lateral thinking exercises at these, using well-thought-through related examples, exercises and stimuli to provoke discussions around 'What if we were to..?', 'How might we apply that approach to our problem?'

Use provocations to help solve your puzzle

3 The problem you need to solve is probably not what you envisaged

More often, when we embark on a project, the team have a view on their strategy. However, when the user insights have been interrogated, there comes an 'AHA' moment, when people say, 'I didn't realise, but the problem we actually need to solve is....!'

Generally, there are two reasons for this.

• Firstly, at the outset, a problem statement is often written before you have any valuable insights, so it is heavily influenced by Groupthink and opinions as to where the solution lies.

• Secondly, groups can easily fall into the trap of focusing on generalisations and generic truths rather than deep insight into users' needs.

For instance, if we had a pound for every time we hear that customers want greater convenience, faster service, or they just need to be more educated about how the product works for the idea to take off, we wouldn't need to work again! The reality is these are simplifications that lack deep insight around peoples’ true needs.

So what's the solution?

Take a human-centred approach

Map out your problem, process or user journey. Talk to users at each critical step to understand what they want to achieve at that moment and dig into their frustrations and unresolved needs. For instance, if you are tackling a process or systems issue, talk to the people at the sharp end of customer service, the IT teams who have designed the software interactions, the admin staff dealing with after sales customer queries, and finally, the end-user or customer.

Capture these people-centred insights to identify the jobs to be done: springboards for ideas and solutions.

The result: you'll have a user-centred approach to problem-solving that mitigates against Groupthink.

Involve your target users to help co-create the solution

4 Get users to help you design the solution.

You will develop ideas with greater impact if you involve your target users to co-design the solution.

At each stage of the design process, they can point out flaws in your thinking “Hey, it’s not going to work if you do that, but if you do this……’

This approach helps adjust and fine-tune your emerging ideas faster and also helps to spot unexpected barriers that you need to fix.

Crucially, you will spot what's important—and what's not important—to the end-users, which helps accelerate the delivery of the solution as you won’t waste time fixing problems that don’t need fixing.

Co-creation works equally well for service, process and supply chain problems.

The benefit: you avoid internal Groupthink by putting users and their needs at the centre of the response.

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