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Beware the Groupthink Syndrome (Part 1)

by Bruce Watson, Principal & Proprietor, HEADS TOGETHER

I recently had time to reflect on my 20 or so years of experience working on boards of management and boards of governance. In fact, Article 1 in this edition of Headway came to me at the time I was trying to “drill down” in detail in my own mind for what ultimately makes boards ineffective – past their prime – causing frustration for new comers in particular and the loss of mind broadening experiences and opportunities for the future overall.

I remember being verbally attacked after a board meeting for having the temerity to suggest that a board consider meeting less often and letting the management get on with their jobs – besides the task of producing mountains of reports every month to meet the board meeting deadlines.  No sooner had one cycle of reporting finished when the next had to be started. In the case of this board, the nature of the business clearly required a longer time period between meetings – this may not be the case for all boards.  It said a lot that the person concerned waited until after the meeting, in the car park, to apparently try and put me in my place.  As a matter of interest, I said that I would not discuss the issue in such circumstances and that the place for discussion and debate, rather than verbal abuse, was within the board meetings.

On another occasion, I pressed for the same board to look at its own performance. Great efforts had been made to review the performance of the chief executive but at least half the board members were just so certain of their own self importance and expertise that they seemed to feel immune from the need for scrutiny. They could not see any point in looking at the big picture and how things might be improved, how things had been changing around them and to be blunt, how they they had been left behind in their understanding of board processes and even themselves.  Eventually, a trial process of board review did take place, with much grumbling from the long-serving stalwarts.

The list of negative experiences can be long – agenda items and papers buried so they are never discussed, new ideas viewed as academic or quirky ("we've been going all right, why should we change now?"), self-congratulatory boards and board members lost in a time warp and their own “good works”, insufficient risk management, laziness in keeping abreast of current trends – and so on.  I’m sure that everyone has stories of their frustrating experiences with committees and boards. Despite this, they have a vital role to play and when operating effectively the “heads together” approach to planning, researching and problem solving can be remarkable. But it seems to me that it is easy to fall in line for the sake of expediency or avoiding a possible argument – I think this is particularly the case where the board members are personal friends and there is insufficient openness to external prodding to widen discussion and debate. When things go wrong we rarely challenge our friends.

In 1972, American social psychologist  Irving Janis described a syndrome he called “Groupthink”. There were themes of more concern for retaining the approval of the fellow members of the group, or one board member in particular, than coming up with good solutions to the tasks at hand. Also the observation of a pattern of concurrence-seeking behaviour observed by Janis in other face-to-face groups , particularly where a “we-feeling” of solidarity is running high. Janis expanded on the knowledge of Groupthink in 1982 through further studies of policy decisions and fiascos. In his view there are three main types of symptoms:

Type I: Overestimations of the group – its power and morality

1. An illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all the members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages taking extreme risks.

2. An unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.

Type II: Close-mindedness

3. Collective efforts to rationalise in order to discount warnings or other information that might lead the members to reconsider their assumptions before they commit themselves to their past policy decisions.

4. Stereotyped views of enemy leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate, or as too weak and stupid to counter whatever risky attempts are made to defeat their purposes.

Type III: Pressures toward uniformity

5. Self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member’s inclination to minimise to themselves the importance of their doubts and counterarguments.

6. A shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgements conforming to the majority view (partly resulting from self censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent).

7. Direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that this type of dissent is contrary to what is expected of all loyal members.

8. The emergence of self-appointed mind guards – members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.

Defective decision making

When a group displays most of these symptoms the likelihood is that the group will also display the symptoms of defective decision making: 1. incomplete survey of alternatives, 2. incomplete survey of objectives, 3. failure to examine risks of preferred choice, 4. failure to reappraise initially rejected alternatives, 5. poor information search, 6. selective bias in processing information at hand, 7. failure to work out contingency plans.

Structural faults in organisations

Groupthink is most likely to occur where structural features and situational circumstances of a group or organisation make it easy for the symptoms to become dominant. In addition to group cohesiveness, the chances of Groupthink are increased in relation to the following structural faults of organisations:

1. The cohesive decision-making group is insulated from the judgements of qualified associates within the organisation who, as “outsiders,” are not permitted to know about the new policies under discussion until after a final decision has been made.

2. From the outset of the cohesive group’s deliberations, the leader does not feel constrained by any organisational tradition to avoid pushing for his own preferred policies and, instead, to encourage open, unbiased enquiry into available alternatives.

3. The organisation to which the cohesive decision-making group is responsible does not have previously established norms requiring the members to adopt methodical procedures of information search and appraisal.

4. Lack of disparity in social background and ideology among the members of the cohesive group makes it easier for them to concur on whatever proposals are put forward by the leader.

Counteracting Groupthink - is it possible?

In the next edition of Headway, Janis’s prescriptions for counteracting Groupthink and their possible side effects will be considered.

(This article includes extracts from Groupthink by Irving L. Janis, 2^nd Edition,  Houghton Mifflin, 1982)

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Dr. Bruce D Watson,

Principal and Proprietor,

HEADS TOGETHER

February 2005

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