Combatting groupthink in meetings and decisions

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“During an informal conversation recently, the new hire on our team raised a couple of important questions about a new project that we’re starting soon. As a colleague, I was glad that he raised the questions and I thought he would raise them when the whole team met, but he didn’t. I don’t know if he wasn’t comfortable speaking up because he’s new or because he didn’t want to disturb the flow of the meeting. Thoughts?”

Of course you were disappointed. From the conversation you had, maybe you were thinking you could avoid that thing called “groupthink” – which occurs often – the pressure to conform in a meeting and avoid disagreements or dissenting ideas, all to maintain harmony.

As you say, we don’t know if this person’s reluctance to speak up was about being new to the organization, or whether it was their “reading” of the social dynamic in the meeting that prompted them to stay away.

If “groupthink” isn’t addressed somehow, it can cause quite a bit of damage to a project and team members’ motivation and drive.

“Groupthink is why so many meetings feel like graveyards for good ideas. I’ve seen teams nod along to weak strategies just to avoid conflict, only to waste months executing on mediocrity,” says Patrice Williams Lindo, chief executive officer of Career Nomad, a firm specializing in career coaching and leadership development.

“The real cost? Missed innovation, burned-out top talent, and cultures that reward compliance over contribution.”

The term “groupthink” was coined by psychologist Irving Janis back in the 1970s who described it as a way of thinking that occurs when a group’s desire for unanimity and harmony overrides the critical evaluation of alternatives.

Decades later, Janis’ research remains relevant but sometimes manifests itself differently, says Michael Taylor, co-founder and chief executive officer of SchellingPoint, an applied research organization in New Jersey specializing in collaboration and group decision-making.

“Today’s leaders run project kick-offs, strategy off-sites, and virtual huddles faster than ever, but the cognitive trap remains the same. Beneath the appearance of unity lurk unspoken reservations, hidden risks, and partially formed ideas.”

“The result is the ‘false positive decision,’ a proposal that looks solid on the surface, yet collapses in implementation when suppressed doubts resurface as resistance, delay or scope creep.”

Several factors contribute to the “amplification” of groupthink in meetings, Taylor says, and they include: social pressure and status, where senior-level people unintentionally signal which views are ‘acceptable,’ causing quieter team members to censor themselves in meetings. Another is the “illusion of completeness,” or meeting agendas that rush from “problem to solution,” providing little room to discuss questions, assumptions or consequences.

Another factor involves concern about slowing the momentum of a project. “Teams equate speed with competence,” he says, and as a result, someone raising an objection in a meeting can feel like they are sabotaging the progress of a project, “even when it is the responsible move.”

Yet another factor involves the role of remote meetings or what Taylor calls “digital echo chambers.” “Remote meetings can worsen conformity with cameras off, and body language cues muted. Silence is often misinterpreted as agreement.”

The evidence of groupthink can come through in other ways, as SchellingPoint’s researchers discovered. “When we studied group’s flipcharts, digital whiteboard content and consultants’ pre-meeting interview notes, 50 to 90 unique opinions were expressed,” Taylor says. “However, when we use a 100 percent virtual anonymous dialogue, the number of expressed opinions doubles to 130 to 190.  Half of what they were thinking was not being said before.”

“Give people a safe channel to express themselves fully, including their tacit and negative thoughts, and the cognitive landscape widens dramatically,” he says. “More perspectives surface, blind spots shrink, and the final decision fits more closely to the ideal response required by the situation at hand.”

Safety doesn’t come easily, however. Many team members hold back and find it difficult to raise concerns and questions in meetings because it feels too risky, from a personal or professional standpoint, or both.

In her consulting practice, Williams Lindo says she tries to teach leaders to break the cycle so that dissent surfaces early in a meeting and constructive “pushback” gets normalized. She also assigns a ‘devil’s advocate role,” giving one person the job of “challenging the consensus, assumptions and ideas on the table.”

“This person isn’t being negative for the sake of it; they’re stress-testing proposals to uncover blind spots and reduce groupthink,” Williams Lindo says. “It helps teams practice constructive disagreement safely and signals that pushback is valued, not punished.”

For example, if a team is leaning toward a new product launch, the devil’s advocate might ask, “What’s the worst-case scenario if this fails? Which customer segments might reject this? “Are we underestimating competitors?”

“It shifts meetings from rubber-stamping ideas to evaluating them rigorously, while making dissent a normalized rotating responsibility rather than a risk to one person’s psychological safety.”

Another strategy for the end of a meeting that Taylor suggests is inviting the group to say whether a proposal is “inaccurate, incomplete or unfeasible.” “This surfaces the disagreement that would otherwise come out later as problems during implementation,” he says.

When it comes to group brainstorming, author and leadership consultant Gustavo Razzetti, author of an upcoming book on groupthink called “Forward Talk,” says it’s important not to let the “louder voices” take over. Use “silent brainstorming” instead.

“Have people write their ideas before anyone speaks. This prevents the first person from anchoring everyone else’s thinking – what psychologists call ‘influence bias.’ It also allows people time to explore, especially those who like to think before they talk.”

He urges leaders to protect the dissenting voices in the group. “These are the engineers who warn about flawed product features, the new members who see what others stopped seeing, or the contrarians who asks questions that everyone else avoids.”

Be sure to protect their voices instead of dismissing them as inexperienced or disruptive. These voices are your warning system. “They’re not being pessimistic but caring (and brave).  “Ask directly: Who has reservations? Then, listen genuinely.”

Unfortunately, groupthink often goes unnoticed until it’s too late, Razzetti writes in his newsletter.  “The illusion of swift alignment quickly turns into blame. When people realize that a decision is subpar, that the outcome didn’t match expectations, or that they weren’t on the same page as they thought, we start pointing fingers, looking for the person to blame for the mistake we all made as one.”

And now artificial intelligence is making groupthink even worse, Razzetti writes. “We’re all asking ChatGPT the same questions, getting the same responses, and bringing those identical insights to our meetings. AI is democratizing information but also homogenizing thinking.”

Citing research by SBS Swiss Business School researcher Michael Gerlich, Razzetti mentions concerns about the decline in critical thinking skills as a result of AI. “As we offload cognitive tasks to AI, we’re creating what researchers call the “black box” problem—We blindly trust AI recommendations without questioning or, worse, not understanding its thinking.”

This can create “devastating damage” when combined with social pressures, he writes.  For strategic decision-making and creative challenges, it’s important to use AI as a “thinking partner,” not a replacement.

AI tools like Claude.ai and ChatGPT have “logical, confident tones” that make them sound more authoritative than they might be. “Combat this by asking AI to play devil’s advocate to its own ideas – to find the pros and cons of ideas, present counterarguments, or identify its assumptions. Ask it to do that with your ideas, too.”

“AI can help you think better, but it shouldn’t think for you.”

Managers at Work is a monthly column exploring the issues and challenges facing managers. Contact Kathleen Driscoll with questions or comments by email at [email protected]