Imagine the moment of high stress, when your team has to make a Go/No-Go decision for a high-profile customer experience feature. This feature has the potential to create competitive advantage like never before. The dedicated team has worked tirelessly for the past 3 sprints. The feature is aesthetically designed and works beautifully except for one thing - there is one fatal bug happening intermittently. Is it a Go or a No Go? What will your team decide? Will they decide a Go because of time pressures and confirming with the illusionary optimists that everything will work fine or a No-Go as the fatal bug has the potential to negatively impact customer experience and company image.
A similar situation occurred in 1986 with the Space Shuttle Challenger program which was the first one for space tourism taking the first American civilian, a high school teacher, in space. The launch day temperature was too cold for the rocket booster system to function properly and could turn fatal. But NASA’s self-imposed schedule forced the team to give in to the Go decision leaving a learning case study for the world on groupthink. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon which occurs in team decision making when the desire for harmony in the group results in sub-optimal decisions (sometimes fatal). It is one of the most dangerous cognitive bias in organizations as seen with Nokia, Swissair etc.
I have come across two ways to avoid groupthink which are diversity and objectivity in decision making e.g. Steve Jobs designing Pixar office for exemplified collaboration or Rad Lab developing radar.
How else can groupthink be avoided?
