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You know a room is about to make a bad decision when everyone starts smiling too much. Group decision making is one of those office phenomenon that's half magic trick, half menace. I have spent time sitting in boardrooms from Parramatta to Perth and I can tell you that groups can either produce intelligent, creative results or stampede straight into a dumpster fire, sometimes within the same meeting. The psychology of that swing is more important than most managers think. Get it right and you accelerate innovation; get it wrong and you'll pay with squandered projects, a beaten up reputation and the kind of morale that evaporates faster than a summer shower in Melbourne.

There's nothing mystical about why groups often perform poorly. It's predictable human behaviour. There's conformity, obedience to apparent authority, social identity pressures and a whole host of cognitive shortcuts, heuristics and biases, that subtly bend judgment. These forces, paradoxically, can both bond teams together and splinter their capacity to reason.

Conformity looks harmless. The people want to be accepted, they crave palatability; they long for this meeting to come to an end so that they can return home. Trouble is, the drive to belong can extinguish scepticism. Solomon Asch's classic experiments remind us that people will sometimes follow group opinion when it is unanimous and expressed with certainty, even when they know the facts better than the group does. Of the subjects, Asch observed that a majority, around 75%, of them did conform on at least one trial and average conformity in critical trials hovered at approximately 37%. That's not a fringe outcome. It's a structural vulnerability when you have people as part of groups.

And then there is obedience, Milgram's disturbing discovery that everyday people will heed authority to destructive extremes. In the lab, approximately 65% of participants went to the highest voltage when ordered by an experimenter. That's an extraordinary example, but it illustrates a very real issue: when leaders or even perceived experts signal direction, teams tend to follow suit without critically examining the decision.

That syndrome, when coherence and harmony matter more than critical judgment, we label groupthink. The symptoms are textbook: invulnerability, collective rationalisation, suppression of dissent and an inclination to stereotype out group critics. We have seen how traditional Organisations who could not manage to cope with this pressure have crumbled under the impossible <a href="https://paramounttraining.com.au/training/decision-making-training/">decision making</a> of what to focus on. It's not just that the risk is theoretical; it's procedural. A group that doesn't invite challenge will also be delightfully mistaken.

These tendencies are multiplied, or else balked, by the quality of the leadership. An authoritarian ruler may make faster decisions and act decisively in a crisis. That's useful. But far too frequently authoritarianism muzzles the view that would have saved the Organisation from embarrassment, or worse. On the other hand, a democratic process encourages ideas, enhances ownership and generally produces higher quality decisions. It's also slower. My view? Both styles are tools. The trouble is in pretending that your tool is a philosophy. Match your style to the problem at hand.

Transactional leaders represent the perfect compromise here. They express a mission that is deeper than self and which ennobles what people do, but they also reward intellectual courage. That being said, transformational leadership is not an elixir to ill group processes. You still need contrarian positions that force evaluation: devil's advocates, pre mortems, red team exercises. Rhetoric which inspires, but isn't challenged by disciplined action, is theatre.

Diversity matters, and not just for show. Teams get out of the echo chamber when they bring genuinely different backgrounds, experiences and mental models to a problem. Research by McKinsey from 2020, called "Diversity wins: How inclusion matters," found a strong correlation between diversity and performance: Companies with more gender and ethnic diversity are more likely to outperform their peers. And that's not a moralistic argument; it's practical. The more perspectives, the more likely to spot unintended consequences, and unexpected solutions.

But diversity by itself doesn't solve everything. You can have a numerically diverse room and still fall into groupthink if the culture values harmony above argument. The aim is not adversarial conflict that burns a relationship to the ground but constructive friction and robust debate that leaves the people in the room respectful of one another.

Cognitive biases are the hidden channels dragging groups off course. Teams in the grip of confirmation bias seek out data that supports the favoured option and neglect evidence to the contrary. Anchoring focuses attention on initial numbers, put a budget figure on the table and everything else gets yanked toward it. The availability heuristic causes recent, colourful events to dwarf statistical likelihood, after a headline making data breach, for example, a team might overemphasise certain security fixes while failing to attend to equally important but less visible risks.

These biases are human. They're not moral failures. They're heuristics engineered to help our ancestors survive and aren't always well suited for 21st century complexity. We control them by developing processes that work against them. Real, if unsexy, steps that get stuff done (yes, they're simple; no, many people don't actually do them):

Separate idea generation from evaluation. Allow yourself to brainstorm, and then learn when it's time to be critical. This will decrease on the fly social pressure.
Use anonymous input and voting for sensitive conversations. When status recedes, ideas stand or fall on their merits.
Name a rotating devil's advocate. Formalise dissent. Put it in the job.
Do pre mortems. Ask, "Why did this fail?" before you fall into the trap, compels teams to seek ways in which things can fail that they would otherwise overlook.
Have groups of more than three break out into pairs or triads for initial discussion, and then return. Smaller groups lower the pressure of conformity and increase participation.
Request a dissenting opinion in writing. If anyone disagrees, they have to write a quick note explaining why. It's a step toward the man, not away from him.
Time box decision steps and establish decision rules, who decides what, by when and based on which criteria? Clarity helps.

I have a few other counterintuitive views: I actually prefer to see structured debate than unfiltered "creative" brainstorming. So many organisations practise open ended jam sessions where everyone makes it up as they go along. People call it creativity. Most of the time, it's just noise, and dominated by whichever voice is loudest. Structure is not the enemy of creativity; it guards the time and attention that creative ideas need to survive long enough to come into being.

You'll rub up against resistance to these ideas. Some will say you are squelching spontaneity. Others will tell you that building committees and checklists will kill momentum. Those are fair objections. Momentum matters. But momentum without guardrails is just speed in the wrong direction. You can be quick and ruthless. They're not mutually exclusive; you don't have to get rid of one to have the other.

Social Identity's role is more subtle than most leaders assume. When colleagues begin viewing one another as primarily members of a common tribe, they start to interpret dissent as "unloyal." That's especially combative in organisations with pretty strong subcultures, start ups, professional services, well aligned project teams. The solution is cultural work: celebrate disagreement, reward speaking out, normalise respectful challenge. Cohesion is a good thing; the question of course, is how to keep