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A New Perspective on Groupthink

Why should you have group thinking in your workplace?


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Sila Cakmak

3 years ago | 4 min read

It is the human friction that makes the sparks (Jonah Lehrer).

In our contemporary world, organizations such as companies or governments seek to try to develop themselves and do the best that they can do. Many well-known companies such as Apple, known through a single person like a symbol who is the founder of this company or working as a successful CEO in there.

Also, governments are usually known through the people who have the highest position. That’s why some people claim that working individuals increase productivity because they are familiar with a single person.

However, there is something which we always forget: They are not alone as we think, they work with plenty of people. That’s why, working as a team is the best thing for institutions, especially for creating ideas, making decisions, and solving problems.

Firstly, when people work as a team, they can produce more and better ideas to develop those institutions. Nowadays, institutions prefer to utilize a technique which is called brainstorming.

There are lots of ways to utilize brainstorming with small modification but the main purpose is to create ideas with a team. Although Susan Cain, who is the writer of New Groupthink, claims that brainstorming is the worst thing to do to produce ideas, many companies utilize brainstorming.

People can create more effective ideas if they work together and criticize each other. What I mean by that is if people find an idea and debate on it, they tend to produce more and better ideas because they come together with different perspectives and different ways of thinking about a topic.

Also, people only criticize each other when they in a group, criticizing your own is not as possible as in a group.

Criticism and debate are significant for creating ideas because when someone criticizes you, you may try to modify or change something and find better ideas.

According to Nemeth, a professor of psychology “debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive” (Lehrer).

When you look at a famous technology company, these companies try to produce more complex and fashionable products to sell but to do this they have to detect the missing parts of the ideas and chose the best one.

This is not a process that a person handles it. Besides, when we consider governments and parliaments they are chosen from different ideas and opinions.

That’s why, when they want to make innovation or regulation in a country, they produce numerous ideas and when they do this they take advantage of different people in society that they represent. Also, they argue about their opinions, and sometimes these ideas change, modify, or even stop.

However, if it would be one person in all of this process or they wouldn’t work together, there would be nobody to notice the missing or wrong part of an idea.

Secondly, institutions take advantage of group work in order to make decisions. Advocates of solitude argue that working as a team may damage making decisions because this causes pressure on you or you do not want to share your opinion if it is different than group members.

Irving Janis, writer of “Groupthink: Why so many miscalculations” text states that groups have the capability to make better decisions than any individual who works alone.

One reason for this is that people with different knowledge and experience can make better decisions. For instance, we usually know presidents of a country pretend that he or she gives all decisions in that country. However, in deep, there are lots of ministers that help governments to make decisions.

To be specific, family and women ministers are responsible for protecting women and children. Besides, if children are abused or murdered women in a country they have to make decisions and protect them.

Therefore, they work with psychologists, doctors, sociologists, and lawyers. This is the only way to make healthy decisions. However, when these organizations do not collaborate with each other they cannot become a part of a solution.

Another essential point is miscalculation possibilities. Some people think that one person with lots of power is the best way of making decisions and development. However, I strongly disagree with that. The reason is if a person has such power, who monitors her or him, nobody, so if there will be the wrong choice by that person how institutions can prevent it.

Take Away Points

Nowadays we can easily see lots of people made the wrong decisions. Even in daily decisions, we can easily choose the wrong thing, so especially for institutions, the only person cannot handle making decisions on their own. There have to be people who work together and monitor each other. Otherwise, mistakes will be invisible because as we know to err is human.

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Sila Cakmak

I am a person who is enthusiastic about psychology, art, and science; and likes to learn something new every day. Let's meet with you https://medium.com/@silacakmak


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