Hi Peter,
Peter H. Jones wrote:
...snip by your host...
> How can one ensure that group-think does not occur when a group
> participates in regular dialogue sessions? And is it essential to have a
> "devils advocate", or does the dialogue process itself have a built-in
> safeguard against group-think? I suspect the later but I'm not confident
> that I'm right.
Group-think is a way, a mechanism, to reduce tension, fear, angst in a
group: it is always difficult to speak out in a group, even among a group
of friends. And i define a group as everything bigger than two persons. So
i always expect a certain level of "group think", no problemo. As long as
the results of the team are the results they or their customer wants. I
just try to feel, listen, watch for the signs and counter-act when i think
it is necessary. Or just address the problem: "I can imagine that we feel
easy, open enough to talk about this?" or "i sense some tension regarding
this ..."
A short time ago i was in a group that did an session on authentic
communication, applying some rules to ensure better sharing of ideas. It
took hours. The members of the group enjoyed it, yet outsiders, seeing and
hearing us dialogueing labelled our group as a "special", closed and ...
"group think".
Another solution i use is starting a meeting with computerized brain
storming with an application i co-developed called Crealogic. Here
participants share their ideas through typing, reading and reacting, much
like e-mail, except, there is more than one question at a time, the
messages are only two lines of text each (but no limit on the number) and
they all appear on the screen. After we've printed the collections, we
start to talk about them. Computerized brainstorming, in my experience,
greatly reduces group think, because the tension is less, participants
react to the message and not to the messenger (the likely "cause" of the
tension, is that people might suspect they'll loose face when the message
is not understood, or not quite right, or incomplete, or whatever ..). In
the same way that this internet enabled dialogue is relatively tension
-free.
Think care,
Jan Lelie
--Drs J.C. Lelie CPIM (Jan) janlelie@pi.net (J.C. Lelie) @date@ @time@ LOGISENS - Sparring Partner in Logistical Development - + (31) 70 3243475 Fax: idem
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