Two conversations have stayed with me recently.

One involved a discussion with a Vice President in an organisation of around 50,000 employees across 90 countries. With decisions potentially affecting operations across the globe, I wanted to know how they tested the robustness of their decision-making process.

The other was with the board and executive team of a highly regulated, high-risk advocacy and service delivery organisation. I asked how they test whether the discussions and decisions made in their meetings are serving the organisation — and those it serves — to the highest degree.

Both responses amounted to much the same thing:

“We’re experienced and intelligent people. We challenge our own thinking in every meeting.”

And there’s the assumption worth questioning.

Could your leaders be falling into groupthink?

In 1972, American psychologist Irving Janis identified a phenomenon he called groupthink. His research challenged the assumption that putting experienced, intelligent people around a table necessarily leads to sound decisions.

More than fifty years later, boards and executive teams still face the same risk: familiarity, routine and comfort reinforce assumptions and entrench established practices, making it increasingly difficult to recognise what’s hiding in plain sight.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• Nobody objected, so the matter was closed.
• We’ve been doing it this way for years. There’s a reason for that.
• We know how to manage the personalities around the table.
• There’s no point raising it. The decision’s already been made.
• We debated it for hours. We’ve covered everything.
• Yes, I agree. (Even though I have reservations.)

The danger isn’t that your board or executive team lacks the courage to have difficult conversations. It’s that everyone has become comfortable avoiding the ones that might make someone around the table uncomfortable.

What can’t you see from inside a room?

A seasoned and experienced finance manager can look at a financial statement and see the bigger picture, where I just see a bottom line I don’t necessarily like.

For all of us, experience and expertise allow us to recognise patterns that aren’t obvious to people whose expertise lies elsewhere.

That same finance manager might see team behaviour they don’t like, while I see the bigger picture that’s driving it.

Those patterns are everywhere in the workplace — how people communicate, make decisions, manage disagreements, follow unwritten rules and respond to problems.

And when you’re part of those everyday interactions, patterns that should stand out usually become so familiar they blend into the wallpaper.

It’s when those blind spots find their way into executive, board and team meetings that they eat away at the quality of our decisions.

You know your business best

Experienced people usually have the expertise, insider knowledge and ability to have difficult conversations needed to make sound decisions.

But knowing your business inside out and being able to argue a position convincingly aren’t the same as critically examining how you arrived at it.

Janis observed that groups remained loyal to decisions they’d already made, even when those decisions were producing poor results.

Group dynamics can protect the status quo at the expense of critical thinking.

The value of challenging your thinking isn’t in confirming what you believe you already know. It’s in discovering what you haven’t considered before you make the commitment.