Reducing Group-Think

To keep a group collaborative.

Amplify’d from www.quora.com

Saul Fleischman, I am learning daily, but getting tire...

- Change up the agenda, design the agenda to draw out different viewpoints. Get new voices/ points-of-view engaged early in the discussion. - Acknowledge those who break out of the mold and think differently. - While maintaining your facilitator's balance, offer alternative ideas to get the group thinking differently. - Check yourself; make sure you're not the one encouraging group think unintentionally. - Get new blood in the group, recruit some new voices.

As a frequent facilitator some techniques I use generally revolve around mixing things up; - Call on those who don't often speak up, change the speaking order of the group so that followers lead and leaders can follow.

Your audience (whether in a room or on a website) needs to understand that synthesis derives from thesis and antithesis. The whole idea of dialectic is finding an answer through looking at an issue from different possible directions. The problem seems to be especially prominent on the internet, including on Quora. Once a comment has received a threshold of "likes" or "votes" they start piling onto each other. Hence, instead of making it easy to say "I agree", a critical discourse should be encouraged. Instead of branding disagreeing commentators as trolls, they be should lauded for nudging the group to the correct answer, which inevitably lies somewhere in the middle.

-Subgroups can work, though are generally unwieldy and unwelcome. -Including a variety of people from different backgrounds is difficult, especially if a group is already established -Suggesting a Devil's Advocate is generally met with opposition and disfavor I'm looking for a practical solution that is easily implementable and framed in such a way that it doesn't alienate or reduce the amicability of the suggester.

How can we reduce group-think? Read more at www.quora.com

 

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