I have had the opportunity to work with many teams of excellent people. Over the years, I developed a way to measure the health of a company by examining how team members interacted with each other – most notably – how often do people voice their disagreements? I was amazed when I first realized there was a positive correlation between the amount of arguments you could hear between team members and the health of the company that we all worked for. This correlation, at least in my personal experience, held up across different teams, different companies, and different industries.

When I started as an engineer, it was common to hear, and participate in passionate discussions between the merits and faults of different approaches to various design problems we needed to solve. The lively discussions transcended seniority in that everyone passionately participated and everyone’s voice was heard. It was never a foregone conclusion that the grey beards were always right and that the “greenies” were always wrong. In fact, in plenty of cases, the junior members provided valuable contributions to the eventual trade-offs that the team did make.

In contrast, when the health of the company was suffering, the tone in the hallways changed. The number and intensity of the lively discussions would taper off. By the time that dissenting ideas stopped being offered, the company’s poor health was visible to everyone. It was especially during the several down times I have lived through that I learned to recognize the reemergence of lively discussions as a harbinger of better times.

It wasn’t until I had experienced a couple of these cycles that I learned about this concept called Group Think. From my observations, the most important aspect of Group Think is the suppression of contradictory ideas. It is during these times of low levels of disagreement that a group does not explore the problem space robustly enough. The team members are less willing to take the risk of disagreeing with the leadership. This increases the risks that the team will miss an important detail that leads to an expensive failure and fix process.

This relationship between open disagreements and lively discussions has been so strong during my career that the obvious presence or lack of such discussions plays a key role for me when I am considering joining a company or group. Does your team suffer from Group Think? Have you discovered other ways to measure the health of a group or company? Have you discovered ways to revive a group into the more “confrontational” means of working together? Or does your experience differ from mine as to the value of lively groups?