Groupthink
It's time we take a look at how we go about reaching concensus in committees and groups. Groupthink is a mode of thinking which arises when concurrent-seeking behavior in a cohesive group becomes so dominant that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative aproaches. What are the symptoms?
1) Illusion of invulnerability
2) Belief in inherent morality of the group
3) Collective rationalization
4) Stereoptypes of out-groups
5) Self-censorship
6) Illusion of unanimity
7) Direct Pressure on Dissenters
8) Self-appointed mind-guards
Keep these eight points in mind the next time you attend a meeting.
posted by Bob Ziller @ 12:43 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Conditions:
Groupthink occurs when groups are highly cohesive and when they are under considerable pressure to make a quality decision.
Negative outcomes:
Some negative outcomes of groupthink include:
1. Examining few alternatives
2. Not being critical of each other's ideas
3. Not examining early alternatives
4. Not seeking expert opinion
5. Being highly selective in gathering information
6. Not having contingency plans
Symptoms Some symptoms of groupthink are:
1. Having an illusion of invulnerability
2. Rationalizing poor decisions
3. Believing in the group's morality
4. Sharing stereotypes which guide the decision
5. Exercising direct pressure on others
6. Not expressing your true feelings
7. Maintaining an illusion of unanimity
8. Using mindguards to protect the group from negative information
Solutions:
Some solutions include:
1. Using a policy-forming group which reports to the larger group
Having leaders remain impartial
2. Using different policy groups for different tasks
3. Dividing into groups and then discuss differences
4. Discussing within sub-groups and then report back
5. Using outside experts
6. Using a Devil's advocate to question all the group's ideas
7. Holding a "second-chance meeting" to offer one last opportunity to choose another course of action
Below is an interesting story about "groupthink" within the school board in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area. Within this story, you might some interesting similarities to what is taking place on the New Richmond school board.
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School Board member: achiever or a divider?
First-termer Mary Russell's actions have won her little support from the other members.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN, St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer
Published November 6, 2005
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One week in May, a spate of long, despairing messages appeared on a Pinellas Web site used by Pinellas educators:
"I am fighting the good fight, you guys. ... I'm just losing."
"Don't make me feel as though I'm all alone."
"Don't offer me as a sacrifice and wait until I come back wounded to help me out."
"Walk beside me."
Was it a high school student having a bad week? A teacher struggling with the principal?
Try a Pinellas School Board member, Mary L. Russell, who describes herself as stubborn, independent, caring and passionate about public education. Yet by any honest accounting - even her own - she is three years into a difficult first term and isolated on the seven-member board.
Russell, 34, was appealing to her supporters on Teachers United For the Future, or Tuff-Teach, a Web site she helped start for Pinellas teachers who feel disaffected with the school system. Her recent posts offered an unusually intimate sharing of her thoughts - risky territory for an elected official.
Russell says she is not concerned about appearances.
"For those who expect board members to smile and wave and tell you everything is okay all the time, they will always be disappointed in me," she said in one post. "I'm not a statesman or a figurehead."
She is, she says, a hard worker who challenges fellow board members to approach problems differently but is often shut down by "groupthink." The flip side, put bluntly, is that many of Russell's colleagues find her maddeningly difficult to deal with.
Last fall, a board majority grew weary of her acerbic statements and her knack for bumping the board off topic with lengthy asides. Russell complained that they ignored her ideas. But other board members said it was democracy at work: Some of her proposals had not resonated with a majority.
Several members confronted her at a board "retreat," a catharsis that left them promising to get along. But the board continues to have good and bad days.
An upset winner in the September 2002 election, Russell has been a full partner in setting the Pinellas school system on a fresh course.
Though initially skeptical of Clayton Wilcox, she voted to hire him as superintendent. A former teacher, she voted for the successful 2004 ballot measure that raised taxes to bring teacher salaries closer to the national average. At the same time, she joined other board members in pushing for a more thorough accounting of district finances.
Among her priorities is the well-being of teachers, a point she drives home each year by donating to nonprofit groups the difference of about $5,000 between her board pay and her old teacher's salary.
She also has pushed to put more of the district's money into classrooms and less in administration.
Like five of her fellow board members, she dislikes the state's heavy reliance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to hold schools accountable. But while others accept the state's testing program as a fact of life, Russell continues to rail against it. She says Pinellas is guilty of buying into the FCAT too much with practice tests.
Shortly after her election, Russell caused a stir by announcing her two sons would not take the mandatory test.
She has proved a ready advocate for constituents. It was Russell, for example, who recently asked Wilcox to get involved in a mold scare at Tarpon Springs Elementary when concerned parents lost faith in lower-level administrators. A more urgent district response followed.
"I think she's done very well," said Fred Roemer, an elementary teacher who helped form Tuff-Teach. "She takes the teacher's side and child's side, which is quite helpful. She's made some mistakes, but we all do."
Russell also has been at the center of some of the board's ugliest moments, and there have been many.
On a Tuesday afternoon in January, a testy exchange between Russell and board chairwoman Nancy Bostock fell so far beneath the dignity of a public board that Wilcox leaned forward and pleaded: "We have too many larger fish to fry, so let's stop. ... We can't go on like this. We have to find another way."
In September, the cross-fire hit Wilcox when board member Jane Gallucci suggested giving him a pay raise he never asked for. Russell responded with a biting speech that targeted Wilcox, at one point questioning how much money he really needed to support his family.
While some cheered Russell for putting Wilcox on the hot seat, many said she had crossed the line.
"Tell her to wake up and smell the coffee," Jose Heinert, the grandfather of two Pinellas schoolchildren, wrote in an e-mail to the board the next day. "And if she is in as nasty a mood for the next meeting she should just take a chill pill and stay home."
From her first weeks in office, Russell had veteran board members squirming by coming on strong with suggested changes, said veteran board member Carol Cook, who often tries to steer the panel toward compromise.
Russell's perspective is valuable because it challenges the board to make better decisions, Cook said. But she also remembers Russell, four years removed from a teaching internship when she took office, coming in with big ideas about how the district should deploy 14,000 employees and spend a $1.2-billion budget. Russell insisted she had the facts and had done the research to prove her points.
"But it's our right, as well as our responsibility, to see the same data and to come to different conclusions, and that's okay," Cook said. " ... Not everything needed to be thrown out and started all over."
Cook said Russell's approach tended to stoke insecurities among other board members, who felt they had done their homework, too, and had been working on the same issues well before Russell.
As a result, she said, some meetings moved from a competition of ideas to a contest to see who had worked harder, talked to more constituents or deserved the most credit.
Russell is by no means the sole source of the board's problems. That much was plain at a board retreat in Gainesville last month that Russell could not attend. While other Florida school boards at the retreat moved efficiently through exercises designed to build teamwork, the Pinellas contingent often got stuck or made up its own rules.
Other retreats have failed to improve the board's work habits. And, over time, the relationship between Russell and the board majority has worsened. At a retreat in August, she walked out twice.
Many recent votes have ended 5-2, with Russell and Janet Clark, another former teacher, on the short end. The majority is composed of Bostock, Cook, Gallucci, Linda Lerner and Mary Brown.
Russell says her No. 1 accomplishment is convincing the district's budget officials to produce a detailed financial report comparing Pinellas to other Florida counties.
"Every time we had a budget discussion, I asked the same questions over and over again," she said. "They were saying, "We're so impressive.' Okay, if we're doing so great, how do you know that and who do you compare yourself to?"
But in a measure of the current climate, other board members say Russell makes too much of her role in the report. They say they had been asking for the same budget information for years. Bostock credits Wilcox for finally pulling it together.
There is nothing in Russell's work record that would have foreshadowed the last three years. Her evaluations as a teacher and student-teacher were excellent. Supervisors said they would rehire her in a heartbeat. One called her "a team player."
Russell says she entered teaching after seeing the connection between crime and a lack of education while working as a records clerk for the Sheriff's Office. She graduated from the University of South Florida in 1998 and began working for Pinellas Schools as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher.
Later, in a move to spend more time with her sons, she took a part-time job teaching GED classes to drop-out mothers.
The bug to run for school board came in 2001, after the board approved a generous contract extension for then-superintendent Howard Hinesley. Teachers got a 2.7 percent pay increase that year.
As Russell tells it, she and other members of Tuff-Teach were angry and asked each other who wanted to run for the board. About eight teachers expressed interest, but Russell emerged as the one with the least to lose in salary. Seven months later, she beat incumbent Max Gessner by 8,000 votes. If her mood is no-nonsense at the board table, she said, it's because she is serious about the public's business.
"I'm nicer in person."
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