Episode 12 - Groupthink

The bane of any introvert's work existence: groupthink.

Managers may imagine it’s cozy and convenient . . . but it can be catastrophic.

Key thoughts:
✔️ Dag pushed against groupthink and cult-like tactics.
✔️ There has to be a "solution" better than "everyone takes the talking stick during the meeting." 😖
✔️ We can learn things even when we disagree with each other.

Tune in, breathe deep, and join the quiet resistance.

📚 Grab your copy of Decoding the Unicorn – the award-winning biography of Dag Hammarskjöld: https://a.co/d/2PlTHHL

✨ Subscribe for more insights into diplomacy, leadership, and the art of inner strength.

#Introverts #Groupthink #DagHammarskjöld #DTUPodcast #QuietLeadership #HSP #UNHistory #DecodingTheUnicorn 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Groupthink, introverts, corporate America, echo chamber, preventive diplomacy, psychological safety, marginalized groups, peer pressure, creativity, conformity, leadership, workplace culture, communication, quiet voices, modern workplace.

Welcome to the decoding the unicorn podcast. Here's your host. Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 12 of decoding the unicorn the podcast in today's episode, I want to talk about group think. This topic came up at least loosely in last week's special episode with my guest Madeline Schwarz generally, we spoke about what it's like to be introverted while working. Corporate America is not exactly friendly to introverts and HSPs. Some improvements have been made sure, but not nearly enough. And one danger of allowing the loudest extroverts in the room to command every meeting or every brainstorming session is that it turns into an echo chamber and people give themselves over to groupthink. This is a topic I actually cover in my book, decoding the unicorn, a new look at Dag hammerschol. Dag tried to avoid groupthink and cult like tactics as much as possible, and it's something that managers and leaders absolutely could take a lesson from today. If you've ever been introverted while working, if you're an HSP or maybe just somebody with general common sense that doesn't want to sit in an echo chamber every day. This episode is for you. 

Are you someone who feels everything, who hears the noise of the world and quietly steps back, not because you don't care, but because you care deeply? Decoding the unicorn isn't just a biography, it's a love letter to the quiet visionaries, to the introverts, the empaths, the highly sensitive leaders who carry more than anyone knows. If you've ever felt too tender for this world, read the story of a man who changed it, decoding the unicorn, available on amazon.com.

To start out this episode, I want to read a brief passage from decoding the unicorn. This is under the tab decoding dag peace, not grandstanding in 1955 dag amended his strategy of quiet diplomacy to include preventive diplomacy, which is precisely as it sounds, a framework to prevent problems from escalating into full scale crises. When dag gave his annual report to the UN's General Assembly, he argued that the Security Council should be briefed via regular private meetings on any issues that might impact world security in the event that a problem intensified, the groundwork would already exist and there wouldn't be an element of surprise. Dag also envisioned better overall cooperation between the UN member nations a spirit of we're all in this together. And the proposal was deemed preventive diplomacy. At the same time, Dag was concerned that the proliferation and intrusiveness of the media presented a temptation for those who wanted to showboat rather than focus on the nuts and bolts of diplomatic work. Just as dag was practicing psychological safety before anyone knew the term as such, he was also steering away from group think. Most, if not all, introverts have been in situations where the person with the loudest volume, rather than the best ideas, trampled over everyone else. Many minorities and members of marginalized groups have experienced discrimination in groupthink scenarios, even so, corporate America loves its huddle ups, its group check ins, its touch bases and it's absurd round robin interviews where a job seeker is pelted with inane questions by a panel in quiet Susan Cain wisely observes that if personal space is vital to creativity, so is freedom from peer pressure. She tells the story of Alex Osborne, an author who wrote about brainstorming. Osborne reasoned that even in a group setting, people would express more creativity and produce better ideas if they didn't feel pressured to conform. Dag homed in on this when he described how leaders might be tempted to put on a show for the press rather than doing what was right in a particular situation. Moreover, that person might be locked into a rigid position he or she committed to in public and feel unable to take a different stance later, for fear of judgment or media haranguing. This dynamic can also refer to Orthodoxy and acquiescence, ie, a person in the room with a different and possibly better idea may be afraid to voice it. If the group has arrived at a consensus, authentic or forced, and decided the issue is settled, I'm just sitting here revisiting this like, girl, you need to preach. And I'm like, Well, I did. Thank you me. Thank you me. Thank you Dag. I. I can recall so many situations that were like this whenever Madeline and I sat down to record the episode that premiered last week, there were so many times when I was on the other end of that call, like, yep, been there, done that. Know how that feels. So many people who are introverts or HSPs have horror stories from what they've experienced in the work world with groupthink in particular, I saw this so many times. There was a place that I worked and I'm going to be necessarily vague and necessarily careful here it is what it is. We would have those weekly huddle ups, and I hated them. I never felt like anything significant got accomplished. And even more to the point those huddle UPS went on way, way longer than they had to. There was another place where, when I was still freelancing in HR and staffing work, there was a place that had daily huddle ups. They wanted to do the the every day at 9am do a stand up routine, but not the good kind of stand up like stand up comedy. They would just call it the 9am stand up. And it was like, ain't nobody wanting to stand up here. Okay, let's just be real. And there were a number of times that, because this was after the pandemic, and so everything was being done virtually, but we would have to get on even though I was a freelancer and I'm like, I'm supposed to be immune to this. I'm supposed to be excused from this nonsense and just be out doing work on my own. I later made that a stipulate, a stipulation, whenever I had a scope of work, it's like I'm not doing the daily stand ups, the huddle ups, the weekly check ins, no you can miss me with that. If it's a problem, don't hire me. Okay. Anyway, we would have this daily 9am stand up and it was so inane. It just really was nothing got accomplished. It absolutely could have been an email every single time, without exception. There was never a time that we had one of those stand ups at 9am that it could not have been an email or even a text message. Hell. There were times that we would get on one of those things, and the man who had called those meetings would simply say, I don't really have anything today. I just thought maybe some of you might have anything. So we would go around person to person. Do you have anything new? No, how about you? Do you have an update? No, what about you? Do you have a contribution today? No, I really don't. Okay, then we'll just break what was the necessity of wasting that time? And the more extroverted members of our population might say, well, all you were out was a few minutes to say hi. Is it really that bad? And I'm sort of sitting here as an introvert and an HSP, and somebody who I don't know values freedom and autonomy, and I'm like, Yeah, it kind of is that bad? It is because it's pointless. It doesn't move the ball down the court. You're not advancing anything. You're just wasting everybody's time. Here's another component of group think and these asinine performance pieces, because that's what it is. It's about performance. I have warned about this across platforms for years, because I was in HR staffing and recruiting work for about 15 years before I started living fully as a creative and saying, oh my god, please just get a dog paddle my way out of that world. And I saw this over and over again, the stock and trade of corporate America, compliance, obedience, conformity, control, even these companies who say that they want a maverick, they say that they want somebody that's going to wake it up, shake it up, and do things different. Really. Long pause there, on purpose, really, no, they don't 99.99999% of the time they don't want the maverick. They don't want somebody that's going to wake it up and shake it up. They want somebody to tell them what they want to hear and to keep their systems in place. They want somebody that's going to uphold the system. A little while back, I got into beau gelard book simulacra. That was a bit of a head trip. If I'm being honest, I'm sitting there going, Dag would be able to read this, you know, in its native French, and understand every word perfectly. I'm sitting there like, Okay, I've got to read every paragraph about four times to really get it to sink in. But there is this passage about the idea of safe rebels, having people who ostensibly appear to be at. Avant garde. They appear to be mavericks and wild cards, but they're really not. They exist to uphold the system. They give the illusion of rebellion. They give the illusion of difference. But at the end, it's really like that cartoon where the cow is standing in front of the slaughterhouse, and it's like you can go in on the left side, or you can go in on the right side, but all roads lead to Rome, all roads lead to your demise. That's really what it boils down to. Now, I know on a podcast dedicated to DAG, I don't want to give myself over to cynicism or pessimism, and I don't mean to do that here. What I really want to highlight is that these exercises of conformity and group think and turning the office into an echo chamber are dangerous, and it's time. It's past time to cut that nonsense out. There may be situations where somebody says, I don't want the talking stick. You know, I wouldn't. So let's say that there's a situation of allow somebody else to lead the meeting. Well, I kind of feel like that should be voluntary, because in my situation, if somebody's like, you have the talking stick today, you didn't ask for it. You may not want it, but we're going to put you on the spot and force you to do it. That's not something that I respond well to. I want to have the opportunity to say yes or no. I want to be able to give consent. I don't want somebody just saying you're going to lead this meeting today, because that's what we've decided. Oh, wait a minute, I might not be in the space to do that today. I might not be feeling well. I might have a lot on my mind. I might not want to be jazz hands in front of the whole group today, but there does have to be some way to include quieter voices, people like myself who want to have the opportunity to think, to formulate a response. I can do extemporaneous speaking. I'm not other than the portion I read from my book. I'm not up here with some script in front of me like, Well, okay, I've already prepared my remarks, and there's a teleprompter somewhere in the distance. I'm ad libbing this. I'm telling you from the heart what I think. So it's not that I'm incapable of extemporaneous speaking. It's that when you're talking about a work meeting in front of your peers. I want to have enough time and ability to formulate my thoughts, because I don't want to waste my time and I don't want to waste theirs. It's really like a personal and a professional courtesy in my mind, to be able to prepare my thoughts. So I don't necessarily know that we'll just go around the room and hand everybody a Talking Stick is is the solution to that problem. But there does have to be a way to ensure that your quiet voice, voices and people that have been marginalized are heard. It's not just a matter of, oh, this person is different. This person is is weird, this person is eccentric. This person is too quiet, right? Because so so often we hear that you're too quiet. This came up a lot in last week's episode, you're too quiet, you need to speak up more. And it's like but yet nobody tells the extroverts in the room to shut up. Nobody tells them it's time for you to put the talking stick down. It's time for somebody else to have the floor. Do you think you could sit down and pipe down for a minute, living as a creative I will tell you, I do not miss huddle up, stand ups, check ins, any of that, and I don't miss the group think, because in my situation, I'm able to seek out opinions that I value, and sometimes that goes well, and sometimes it doesn't. I, you know, I'll be vulnerable here. I have a book that's in process. It's one of the books that I'll publish under a pen name, because it's not anything that connects to my non fiction work about Dag, and I'm protective about all of that. I like to do my creative fiction things in a different arena, and I had a beta reader take a look at it because it had already been through some editing. And I'm like, before I go into the proofreading stage, I really want to have a beta reader look at this a little bit early and just give me their thoughts. And this beta reader ripped me up. And I'm like, you know, I was very clear with you that this story is not dragons and R rated material. It's not Game of Thrones, but somehow that's still what she expected. So there was really a gap in communication. I felt like, Cool Hand Luke: What we have here is failure to communicate. I thought I was crystal clear, but apparently I wasn't, because me saying, This is not R rated, there's no romance, there's no graphic content. This is not Game of Thrones. If you're looking for that kind of a fantasy story, this is not for you. I thought that. We were simpatico, and apparently we weren't. So sometimes we seek out opinions, and we're like, oh, that was a little bit like a knife to the to the heart lady. But even then, even in that situation where I felt like there was failure to communicate and a difference in personality, a difference in opinion, I was still able to learn something from my interaction with her. And one of the things that I learned is that the material that I write, whether it's fiction, non fiction, it's something that I'm putting out under my own name or under a pen name, there's an element to it, of coziness, of something that's an experience, not something that's a throwaway experience, but a real experience. I had another meeting recently with a person I work with that helps with my my marketing, sometimes my positioning, write ups that I do, Amazon blurbs and so forth. And that was one of the things that she said unbidden. I didn't like coax this out of her. It's just something that she said to me, unbidden is that when I read your work, like when I sat down to read decoding the unicorn, it wasn't a beach read. It wasn't something that if my husband and my kids and I were going to go to the beach for the afternoon, and I just wanted a quick story. Just wanted something where I could sit under the umbrella and read and have some peace while they're off playing and gallivanting. I wouldn't take decoding the unicorn. I read decoding the unicorn in my my comfortable chair, and I like I had ambiance. I had a cup of tea, and I knew that I was really going to have an intellectual experience. And I liked that, and I wanted that, and that made me feel really happy. It gave me a warm and fuzzy because I'm like, Well, yeah, that is what I want. You know, I want the writing to be good. I want it to be interesting, and I want somebody to take something away from it, to feel like I learned something. I had a journey. I my emotions were engaged. Yes, intellectually, I was engaged, but my emotions were engaged too. So we can learn things. This is my point about group think. We can learn things from people with whom we disagree. We can learn things from people we don't like. So if we create workplace clicks, where it's like the extroverts or the Wasp males are the only ones that are allowed to voice an opinion in here, you're missing out on so much. So there may be a coworker that you're like, you know, you kind of give the stink eye to them. You don't particularly like them whenever you pass them in the hall. But that doesn't mean that they don't have a solution to a problem. It doesn't mean that they can't identify a bottleneck and say, I may not know how to fix this problem, but I think we need to be aware that it exists when we create an environment of you must be one of us, like a cult, like a religious cult. You must be one of us. You must dress the way that we do. You must think the way that we do. You must obey. We miss out on so many fantastic opportunities, and it doesn't have to be that way. That was one of the driving forces for me when I was writing decoding the unicorn is the modern workplace is broken. It stinks, and it doesn't have to be that way. You're back in the 1950s when dag was running the Secretariat at the UN he was showing so many better options for leadership and people management, and yet here we are. It's 2025 and I'm recording an episode about the dangers of groupthink, and like what's pointed out in Susan Cain's landmark book quiet, it's a suppression of creativity when some consensus is arrived at, even if the dog and pony show is trotted out as no idea is a bad idea, we're going to all brainstorm. Everybody can contribute when you allow the extroverts to run roughshod the loudest voices to run roughshod over everybody else, and you're not giving people a chance to speak. The quieter voices are people that are HSPs. Like, you know, if I were in a situation where people were shouting and it was getting really out of hand, my default setting would simply be to disengage like, I don't. I don't want to be part of this. I want to protect myself emotionally from it. It's like, if you remember, in the 1989 Batman movie, Michael Keaton could, just like, hit a button and on the Batmobile would be covered in shields. That's it's like, shields up. I I'm not, I'm not here for this. And there are times that I challenge myself to say, Well, maybe you should be that lone voice in the room that says, This is getting us nowhere. This is ridiculous. It's childish to do all of this shouting. It's time to cool the temperature down about 10 degrees and calm it, but, but again, that's not my default setting. It takes me telling myself, working myself into it, to say. That and the workplace, the environment, should not be that way. Somebody shouldn't have to, like, have a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel trying to force their way through something, just to force their way through a work day or a work meeting. That's just so ridiculous. There is a better way, and it doesn't involve group think. It doesn't involve a corporate echo chamber where everybody in the room has to all agree. We have to all be on the same page every moment of every day, or this office is going to explode. No, it won't. In fact, it will be a better office. It will be a better environment if those quieter voices are included and included in a way that's comfortable and respectful for them, not necessarily. Okay, here's a Talking Stick lead the meeting. Okay, no pressure there. It may have to be a more organized situation with some notice next week, would you be comfortable? I want to make sure that your voice is included. Are you comfortable speaking up next week? Yes, I'll formulate my thoughts between now and then. Pretty easy. It's only in corporate America that makes it difficult. Stay safe, stay sane. I will see you in the next episode. If you have not liked shared and subscribed, please do hit that bell and I will see you next time.

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