Write up of Gerie Owen’s talk about devops teams and Groupthink from Devopsdays Edinburgh 2017.

What is Groupthink?

Groupthink is a mode of thinking whereby people in a group strive for harmony and conformity, and subsequently end up with an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. This leads to various traits becoming prevalent in the group:

• illusion of immortality - the group ends up with a level of self confidence so high that they take excessive risks that would not normally be considered
• inherent morality - the group believes in the rightness of its model to an extent that they reject ethical concerns
• pressure on dissenters - those that don’t agree come under pressure from the rest of the group to change their opinion
• unanimity - the group assumes this is the case

Due to the collaborate culture of devops where you have a group of people working together to achieve common goals it is inevitable that you will end up with Groupthink occurring at some stage.

How does this affect devops?

When working in a group making decisions it is all to easy for an informal leader to establish dominance, if someone is particularly outspoken for instance. This can lead to no one in the group disagreeing with the informal leaders point of view or “facts”. When this occurs the group mindset blocks critical thinking, it amplifies biases (with no other “facts” the group bases decisions on the only information it has) and the discussion dissolves into deliberation failures.

What is a deliberation failure?

Decisions made are affected by various factors including:

• representativeness - people make judgements based on similar situations
• confirmation bias - people weigh more heavily on information they believe to be true

When a group falls into Groupthink failures in deliberation occur because of:

• cascade effect - because of the desire to conform the group fails to critically assess their own views and instead agrees with the initial speaker
• polarisation - the group starts out with moderate views on an issue but without opposite views the group focuses only on the information it believes to be true and moderate soon becomes extreme

How do we fix it?

What is a mindset?

In order to fix the problem we need to first get the group in the right mindset and in order to do that we need to understand what a mindset is. A mindset is how we approach life and its challenges. There are two mindsets:

• fixed mindset - with a fixed mindset the person believes that intelligence and talent are fixed at birth. Views failure as a reflection of themselves and if something goes wrong its usually someone else’s fault.
• growth mindset - with a growth mindset the person believes that intelligence and talent can be developed. Believes we can work to improve ourselves. Sees failure as a learning process and is never done learning.

Managing Groupthink

There are three ways to manage Groupthink:

• individually - try to listen 80% of the time and talk 20%, listen to yourself and if something bothers you say it
• internally - try to build a diverse team, try to establish a growth mindset within the team, withhold discussion until everyone has had a chance to contribute their opinion, appoint a devil’s advocate to say what people might be thinking but still aren’t willing to and those in leadership positions or with strong opinions speak last.
• externally - use CDE (detailed below). Managers can influence a team’s self organisation.

What is CDE?

CDE is a way to manage Groupthink externally, it is made up of three components:

• Container - bounds within the group, physical space, scope of responsibility etc
• Difference - looking at the differences in the group, backgrounds, skill sets
• Exchange - who provides and receives information, how is this information provided and received, how do the group interact with themselves and stakeholders

Managers or other external parties can look at the three components of CDE and identify possible factors. Once identified they should consider:

• how they affect the group?
• are they appropriate in terms of size, scope and level of influence?
• what impact does this have on the team?
• are the effects positive, negative or neutral?
• what is the biggest negative?
• what can we change?

Making changes can be a good way to combat Groupthink.

• Change container - not getting enough ideas? Think about sending members of the team to conferences, training or user groups. Change their environment for a bit and let them ask questions and see things going on elsewhere in the industry to broaden their horizons.
• Change difference - try to balance strong willed people, if one person is standing out as against the group always can they be removed?
• Change exchange - make sure the team is getting the right feedback at the right time. Identify what stakeholders should be present and when, and make it happen.

Summary

Groupthink is a danger for any close knit group. Continuous improvement can be compromised by Groupthink. Managers and leaders can use CDE to combat Groupthink. Individuals should be thinking individually but collaborating as a group. Remember Groupthink:

• inhibits devops principles
• impedes devops transformations
• limits innovative solutions that can come from the cross functional nature of devops teams.