When all think alike, then noone is thinking. -Walter Lippman
Have you ever heard the term groupthink ? It is a phenomenon that commonly occurs when a team, working on a specific problem, starts thinking as one and everything seems bright. Let's take a closer look at it.
Groupthink
Even though the term has been used by William H. Whyte, Jr. in 1952 in Fortune magazine for the first time, the phenomenon has been known for a long time before. There are reports about great minds of the previous century, who reportedly had a group of people, employed for the specific reason of preventing groupthink. Those groups of people were there just to give alternate views and opinion on the topics in discussion and to expose the downsides of the proposed solutions to problems. For instance, Winston Churchill had a department called "The Bad News department", which made sure that every solution received a series of critics. As he had said, he wouldn't have been able to sleep well at night, had he not been reassurred by the department, that there were weaknesses in the proposed solutions day after day.
The dangers of groupthink
Have you ever experienced groupthink? It occurs quite often, when you are working on something with a group of people and you all of a sudden have the perfect solution, which is without any flaws. Well, as life teaches us, there are downsides to everything and it is only natural that the solution that we propose is not perfect. However, we, as human beings, tend to get very excited about things and therefore miss the important details. We often agree with whatever is proposed after a certain level of excitement has been reached.
To avoid falling into this mindset, a group has to have at least one person, who is annoying others with everything that could go wrong. As discouraging as it seems, it is better for a team to be realistic and to spend more time on a single problem, than to be sure that their solution is perfect.
An easy solution to a brainstorming groupthink is to have each member of a team brainstorm on their own for a period of time before the ideas are brought together. By doing this, we avoid the danger of a single person in the group taking charge of the ideas and others nodding.
Imagine Churchill giving an order during the war, that would later be proven to be not-so-smart!
Groupthink in the crypto world
Is the crypto space safe from this dangerous phenomena? Of course not! Most blockchain projects that have been created during the last couple of months (or years) use slack and forums as their main communication device. Even a quick look at most of the threads will give you the idea about the idea of groupthink: when something new is proposed or implemented, the community rarely gives the opposite opinion. Furthermore, those who do are often labeled as FUDders or trolls - and many times they don't really deserve it. "To da Moon", right? ;)
Who knows, we may even be in a big groupthink bubble, in which we don't see some shortcommings of the blockchain as a whole or its effect on the world. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Have you experienced groupthink yourself? What do you think about it? Let me know in the comments :).
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