Groupthink: the New Zealand Disease

There are considerable benefits to having groups of people collaborating to the same task, but there are also hazards.

In New Zealand there is a devotion to the idea of the team, and membership of in-groups is important as much of our society functions on who you know, rather than what. 

It's the enemy of meritocracy, it means the mediocre (but popular) who don't rock the boat end up in senior roles, innovation in regarded with suspicion and respectful dissent with ideas is greeted with hostility as it's interpreted as a personal attack.

One of the corrosive underpinnings of teams can be groupthink, where considerations of group membership over-ride sense and good decisions becasue the members are unwilling to dissent in the face of group pressure. 

New Zealand's overwhelming team culture poses a particular threat of groupthink, and while there are strategies to guard against it, such as allocating a devil's advocate within the group to test ideas, there seems to be little understanding in improving our thinking. 

The principles of the perils of groupthink are well understood in disciplines like behavioural economics and social psychology; it's just like no-one looks interested in so many organisations as it might go against, wait for it, the team's cohesiveness.