The zebra knows: How groupthink silences innovation and shields the herd

On the open plains, danger rarely announces itself. It prowls. It circles. And when the lion finally moves, the herd of zebras reacts not with chaos but with unity. They press together, black and white stripes blurring into a single mass. To a predator’s eye, the herd becomes one. The individual disappears.

Safety, in that moment, is sameness.

In boardrooms, businesses and creative teams, a similar instinct takes hold. Under the pressure of deadlines, dissent, scrutiny etc., teams often tighten their formation. Harmony becomes a goal in itself. Ideas that stray too far are quietly ushered back to the centre.

It’s not laziness. It’s not even fear. It’s a deeply human drive for cohesion: the group’s ancient instinct to survive, dressed now in strategic language and PowerPoint slides.

And this, at its core, is groupthink.

This article discusses this psychological phenomenon, including what we might believe groupthink is, its less obvious facets, and how to mitigate against its influence in teams and businesses.

What we traditionally mean by groupthink

The term groupthink was first introduced by social psychologist Irving Janis in 1972, to describe the dysfunctional decision-making that occurs when a group values consensus over critical evaluation. In environments where groupthink takes root, people become more concerned with cohesion than with correctness.

The symptoms are familiar: illusion of unanimity, suppression of dissent, self-censorship, and direct pressure on those who question the norm. Janis used historical case studies like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam War to illustrate how even intelligent, well-meaning groups can make irrational decisions under the weight of conformity.

The underlying psychology is relatively straightforward: Humans are social creatures who are hardwired to seek inclusion and avoid exclusion. When faced with the potential discomfort of disagreement, especially in high-stakes or high-status environments, many will choose silence over challenge. The result leads not only poor decision-making but also a narrowing of the group’s cognitive bandwidth.

But, like many human considerations, the reality is far more nuanced and complex.

Whilst groupthink is a consideration in social or group dynamics, groups are made up of individuals, and each individual member will have different levels of Agreeableness – a dimension within the Five Factor or OCEAN model of personality, together with Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism. This dimension encompasses qualities such as warmth, trust, altruism, cooperation, modesty, and tender-mindedness (Costa & McCrae, 1992).

We are programmed for conformity and homogeneity. High Agreeable individuals have natural tendencies toward maintaining harmony and avoiding conflict, and they may find themselves more likely to conform to the social norms of the group. But there is a strange hypocrisy with the dimension; studies have linked higher Agreeableness with a greater likelihood of deferring to authority, even in morally questionable contexts (Bègue et al., 2015).

Despite often being framed as a moral virtue, Agreeableness can fuel the need for group conformity and justify ethical fading, allowing individuals to suppress their own moral judgement in favour of group loyalty. It might not appear so on the surface, but studies have shown that rioting mobs, football hooligans, and radicalised terrorist groups have higher prevalence of high-Agreeable individuals, compared to standard populations (Janis, 1972).

In many workplaces today, groupthink rarely announces itself in dramatic failures. However, some do still make the news, such as Boeing’s safety record, the Post Office scandal, and the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic (BPS, 2022).

But, more often, it arrives subtly, as a culture of politeness.

In meetings, ideas go unchallenged. Risk is avoided. Presentations are met with nods rather than questions. A team might describe itself as “tight-knit” or “aligned,” but beneath that alignment is often an unspoken agreement not to rock the boat.

This version of groupthink is particularly dangerous because it masquerades as psychological safety. But psychological safety is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of trust strong enough to weather disagreement.

When teams confuse the two, they begin to prize comfort over candour, and the space for innovation quietly closes.

Why perceived threat makes groupthink worse

The lesser-discussed dimension of groupthink is its intensification under perceived threat. Just as zebras close ranks when a lion is near, human groups often become more homogenous when they feel under siege.

This response has evolutionary roots. In threatening situations, reducing variability and increasing coordination can be life-saving. In the modern workplace, though, this defensive reflex can become counterproductive. When a team is facing a merger, a reputational risk, or even just scrutiny from senior leadership, it may respond by doubling down on conformity. Differences are smoothed over. Dissenters are marginalised. The group seeks safety in similarity.

In practice, this might manifest as a culture of meetings-before-meetings, where we reduce perceived threat through gaining individual views and consensus before addressing the group.

This reaction is underpinned by social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), which suggests that people derive part of their self-concept from group membership. When the group feels threatened, individuals are more likely to identify with the in-group and less likely to tolerate internal deviance. Even well-intentioned team members can find themselves policing the boundaries of acceptable opinion.

Organisational scandals often reveal this dynamic. Whistleblowers, when they exist, are frequently ignored or punished. Consider the case of Theranos, where Elizabeth Holmes’ leadership created an environment of intense pressure and secrecy. Several employees raised concerns about the company’s technology, but these voices were silenced or dismissed. The group closed ranks around the illusion of success.

The same occurred historically in Enron, NASA’s Challenger shuttle disaster, and in the First World War, where thousands of troops were pointlessly killed using traditional “storming” techniques against newly designed machine gun weapons.

In contemporary workplaces, groupthink can be reinforced by multiple factors: hierarchy, remote working, and the unspoken norms of organisational culture. Digital collaboration tools can compound the issue. In video calls, it is easy to mute a dissenting voice. In Slack threads or Teams chats, agreement can be signalled with a thumbs-up emoji, and dissent left unexpressed. A cursory look at Zoom reveals that almost all of its instant reactions available to respond in-meeting are positive (i.e., thumbs up, celebration animation, floating hearts, clapping etc.).

Moreover, the culture of positivity that pervades many organisations, while well-meaning, can discourage healthy challenge. Leaders may say they want innovation, but reward stability. Team members may say they value diversity, but resist discomfort. In such environments, groupthink thrives not through overt coercion, but through ambient pressure.

Productive friction: Groupthink’s kryptonite

The antidote to groupthink is not conflict for its own sake, but deliberate space for productive dissent. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety (1999) offers a foundation: teams must feel safe to take interpersonal risks. But safety alone is not sufficient. Teams also need structured ways to disagree.

One method is to assign roles that legitimise dissent. The “devil’s advocate” approach is one example, though it must be used carefully to avoid tokenism. More effective still are red teams, whose role is to critique a proposal as if they were an opposing force. These strategies externalise challenge and reduce the interpersonal cost of disagreement.

Another approach is to increase cognitive diversity. This goes beyond demographic diversity, and includes diversity of experience, training, and perspective. Teams with greater cognitive diversity tend to generate more creative solutions – but only when their environment supports open exchange. Without inclusion, any diversity is stifled. Inclusion is the route to diversity – not the other way around.

Organisational design also matters. Rotating leadership roles, anonymous idea submission, and Gary Klein’s (2007) work on pre-mortem exercises can help surface dissenting views without triggering defensiveness. Meeting structures that prioritise silence (e.g. writing before speaking) can help introverts and dissenters enter the conversation.

Similarly, individual ideation away from the group has been shown to create both a greater number and a better quality of ideas and suggestions compared to a team-based brainstorming or collaboration session (Janis, 1972).

Ron Heifetz’s concept of adaptive leadership offers a helpful frame: leadership is not about providing answers, but about creating conditions for learning and adaptation. This often involves what he calls “productive distress.” A degree of tension is not a problem to be solved, but a sign that the group is doing important work.

At IDEO, the design firm, teams are encouraged to “build on the ideas of others,” but also to “fail often and fast.” At Pixar, candid feedback is institutionalised in their Braintrust meetings, where filmmakers present early versions of their work for critique. 3M provide innovation labs that allow the sharing of project failures across the business, as well as encouraging employees to spend 15% of their time working on personal projects, experimentation, exploration and innovation.

These organisations demonstrate that creative abrasion – the friction of diverse ideas rubbing against one another – can generate brilliance, if the right conditions exist.

Returning to the herd

Back on the savannah, the zebra does what it must to survive. It blends in. It obeys the logic of the herd. But in the boardroom, the stakes are different. Safety lies not in sameness, but in difference.

Groupthink is not just a failure of decision-making. It is a failure of courage. The courage to challenge, to question, to step slightly out of line. And the role of leadership is not to prevent conflict, but to hold the space in which it can be safely explored.

Innovation does not emerge from the centre of the herd. It begins at the edges, where the view is clearer and the air is a little less safe.

The edge of the herd isn’t just where danger lies. It’s where perspective, innovation and opportunity begin.

References

Bègue, L., Monpierre, S., Moussaoui, L., & Nadler, A. (2015). Personality predictors of obedience to authority. Personality and Individual Differences, 76, 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.054

Boeing: Gelles, D., & Kitroeff, N. (2020). Boeing 737 Max: 2 deadly crashes, 5 crucial decisions. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/business/boeing-737-max-crashes.html

British Psychological Society. (2022, February 7). Groupthink: A monument to truthiness. The Psychologist. https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/groupthink-monument-truthiness

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Harvard University Press.

Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Houghton Mifflin.

Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem

NASA Challenger Disaster: Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. University of Chicago Press.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (2nd ed., pp. 7–24). Nelson-Hall.

Theranos: Carreyrou, J. (2018). Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Knopf.