Saravanan S.

Groupthink
 
Groupthink is a term coined by the social psychologist Irving Janis, which means that when ideas are not challenged in the group discussions or brainstorming sessions on any issues, but accepted without any debate, then this psychological phenomenon of groupthink sets in.
 
In many of these situations, people may think that it is always better to go along with the opinion of the majority, instead of contesting it.  This leads to poor performance of the team and also bad decision making on any particular issue.
 
In many cases, people think that if they object the ideas being floated by the team members, it might create some kind of disharmony or friction among the team members, and they may get alienated from the other members of the team.  This kind of groupthink is more common in groups with more cohesiveness and also with impartial leadership, which results in suppression of individual opinions and creative thoughts that leads to poor decision making and ineffective problem solving capacity.
 
Symptoms
 
There are some symptoms by which this tendency of groupthink in the team can be identified.
 
1.  Group cohesiveness is valued more than individual contribution or creativity.
2.  Lack of intention to debate on any alternate approach.
3.  Group leaders behave in a very impartial or biased way.
4.  The group has faced recent failure and is in a great stress to perform to achieve success.
5.  There is no standard method or metric in place to evaluate the ideas.
 
Prevention
 
There are various steps to prevent this phenomenon of groupthink -
 
1.  Encourage debate - the team leader should talk to the team members and make them understand that how important is the ideas and opinions of other team members’ to be challenged, to induce the creative thought processing and arrive at the better decisions.  The group leader should ensure that everyone in the group has offered their opinion/ideas, and also should ensure that a real debate has happened before the decision has been taken.  If the leader realizes that there was no enough debate happened on the ideas, then the leader should postpone the decision making, and ask for more research.
 
2.  Devil’s Advocate – during the group discussion or brainstorming sessions, one person should act as Devil’s Advocate, who could counter all the ideas and opinions being discussed in the group, and this will help to create an environment for more healthy debates and creative thoughts, which will help in better decision making.
 
3.  Team Leader Ethics – ideally the team leader should abstain from attending such group discussions or brainstorming sessions; if he/she attends due to the gravity of the situation, at least they should refrain from sharing their opinions to the team.  The trouble with being a leader is that his/her opinions will have a big impact on others, especially some timid team members, who would not dare to dissent the team leader’s views.  Apparently, those team members might be have a better idea than that of the team leader’s.  In that way, we are implicitly, stopping the other team members from exploring some great ideas.
 
4.  External perspective – the group’s decision can be scrutinized by any outsider, from outside the group, but still who can provide a better idea on the issue on hand; he/she could be one of the stakeholders from a different department, a team member or a group leader of the team that had handled similar type of projects before, etc.  The logic is that these outsiders would not be influenced by the ideas of this group’s leader or any other factors, and hence they would voice out their own ideas, which might be better than anyone else in the group.
 
5.  Standard methodology to assess – after collecting all the ideas from the team, we need to put them through some standard evaluation methodology to find out how those ideas could help the team to move towards the better solution for the issue on hand and also towards the organizational goal, steps and risks involved in executing them, etc.
 
By following the above stated steps, the phenomenon of groupthink can be avoided in any of the group discussions.
 

The Bathtub Curve Analysis:
 
(not able to copy/attach the bathtub curve from my office laptop)
 
The Bathtub Curve is being used for likely failure rates of any products, be it manufacturing products or technological products.
 
This bathtub concept holds good for almost all the products which are coming new to the market, and has been widely accepted by the reliability community over the years.
 
Predominantly, it has three parts, decreased failure rates (Infant mortality failures), constant failure rates (useful lifetime), and increased failure rates (wear-out failures).
 
During the initial period of any new product, the product life cycle faces a lot of failures because of design failure of the manufactured goods, bugs in the software, wrong positioning of the product, etc.  This phase of the product life cycle is being backed up by the strong support team to make the product a success.  Hence, we experience decreased failure rates of the product life, which can be otherwise called as Infant Mortality Failure, which was high when the system came into existence and then started ramping down.
 
The second phase of the bathtub curve experiences, less failure rates due to stability achieved in the product.  This phase is also called as Useful lifetime of the product, wherein the product experiences only chance failures.  The products are designed to operate under certain external conditions with certain stress level and when it crosses these constraints, the failure occurs, which is of rare situation.  The end users of the products, would know how to use the products, and hence they do not attempt to cross that limit, and would try to extract more usability from the product.  Hence this phase of the product is aptly called as useful lifetime of the product.
 
The third phase of the bathtub curve is called as increased failure phase, wherein the products face a lot of failures due to the deterioration of the machinery, wearing out of its parts, outdated technology, slowness, etc.  Either we need to repair the products, increase the support activity or else we need to install a new product/equipment or resort to newer technologies with respect to the technological products.  This phase is also called as wear-out failure phase.
 
For any product, the initial and final phases are very short when compared with it middle phase, which is the useful lifetime of the machinery/technological product.
 
In my opinion, the bathtub curve concept is applicable for all the products that are being manufactured, technologically innovated or the written software.