CHAPTER 9

ADVANCED COACHING: FROM INDIVIDUALS TO GROUPS

In 1961 hundreds of ordinary, normal, pleasant people came into Stanley Milgram’s laboratory at Yale University, took off their hats and coats, sat down – and electrocuted the man next door.

It was part of a research study on ‘learning’. The ‘learner’ was strapped into a chair with electrodes. The people who had volunteered to take part came in one at a time. They were instructed by a man in a white coat to read out a list of questions, and every time the learner in the next room got one wrong, to flick a switch on a scientific-looking machine, which allegedly delivered him an electric shock. The first switch was marked ‘15 volts’, each switch was stronger, and the last was marked ‘450 volts, Danger extreme shock XXX’. What percentage of the nice ordinary people who took part, do you think would be prepared to go right along the panel of switches, inflicting increasing levels of shocks – despite first yelps, then cries, then screams of pain, and finally after 330 volts, ominous silence, coming from the other room?

63 per cent.

63 per cent of ordinary decent people were prepared to inflict fatal electric shocks on another human being because a man in a white coat told them to. (In fact of course, the ‘learner’ was an actor, the screams were a recording and the machine was a fake – but the individuals didn’t know that.)¹

Ah, well, you say, that was decades ago, a more restricted society, we’re individualists now, we think for ourselves, we wouldn’t do it – wrong. Milgram experiments have long since been banned by psychology ethics committees. But that doesn’t stop reality TV: when entertainer Derren Brown and others replicated the study in the 1990s and 2000s, they found almost identical results.²

The original studies caused an uproar. Especially as Milgram had carefully repeated them many times: in a sleazy dockside office in case people had been overly influenced by being at Yale; with women-only groups; and with groups composed only of pillars of society such as lawyers, teachers and judges. The numbers varied slightly, but in all cases around half of the participants went right through to the end, inflicting ‘Danger XXX 450 volt’ shocks despite the man next door screaming in pain and crying out for them to stop. They sweated and squirmed, and clearly hated doing it, but they did it.

The great classic experiments in 20th-century psychology, such as Milgram’s, the Zimbardo ‘prison experiment’ and many many more proved absolutely conclusively that we are much more affected by our context – by roles, stereo­types, group dynamics, others’ expectations, etc., than we believe. These were not wicked people, they were good ordinary folk – us! But it feels almost unthinkable that we, or our colleagues, neighbours and friends, would have done it.

Underlying all this, particularly in the individualistic West, is our tendency to make the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). The FAE is the illusion that we (and our clients) as individuals are more masters of our own destiny than we actually are. It is an illusion: the evidence is categorically clear that our context has a far more important impact on us than we like to think.

Of all the domains of psychology, this is the one that coaches, and leaders and managers who coach, usually know least about. Coaches use personality insights and tools, as we discussed in Chapter 7, and the GROW Model has much good cognitive and behavioural work in it, but the vast field of social psychology (as this area is termed) and in particular the danger of making the FAE, is for many, terra incognita. This is despite the existence of literally millions of articles, books, Master’s and PhD theses, theories, courses, and therapists specialising in interpersonal, group, team and organisational dynamics. So in this chapter, we just open up the territory, offer some practical suggestions, and hopefully encourage you to sniff the wind and want to explore further.

We consider in particular:

1. 1how best to bring the context in, when coaching an individual;
2. 2what happens when we widen the lens, from coaching just one person to coaching a group or team.

1. Bringing the context into individual coaching

In this section, we consider several ways of taking account of the context in individual coaching:

• ●contracting;
• ●feedback from the coach;
• ●360° feedback;
• ●hypothesis; and
• ●psychometrics.

Contracting

In fact, we have already laid the foundations of avoiding the FAE, when in Chapter 5 we paid careful attention to contracting. A good business coach, or a colleague coaching well, trusts and respects the person they are coaching – but that person is not their sole source of information; they take care to ‘triangulate’ it by getting good initial briefings and information from a variety of sources. This begins with hearing from all interested parties when defining the work to be done. The initial contracting will often also make provision for gathering ‘360° feedback’, which we talk about more below, and/or some other data-collection process. Contracting, as ever, is key.

Feedback from the coach

The coaching relationship offers a unique opportunity for a client to receive from their coach that rare thing, direct and honest feedback, (relatively) free from the influence of hierarchy, politics, history and expectations. Good feedback is powerful and rarely given, particularly to those most senior in organisations.

Feedback is distinct from hypothesis, which we consider more below, and which interprets what has been observed. Keeping the two separate can be a challenge.

Imagine a coaching situation where the client is sitting leaning back in her chair, with her hands on her lap, talking. When she begins talking about her relationship with her board, she leans forward in the chair, takes in her left hand a piece of paper from the table and crushes it into a ball. As the coach you may be tempted to make assumptions (e.g. she is nervous or angry or upset) and to form an instant hypothesis (e.g. this is a difficult or challenging board). However, these are not facts – there may be other reasons for the changes you see. Offering to describe what you observe and then being specific, with no interpretation (as in the description above), may be helpful; though not always the way you anticipate, and not always for the client – the coach might learn they were wrong!

Providing feedback well is dependent on accurate observation and your ability to relate that information simply and without interpretation.

If you have established a relationship of openness and trust with your client, you may want to take the feedback one stage further. Your emotional response to what the client did or said may be of value. If you as the coach are experiencing something in the coaching session, e.g. believing the client is not listening, and feeling somewhat belittled as a result, others in the organisation may have the same reaction – and be less inclined to share it.

For example:

• ●‘When you . . . [insert the action or words], I felt . . . [insert your response] and I was wondering whether [other team members, colleagues, your manager] might have this reaction too?’

So the rule of thumb for good feedback is to avoid interpretation and confine it to the facts. Second, use only yourself – where you have direct evidence – if some consequences are to be drawn. The formula is hence: ‘When you did this . . . [insert specific action] I felt this . . . [insert actual personal experience].’

That might be all that’s appropriate; if more is wanted, the third stage is to ‘wonder’^* (we have no proof) if others may feel the same way.

^* A terrific word, borrowed from the therapy world: it signals loud and clear that what follows is not a statement of fact but something offered for consideration.

360° feedback

This is the most direct, common and potentially powerful way of getting a quantity of information from the context to your client. But sadly, unless handled exceptionally well, it is also one of the most problematic. There are several alternative ways of doing it:

• ●interviews;
• ●using an off-the-shelf 360° instrument;
• ●using a bespoke instrument, designed specifically for that organisational context.

Interviews by the coach

The coach interviews people in the client’s context. This approach is probably best, as the coach thereby hears directly from key people in the client’s world. If someone says something puzzling, or drops a hint, the coach is there to pick it up and carefully enquire further.

Six interviews are usually more than sufficient. They need only be quite brief, and although one might think they would need to be conducted in person, in fact phone interviews also work well if the coach is experienced enough to pick up the nuances. (And importantly for the busy businesspeople being interviewed, they’re much quicker.) This process is set up by the client nominating people to be interviewed, ideally those above and below them, internally and externally (e.g. clients if possible) and those who like them plus those who don’t. They then advise the interviewees that the coach will be in touch.

The standard interview framework is to ask just three questions:

• ●What should this person do more of?
• ●What should they do less?
• ●What should they keep doing, or stay the same?

However, my colleague Alice Perkins has a nice little improvement on these questions, setting them in the particular context, by asking instead:

• ●What does this person need to do to be successful in this role?
• ●Against that background, what are they doing really well?
• ●What could they do better (less of/more of)?

Signalling in advance that only three questions will be asked, and detailing them, gives reassurance that the process will be contained, dignified and respectful – and still gives the interviewees plenty of scope to say whatever they’ve been saving up! The feedback process then aggregates the input and delivers it back to the client under those three simple headings, with individual comments anonymised.

Bear in mind that no matter how sophisticated the coachee, and how positive the feedback for them, it is still at best an unnerving experience, and possibly a shocking and deeply unpleasant one: each of us has a cherished internal picture of ourselves which is to some extent at odds with how the world sees us, and having that disrupted can be a challenge to our whole ego identity. You should never give 360° feedback without having received it yourself in order to appreciate this point fully. (Sometimes participants on training courses swap collecting and delivering feedback on each other: this has the double benefit that they experience the process personally before doing it with clients and can also practise first with more forgiving peers.)

The drawback of this approach is it is expensive in terms of the coach’s time. This is however usually still cheaper than the hidden opportunity cost of a dozen senior people within the organisation filling in forms for the computer-based 360° systems (see below) which seem on the surface to be more efficient. One manager of a team of 12 found himself with 144 e-reports to complete every reporting cycle. He took this seriously, but said to me ruefully it felt sometimes as if he had ‘no time for the day job’.

Questionnaires

These come in two forms, off-the-shelf and bespoke. Off-the-shelf instruments are relatively cheap, appear to have a scientific underpinning, as they show scores against a comparable ‘norm group’, and have professionally presented reports. In fact however, the sample sizes of such tools are often small and it is important to check they are from the same cultural context and up to date. (A tool developed in the USA in the 1980s, for example, is unlikely to be appropriate in Central/Eastern Europe in the 2020s.)

Bespoke instruments can be more appropriate, as these are based on current research within the organisation, with the scores shown compared against the management population your client is actually competing with, and usually in categories (or ‘competencies’) and language relevant to the organisation. However, for these to have value, they need to be based on bespoke research for the organisation which is expensive and time-consuming.

Whatever the source, research has made clear that the feedback from such instruments can be seriously flawed by a number of hidden biases. Raters score people very differently, for example: person A will never give anyone 10/10 on principle; person B does so as often as possible, to be encouraging. This can, in turn, be got around by training the raters first: see the British Psychological Society’s ‘360° Degree Feedback: Best Practice Guidelines’ at www.bps.org.uk. But senior people with a high opportunity cost to their time, particularly in professional services firms where every six minutes must be billed to meet targets, are disinclined to attend such training.

There can be more serious problems: I know of two separate occasions, in different organisations, where unwilling recipients have formed feedback ‘cabals’: individuals get together, nominate each other as the feedback givers and generate false but believable reports for each other, to get around a system they despised (in one case) or just thought a pointless bore (in the other). So computerised 360° documents should be taken with a substantial pinch of salt – used as a possibly valuable basis for discussion but not seen as ‘the truth’.

Hypothesis

Based on their observations of clients, experienced coaches often make connections and form theories or hypotheses about their clients. Very judiciously used, these can make a valuable addition to the client’s awareness of their context. However, such hypotheses are not the truth, and may be incorrect; they are for the client to accept or reject.

In other words, we are using the scientific approach to hypothesis: using our observations to develop a theory to be investigated.

Because it is not the truth, the key to success is to float your thought as no more than something to be tested. But once you have built a relationship of trust with your client, they are likely to take what you say very seriously – as a fact, or the truth. So to use this technique successfully, you almost have to overemphasise the point that it is just a hypothesis. For example, ‘I’ve just had a thought, it might be completely wrong, but can I just check it out with you . . .’ or whatever phrasing is authentic for you.

It is generally advisable to present your hypothesis quickly, as the longer you hold on to your theory, the more likely you are to observe those things that support it and to ignore those that contradict it. (‘Confirmation bias’ – coaches can be a source of corruption of data, too!)

Psychometrics

In Chapter 7 we looked at psychometrics such as MBTI and FIRO-B. Where everyone in a team completes one or both of these – and they often are done in groups, so individuals can get to know their fellow team members better – then the data on others represents potentially very valuable information from the context. In larger organisations, even more data might be available if output from ‘team climate surveys’ or staff attitude surveys, etc. can be accessed.

One very large organisation I knew had annual staff attitude surveys, which included detailed questioning on morale, and also on the leadership, management and developmental/coaching capability of their immediate leaders. The organisation was large enough to break the resulting data down by division, without compromising confidentiality. So there was, to use the research jargon, an annual infusion of both between-subjects and within-subjects data. In other words, you could compare the morale levels of different divisions at a single point in time, and you could also compare the results a single leader got in the years before and after they received coaching or were trained to coach. It was enormously valuable.

All of these methods – and many more that may also occur to you – bring the context into coaching more regularly and reliably than would happen just by chance. If both coach and coachee are opened up to channels of data from the world around them, they are less likely to make the Fundamental Attribution Error. Improving the flow of data from the context improves all the stages of GROW: the topics and G are broadened if the input of others is carefully sought at the contracting stage on what is truly required; the R is richer, there are potentially more Os, and perhaps most directly of all, the W is significantly enhanced, because the action planning will take much more careful account of all the potential contextual resources and push-backs.

2. Team coaching

When we open up the lens more widely, from coaching one person to coaching several at once, the level of complexity increases (and the adrenalin – which is why some coaches enjoy this more than anything else!). But many of the tools remain the same – and so too, as we shall see below, does the potential for attribution or thinking error, with the consequent need for even more robust coaching.

Team coaching is a huge subject, and is at the stage one-to-one coaching was 20 years ago, with relatively little direct research undertaken and published. There is nevertheless some, and we mention it below – but before we rush to new tools, it’s also useful to stop and recall that a good deal we have already talked about is relevant.

Hence we consider:

• ●Big Five team coaching;
• ●and getting the issues out;

before we go on to consider very useful work specifically designed for team development:

• ●Kline’s Time to Think approach;
• ●Katzenbach on teams;
• ●Lencioni’s ‘five dysfunctions of a team’; and
• ●Appreciative Inquiry;

  before finally remembering the hazards of:

• ●collective thinking errors.

Big Five team coaching

Big Five coaching is squarely at the heart of team coaching too. Reading Big Five across to the team context, some points to trigger your thinking might include:

• ●Contracting. Working with an individual, you need to contract in advance with those concerned on the business aspects of working together, and with the individual on the psychological contract. This is the case whether you will be working together for six months, or a couple of minutes (for brief ‘coffee machine’ coaching, the key contracting question is often, ‘How long have you got?’), and it’s exactly the same with a team. On the psychological contracting, the obvious point to agree with the group is precisely how confidentiality will be handled. The Chatham House Rule (www.chathamhouse.org) is one excellent guideline; an American client uses the more colourful but equally determined, ‘What plays in Vegas, stays in Vegas!’

  In addition, whenever a group of people comes together, Myles Downey’s useful rubric is that, before whatever else is on the table, they want to know (for reasons of ‘old brain’ assessment of threat) ‘who are we and what are we here for’.^* A few minutes spent on this at the outset, however well the individuals may already know each other, pays dividends. If, for example they know each other well, it is still worth making quick introductions around the table, with a specific focus such as what they bring to the subject, or want from the discussion, followed by someone (the chair; the coach) firmly stating the business purpose.

• ●GROW. Getting a goal is exponentially more difficult with a team, but for that very reason, incredibly valuable. Only a coach, with their ability to be comfortable with silence, or confusion, is likely to have the skill to ‘hang out’ for as long as it takes for a disparate group of people to come to true agreement on a common goal. I once coached a senior management team at a one-day offsite. The task was to come up by the end of the day with an urgent new marketing strategy to meet a sudden change in the market. After initial contracting on confidentiality, their roles with regard to this issue, and what the overall business task was, I explained the GROW Model to them and they agreed to use it. It then took well over two hours of very productive and robust discussion for them to agree the G, after which the R, O and W were tackled in sub-groups and plenary, with flipcharts and walks outside and discussion. The R, O and W took longer, as they worked through the detail of analysis and implementation, but the G was the hardest work of the day, and the breakthrough.
• ●Listening and questioning. Working with a team, the acuity of both listening and questioning needs to be turned up higher. One of the very best ways I know to do this, is Nancy Kline’s Time to Think approach, discussed later in this chapter.
• ●Non-directive. It’s the same rule as with individuals: the coach manages the process and the clients the content; but as you would guess, when there are more people the visible management and signalling of the process needs to be clearer, more overt, and often more robust.

^* Myles Downey, personal communication. See his (1999) Effective Coaching. London: Orion Business.

Getting the issues out

There is a simple pen-and-paper approach that very quickly brings out the issues that are ‘top of mind’ when a group of people comes together. It has great value at the start of life as a team, but can also be used for troubleshooting. (The detailed instructions are in the box below.) This is a very fast way of getting out the core issues in a team – or at least, the first crop that they are prepared to discuss! Effectively it generates for you a series of topics on which you can then coach the team.

It has two variants: the less confrontational one is to get them to share their ratings of the current team anonymously (i.e. they post their scores on the flip chart, but without initials). If you want to raise the stakes, they can be asked to initial their ratings – this is a high-risk strategy, best undertaken with a team you know well, and where trust between you and them, and between them, is already high.

A simpler version using the Post-it Notes so beloved of people working with teams, is also very effective in getting out, for example, what are the most pressing tasks to be tackled next in the business. In this version, you simply issue everyone with some Post-its, and ask them to think for a moment, then write on three separate Notes what they think are the three most important and urgent issues needing to be addressed (for example, it could be products to be developed, priority markets, SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats – etc.). When they have finished writing their Post-its, ask them to place them on flip charts. Then everyone mills around, moving the individual postings as needed so all the similar ones are grouped together. (Which also nicely breaks the ice, if there is any, and gets the noise and energy levels up in the room.) Finally, when everyone is satisfied the right Post-its are clustered together, ask the group to label each cluster. Voilà, the issues.

This is non-directive team coaching, or a beginning to it at least: the coach has run a simple process, but the issues are coming out from the group, and they are also naming and labelling them. Thereafter, you could do worse than just following GROW.

Psychometric team profiling

Training courses for several of the instruments discussed in Chapter 7, particularly MBTI and FIRO-B, devote considerable time and effort to equipping attendees with tools, exercises, tips and extensive background materials for using the psychometrics in team settings. It’s what they want you to do: sell more tests! But it does mean there is a wealth of predeveloped resource available.

Kline’s ‘Thinking Environment’

Over the last 30 years Nancy Kline has developed the ‘Thinking Environment’ approach, designed to ensure groups of people break their usual patterns (phones, interruptions, inattention, domination by a few) and listen to each other so well that thinking is greatly enhanced. I have mentioned it earlier, as it is invaluable in individual coaching, but I personally think its true power is only fully unleashed in groups.

Nancy describes applying this process to ‘meetings’, in Chapter 15 of her first book and Chapter 48 of her second,³ but I think any meeting run as she describes must transcend normal time-wasting and tedium to become not just a meeting but a highly productive coaching space. I know of several organisations where members are trained in the Time to Think approach, and use it not just with clients in team coaching but as part of their own normal business process, to great effect. There are 10 behaviours in the process, summarised in the following box: they might sound impossible, listed baldly like that, but it does work, as is compellingly described in the books, and as I have seen many times.

Katzenbach on teams

Jon Katzenbach’s work on forging teams is based on organisational behaviour research and vast experience with forging business teams in his 35 years at McKinsey & Company, and now as head of The Katzenbach Center in PwC. Though not officially written for the business coaching context, it offers us much of great value. For a start, his excellent definition of a true team:

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.⁴

Every section of that definition repays close scrutiny.

Katzenbach has a great deal else to offer coaches working with teams: their ideal size, what they must go through on the journey from disparate group to high-performing team, and much else, but for me there is one absolutely crucial lesson in it above all others: team forms around task. In other words, a team forms where there is a genuine need for one, and not before. Teambuilding exercises for the pointless sake of it are less likely anyway in a tough economic climate, but anyone still contemplating such things should recall his salutary words. If by contrast there is a real business need for a team to form, then his Chapter 3, distilling his wise advice into practical guidelines for people forming or coaching teams, is indispensable.

Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of Teams

Patrick Lencioni specialises in executive team development and is author of several books in this arena.⁵ His famous ‘five dysfunctions of a team’ are:

• ●absence of trust;
• ●fear of conflict;
• ●lack of commitment;
• ●avoidance of accountability;
• ●inattention to results.

Lencioni uses a range of tools, including MBTI, to develop mutual understanding and trust among team members, and various approaches to mastering conflict and improving team effectiveness, backed up by a scorecard approach to measurement of results. His first book set out the ‘five dysfunctions’ in a classic ‘leadership fable’; the subsequent ‘Field Guide’ is a practical guide for leaders, facilitators – and coaches – with exercises, tools and session plans for developing team effectiveness.

Appreciative Inquiry

Founded in 1987 by Cooperrider and Srivastva, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) seeks to create positive change in organisations. Like Katzenbach’s work, it was not designed for team coaching, but it has much to say to it. (It is also not formally a part of the Positive Psychology movement, though it is very congruent with it.) AI consultancy in organisations seeks not to find out what’s wrong in order to fix it but to assist the organisational members to find out what’s right and build from there.

It might hence be viewed as the strengths approach at organisational level. There is a great deal more to it than that (see for example The Appreciative Inquiry Commons at https://appreciativeinquiry.champlain.edu), but it is mentioned here, not just to pique your interest, but also as another salutary reminder that, as with individuals, when coaching a team it is very easy to be drawn down into everything that’s wrong with the team, the individual members, their interpersonal relations, the organisation, the world. But equally we know from authoritative research that there is equal power in attending to what is right and building therefrom.

Tackling collective thinking errors

One of the reasons coaching is so powerful is it improves the quality of individuals’ thinking; even the simple discipline of GROW serves to combat habitual thinking errors. (Looking at it in MBTI terms, for example, one might say that R and O cause Js, who are typically at risk of rushing to judgement, to stop and consider the facts and alternative options, while G and W causes Ps, who are typically at risk of keeping things open too long, to set a clear objective and come to completion, and so on.)

If in the 20th century economics had the upper hand in business and political thinking, I believe the 21st will be the century of psychology. It got off to a flying start: the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize was Professor Daniel Kahneman in 2002. (Strictly, he was the first person with a PhD in Psychology to win; others with connections with psychology but whose original training was in zoology, etc., had won in the past, but Kahneman was the first ‘clear’ psychologist.) There isn’t a prize for Psychology, so he won it for Economics, for his work on economic decision-making. It was a brave decision by the Nobel committee, as Kahneman’s work flies in the face of the consensus that has gripped economics throughout the post-war period – namely that ‘man is a rational decision maker’. Kahneman demonstrated categorically that he is not – and she isn’t either. He went further: not only do ordinary mortals mix large doses of the non-rational into their decision making but, crucially for business coaches and boards, the world’s leading professional decision makers are fallible, too. (We knew it; he proved it.)

Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky explicitly tested the decision-making powers of groups of expert decision makers in many fields, including over 40 of the world’s leading analysts of a particular type of cancer tissue slides, another group of the world’s leading trial court judges, and many others.⁶ They found that while each individual believed they rated many complex factors simultaneously, in fact they are no more exempt from basic biology than the rest of us: as Chapter 12 will note, we can process only ‘seven plus or minus two’ bits of information at once in the ‘working memory’ part of the brain. The experts (we do the same) cope with this by developing heuristics, or habitual patterns of thinking or shortcuts, enabling them to process the enormous amounts of information needed to get through each day. Their heuristics may be world-class in their expert focus, but they’re still shortcuts, and they lead to a percentage of thinking error.

Kahneman’s Nobel Prize was an early straw blowing in a new wind for economics. With the advent of ‘behavioural economics’, the ‘dismal science’⁷ is belatedly catching up with what psychologists had categorically demonstrated for decades: the fact that we are social animals. Even the most introverted and/or strong-minded of us can, as Milgram so graphically showed, be swayed in our decision-making processes by factors in our context – and to a far greater extent than we would have believed possible. Kahneman showed that, for a variety of reasons to do with both brain and context, even the individuals who are most highly valued by society for their thinking powers make errors too.

You would therefore expect that when individuals, even talented ones, then come together in groups, they would bring, as well as their gifts, all their individual capacity for decision flaws, and indeed they do. But research has fascinatingly discovered that when people form groups or teams, the capacity for error is more than the sum of its parts: whole new types of error appear!

We began this chapter talking about Milgram and one of the great classic experiments in 20th-century psychology. Let us end it by considering equally disturbing research with regard to the decision-making capability of groups – and how business coaching might mitigate some of that risk.

Psychologists have pinned down many of the quirks of non-rationality once multiple people are involved. They’ve shown the old view of ‘safety in numbers’ isn’t necessarily right. Groups can and often do come up with better solutions than the individuals would have alone – we don’t have to abandon trial by jury yet! But phenomena such as ‘risky shift’, ‘group polarisation’^* and ‘groupthink’ have been identified which beyond all doubt exist and represent serious risks to accurate and reliable decision making.⁸ We consider here just one of these: ‘groupthink’.

^* Risky shift and group polarisation are phenomena in groups, which can make worse (i.e. more extreme or ill-balanced) decisions than each individual would make alone. See Myers, op. cit., p. 680.

Research identifying groupthink arose directly out of one of the most dangerous periods in recent world history – when the USA’s Kennedy administration got to the brink of nuclear warfare with the Soviet Union. Aghast that such a gifted ‘Camelot’ administration, including the most brilliant minds of its generation, could go so horribly wrong in its decision making, the US Government poured money into research to understand why, and how it could be prevented in future (see below). The first famous study was by Irving Janis, and he and others have since examined other examples of this dangerous phenomenon including the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the explosion of the US space shuttle Challenger and the Iraq WMD (so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction) crisis and Iraq war, with all its consequences. Already by 2004 the bipartisan US Senate Intelligence Committee was saying WMD:

. . . demonstrated several aspects of groupthink: examining few alternatives, selective gathering of information, pressure to conform within the group or withhold criticism, and collective rationalization [which led analysts to] . . . interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have [WMD] programs.⁹

In the Cuban crisis disaster was averted; in Iraq it was not. Groupthink matters.

One of the preconditions of groupthink is an over-cohesive group. The essence of prevention is to break the carapace that then forms, by setting up systems to ensure channels of information from the outside, including disconfirming evidence, continue to flow. Military strategists know this, and when major decisions are being made often deliberately task a senior and respected officer from a different area with the specific role of ‘Devil’s Advocate’.

In civilian life, I believe that a sufficiently strong business coach, either a director additionally trained to coach, or a trusted outsider, supported by a clear and unequivocal anti-groupthink brief, could perform this task in corporate boardrooms.

We have many clear guidelines to help prevent groupthink, and I am struck by how good coaching goes straight to the heart of many of them. Some of the key recommendations from across the research spectrum are summarised in the following box.

We’re moving further into advanced coaching here, drawing on the crucial insights from social psychology, which have been hitherto largely untapped by business leaders and coaches. This leads us nicely into other exciting new domains of the business coaching of the future. In the next two chapters, we consider two more emerging specialist areas. First, in the next chapter, is career coaching for the new world.