The 12-Week MBA Chapter 19: The Power of Dissent
Everyone on your team says they agree. The meeting ends early. People smile and nod. And then you make a terrible decision. Sound familiar?
This is post 21 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.
Chapter 19 tackles something most teams get completely wrong. They treat harmony as a sign of health. Quick agreement feels good. Nobody wants to be the person who slows things down or starts an argument. But the authors argue that easy agreement is often the most dangerous thing that can happen to a team. When nobody pushes back, nobody is really thinking.
The Groupthink Trap
The authors open with a story from their leadership training simulations. They ask teams to evaluate their own performance using a simple exercise: two columns on a whiteboard, one for what is going well and one for what needs to change. Almost every time, someone says “we are communicating well as a team.” Heads nod. Everyone agrees.
Then the authors change the format. They go around the room one by one and require each person to share both something positive and something that needs to change. Suddenly the picture looks different. The people who said communication was great were the ones who had been doing most of the talking. The quieter team members had concerns all along. They just never said anything.
This is groupthink. The term comes from research psychologist Irving Janis back in the 1970s. It works like this: someone voices an opinion early, and nobody pushes back. It is not that everyone agrees. It is that nobody wants to be the one to disagree. The absence of opposition gets mistaken for consensus. And in that comfortable silence, teams make their worst decisions.
The authors give a relatable example. Imagine your team needs to hire someone. There is an obvious candidate, let us call him Orson. One person on the team has seen Orson make some questionable calls in the past. But everyone else seems enthusiastic. So this person thinks: “My concerns are vague. Everyone else knows him better. If I speak up, I will just slow things down.” So they stay quiet. Multiply that by several people, and you get a team that unanimously chose a candidate nobody was actually excited about.
Why We Avoid Disagreement
Here is the thing. You do not need a scary boss or a power-hungry leader to create groupthink. The authors point out that even in their training simulations, where the “CEO” has zero real authority and cannot fire or promote anyone, groupthink still shows up. People avoid disagreement just because they want to keep things friendly. We have all been there. You know from experience that a small disagreement can turn into a big fight. So you stay quiet and go along.
But the authors draw a clear line. A high-performing team is not one that avoids conflict. It is one that uses disagreement to make better decisions without destroying relationships in the process. That is a hard balance, but it is the one that matters.
Teams need friction. A team that agrees unanimously on everything is probably not thinking hard enough. If every decision is easy and obvious, you are likely avoiding the interesting and important ones.
The Devil’s Advocate (and Its Limits)
So how do you get teams to disagree productively? One classic answer is the devil’s advocate. Someone whose job is to argue against whatever the group seems to be leaning toward.
The authors reference a fun example from the movie World War Z. In the film, Israel is the only country that prepares for the zombie apocalypse because they use what is called the tenth-person principle. If nine analysts all agree on an interpretation, the tenth person must come up with an alternative. Nine analysts said the word “zombie” in intercepted military communications was code for “terrorist.” The tenth person asked: what if they really mean zombies?
The same logic applies to business. The authors bring up the innovator’s dilemma. When a company has a product that is doing well, there are a dozen good arguments against investing in something new. The new thing will cannibalize existing sales. Marketing does not know how to position it. Production costs will be high. It is easy for the whole leadership team to quickly agree: let us stick with what works. Nokia had a touchscreen smartphone before Apple released the iPhone. They buried it.
But here is the problem with having one designated devil’s advocate. That person burns out. Carrying the weight of being the constant contrarian is exhausting. And over time, the team starts to tune them out. “Oh, that is just Sarah being negative again.” The dissent loses its power because it always comes from the same source.
Better Tools for Surfacing Dissent
The authors suggest several practical techniques that spread the responsibility for disagreement across the entire team.
The Round Robin. Instead of open discussion where the loudest voices win, go around the room in order. Each person must share both an argument for and an argument against the current direction. This forces everyone to think critically, not just the designated contrarian. The team leader should hold off on sharing their own views until after everyone else has spoken, because the boss’s opinion has a way of shutting down everything that comes after it.
The Fist of Five. On the count of three, everyone raises their hand showing a number from zero to five. Zero means total opposition. Five means you are ready to champion the idea. This works because everyone signals at the same time, so nobody is influenced by what came before. And it captures degrees of enthusiasm, not just yes or no.
This is where it gets interesting. If everyone shows three fingers, the team agrees but nobody is excited. That is a warning sign. Maybe the team is solving the wrong problem. And if everyone shows five fingers with huge enthusiasm, the authors say that is also a red flag. Unanimous excitement might mean groupthink has already taken hold.
Private Forecasts. When decisions involve numbers and predictions, the authors describe a technique from Harvard Business School professor Jan Hammond. Instead of discussing forecasts as a group, each person writes down their prediction privately. Then the team averages the results. Hammond used this approach with a sporting goods company where group discussions consistently skewed toward whoever spoke loudest. Private forecasts removed that bias and significantly improved accuracy. As a bonus, the spread between individual forecasts gave the team a built-in confidence meter. Tight clustering meant high confidence. Wide spread meant they probably needed more data before committing.
Why Cognitive Diversity Matters
Having good processes for surfacing disagreement is important. But the authors point out that processes only work when people actually have different perspectives to share. If everyone on the team went to the same schools, worked in the same industry, and thinks the same way, no round robin in the world will produce genuinely different viewpoints.
The authors reference social scientist Scott Page, who breaks cognitive diversity into four parts: different ways of seeing problems, different ways of categorizing information, different ways of generating solutions, and different ways of predicting cause and effect. Teams with this kind of diversity are better at handling exactly the decisions that matter most, the ones where outcomes are hard to predict and the stakes are high.
Cognitive diversity is not the same as identity diversity, but the authors note that hiring people from different backgrounds, different fields, and different life experiences does tend to increase cognitive diversity as well. Beyond the fundamental fairness argument, there is a practical reason to build teams that do not all look and think alike. Those teams simply make better decisions because they have more perspectives to draw from.
But even with a diverse team, you still need the right processes. Diversity of thought is wasted if only the loudest voices get heard. A quiet team member with a brilliant objection will stay quiet unless the team has built a culture and a process that makes dissent safe and expected.
The Meeting Without the Boss
One more technique the authors suggest is simple but powerful: hold at least one meeting without the leader present. The boss’s views carry extra weight whether they intend it or not. Remove them from the room, and people who would normally stay quiet are more likely to speak up.
Many teams already do this informally, whispering in hallways after the real meeting. The authors say make it official. When dissenting views emerge through a known, accepted process, they are easier to bring back to the full team. Nobody has to feel like they are going behind the boss’s back.
Key Takeaway
Quick agreement is not a sign of a healthy team. It is often a sign of groupthink, where people stay quiet because they do not want to rock the boat. The best teams build friction into their process on purpose. They use round robins, anonymous signals, private forecasts, and meetings without the leader to make sure dissenting views come to the surface.
The goal is not to create chaos or endless debate. It is to make sure that when a team commits to a decision, they have actually stress-tested it first. Disagreement before the decision leads to better execution after it. A team that never disagrees is a team that is not trying hard enough.
Book: The 12-Week MBA by Nathan Kracklauer & Bjorn Billhardt | ISBN: 978-0-306-83236-9
Previous: Chapter 18 - Deliberating and Executing
Next up: Chapter 20 - Embracing Responsibility Part 1 - Weaving numbers and people together.
Part of the 12-Week MBA retelling series