Opinion Piece – Three Traps that Turn Your Best Work into Group Fails
Sat Pillai, CircledUp, Founder
Have you ever worked at your absolute best only for the outcome to turn out to be a group fail? Read on to find the three inherent traps you would want to avoid to prevent group fails. Learn about a better way, based on research on organisational behaviour, that ensures your best work become group wins.
Hidden Agendas, Biases and Blind-spots Hurt Group Success
When we work in groups, our diverse points-of-view are often rooted in hidden agendas, biases and blind-spots. For example:
- Hidden agendas. We may opt to share opinions when we feel safe to do so, yet we may withhold them when they may well have been crucial.
- Biases. We are inclined to selectively engage with topics and opinions that we believe we can comfortably support or reject, with little time to dig deeper.
- Blind-spots. We tend to give weight to opinions from those who appear certain, yet we discount, or do not even consider, opinions from others who may be uncertain.
As a result of these three inherent traps, our collective efforts take a longer, winding and uncertain path compared to what we could have achieved if we headed directly to our goal, armed with complete, accurate and timely perspectives.
Such Traps Risk Groups Reaching Flawed Conclusions
If we were to be honest with ourselves, groups rarely attain a complete, accurate and timely assessment of their challenges and opportunities. Two things happen as a result:
- Flawed conclusions. Governments, industries, corporations, NGOs and other teams unwittingly reach flawed conclusions based on incomplete, inaccurate or unprocessed information.
- Failed initiatives. Policies, regulations, investments, strategies, alliances, programs, products and processes founded on such flawed conclusions are consequently likely to achieve sub-optimal and undesirable outcomes for some or all of the stakeholders within these initiatives.
Global impact but local or organizational cause
We simply need to look around the world about us to see the results of flawed conclusions. Any global issue is triggered by group failures that had happened much earlier at local or organisational levels.
- Global. We now pay more attention to the effects of climate change, economic disparity and political discontent.
- Local or organisational. Yet, we did not pay enough attention to the triggers that arose much earlier as a result of perhaps mismanaged or poor quality initiatives.
Wherever we work together, the paths to our goals are littered with misunderstood causes, unintended effects and flawed conclusions.
Flawed Conclusions > Wasted Action > Unsustainable Outcomes
Outcomes based on flawed conclusions become reality not just for a subset of those who were party to reaching those conclusions but, eventually, for all of us. By triggering unintended consequences, choices based within a subjective melting-pot of hidden agendas, biases and blind-spots undermine our overall productivity, well-being, and relationships.
This damage simply furthers a cycle of wasteful actions and unsustainable outcomes.
Surfacing and Optimizing Unvoiced Perspectives
While we need to work in groups, regardless of the organisations to which we belong, is there a new way of working? A way that uses perspectives – shared as completely, as accurately and as readily as possible – to shape better outcomes?
There is a growing body of research and practice within the field of organisational behaviour that has developed tools to surface and optimize perspectives. This approach seeks to eliminate the traps that will turn your best work into group fails, by using misunderstood causes and unintended effects as tools to rapidly build winning outcomes at less cost.
Bringing about resource efficiency, e.g., through leasing, will need teams of stakeholders across value-chains to work together in ways that overcome hidden agendas, biases and blindspots. Until we do so, we will only go round in circles in a linear economy.
About The Author
Sat Pillai brings 25 years of experience in Industry, Consulting and Finance on three continents, focused on new product/service development and launch. He founded CircledUp in 2012, a business that measures and maximises the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives using stakeholder analytics within one, between two, or across many organisations. Previously, he was:
a vice-president in Strategic Risk and Regulatory Initiatives and a member of a regional Executive Leadership Council at Bank of America in the US, with a focus on analysing and structuring loan deals for US capital markets, corporate and commercial clients, a senior management consultant in strategy and transformation at Capgemini Consulting, and his own firm, and a researcher and engineer in new product development at the University of Warwick, and at Gillette (Procter & Gamble).
Sat now also serves as the Chair of the Environment Policy Unit at the Federation of Small Businesses, and as their Environment Policy Lead in London. He is part of the organising committee of the Circular Economy Club in London, a franchise of a global network of 260 chapters in 110 countries that promotes new (and old!) ways of production and consumption. He has been an advisor to sustainable ventures, including the 1st large-scale cycle-hire venture in London. While working towards his MBA in Finance at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Sat worked for a venture capital fund investing in renewable technologies and at HSBC’s Energy & Utilities coverage group. During his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College, he conducted research into industrial applications of hydrogen and the emergence of the biodegradable plastics industry.