| Stereotyping and the tendency of labelling are often the enemies to establishing a culture like the one you described. It's a product of our egos and cultural history unfortunately, and we are all susceptible to this flaw from time to time. I can't tell if we are getting better or worse on that front. The attention economy and social media might have accidentally turned people into various giant bubbles, making it increasingly more difficult to find common patterns to agree on. Everyone all has different opinions on thousands of tiny different things. People in the past did not face this problem, the society of yesterday was a much more simple place with fewer variables, so groupthink was probably a lot more common. Diversity is the obvious answer to counter groupthink, but managing diversity effectively is in itself another challenge. This is a modern problem of today and will become even bigger tomorrow. Other than alignment, a safe environment for everyone to operate in as you have suggested is absolutely fundamental. Human will always have the tendency to attach labels to everything, it's the natural way for our brain to create patterns and make sense of the world around us. Without those patterns, we can't operate effectively either. In that sense, the only way to counter that is to anonymize informational sources during internal meetings and data collection processes so people can't attach labels and link it to specific sources - people don't like to admit it but we all do this unconsciously. That way the data will be free from prejudices and biases since all sources are being given equal weight in consideration. Organizations should run pilot programs to test this on their decision-making process. It should be easy to achieve with many tools available today. Applying the "grey zone" mental model is also important here, as it constantly forces us to consider the pros and cons and weight everything in probability calculation - there is not a clearly right or wrong position in many cases. Another method is by encouraging each group member to seek out two to three other directly or secondary related topics by themselves (so there is a higher chance for a more random selection which should yield better accuracy), and then asking each person to make a summary on the areas they had chosen, and to further explain their idea on why they have established those critical connections with the main topic. This way, it may foster the discovery of new patterns based on arbitrary links that no other individuals had ever thought of before. |