Your business is growing slowly. You want more leads and sales, but they’re not coming. You realise your visual front of house (your logo, website and social media accounts) all show you in the wrong or bad light, so set about changing them. But you’re stuck, no one can see the way forward.

We’ve all been there. When you can’t imagine how you could possibly do things differently, this is classic groupthink.

If you’re new to the concept, groupthink is a phenomenon whereby a team makes poor decisions due to the desire to conform to the group’s interests of harmony. The removal of critical thought leads the team to accept a sub-optimal outcome to prevent any conflict from breaking out, and so leads to the business accepting an average outcome. 

We put some tips together that we use at our agency to combat groupthink:

1.     Research what everyone else is doing.

One that often gets overlooked, is simply researching to see what everyone else is doing to gain awareness of trends. Whilst simply following the crowd is not the best option, ensuring you’re in-step with what everyone else is doing, will help you to look relevant.

2.     Invite trustworthy people to audit your brand.

The problem we’ve found with inviting your friends or family to be critical about your branding is that they often don’t want to for fear of hurting your feelings (see the description of groupthink above for this). This means that you might end up accepting a brand voice that’s completely inadequate for your organisation due to taking bad advice.

3.     Purposely try doing something new and see what data you get back from it.

Another way to break out from closed-loop thinking is to purposely try a new approach or style that you wouldn’t usually consider. The goal isn’t to try and make it fit your brand but make decisions from a position an open mind after you’ve considered it. You’ll find you see it from a whole new viewpoint after you’ve changed your initial position.

4.     Reach out to a professional in that field and ask for advice.

If you’ve never worked with a business coach before, give it a go. They’ll not only challenge your thinking, but also keep you accountable as well. Breaking out from the closed loop thinking that’s limiting your creative flow.

5.     Agree before the ideas session that you’ll be respectful to each other and that it’s a safe space to air your views.

If you have diverse ideas that can easily get pushed to the side, agree a set of rules beforehand that allows everyone to talk. It’s often the people that are the quietest in the room that are holding the best ideas to themselves, not the loud and confident person who’s leading the discussion. Put them as the note-taker if possible, to allow the quieter voices space to speak.

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