Written by Michiel R. De Boer
The team had extraordinary relationships. They had worked together, most of them, for three years or more. They genuinely liked each other. Their meetings were warm, inclusive, well-facilitated. People listened. Nobody dominated. Ideas were welcomed and discussed with generosity. The meeting culture, by any conventional measure, was excellent.
And they had been discussing the same two strategic options for four months.
Not because the analysis was incomplete. The analysis had been done: thoroughly, by people who knew the business. Not because the options were unclear. They were clearly differentiated, with well-understood trade-offs. Not because the decision required external approval it had not yet received. The decision was theirs to make.
The reason nothing had been decided was that every time a conclusion appeared to be emerging, someone raised a concern, the concern was carefully heard and incorporated, the discussion expanded, the conclusion receded, and the group arrived at the end of the meeting having maintained its harmony and deferred its decision.
By the fourth month, the option that the market had originally existed for had been partially captured by a competitor. The window had narrowed. A decision that would have been clearly better four months earlier was now more complex, because the context had moved while the team had deliberated.
“We’re very aligned,” the team leader told me. He meant it as a strength.
He was not wrong. The team was aligned. On the importance of listening to each other. On the value of taking everyone’s perspective seriously. On the culture they had built together. They were aligned on all of those things.
They were not aligned on what they were going to do.
Harmony As A Trap
Relatedness: the sense of belonging, connection, and goodwill within a group, is one of the three core drivers of intrinsic motivation in Self-Determination Theory. It matters enormously to how people experience their work and how willing they are to invest in shared outcomes. A team without it is a team where collaboration is transactional, communication is guarded, and the surplus effort that comes from genuinely caring about the people you work with is absent.
But relatedness without accountability is not a functional team. It is a social group with shared tasks.
The distinction is this: accountability in a team context means the willingness to hold each other to commitments, to name when something is not working, to disagree when a direction seems wrong, and to make decisions that some members would have preferred to be different, and to implement those decisions anyway, because the team’s ability to move matters more than the resolution of every individual preference.
Harmony, when it becomes the primary operating value of a team, systematically crowds out accountability. Not because people are weak. Because people are human. Naming a real concern in a warm, relational environment carries a social cost. It introduces tension, it distinguishes you from the consensus, it potentially creates an unequal dynamic with a colleague you like and want to continue liking.
The rational response, in a culture that values harmony highly, is to soften the concern, incorporate it into the general discussion, and let it dissolve rather than letting it crystallise into a real objection that the team has to engage with directly.
This is not a failure of courage. It is a failure of structure. And it is the team leader’s problem to solve.
What Groupthink Actually Looks Like In Practice
Irving Janis introduced the concept of groupthink in 1972, developing it from his analysis of several major foreign policy failures including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam War. His central insight: that highly cohesive groups under pressure to maintain their consensus actively suppress dissent, not through coercion, but through the internal social dynamics of belonging.
The members of a groupthink-prone team do not experience themselves as suppressing dissent. They experience themselves as being collegial. As not wanting to be the difficult person. As recognising that their concern is probably overstated, that they are probably missing something, that it would be disruptive and a little arrogant to push back now when the group seems to be moving toward agreement. The self-censorship is genuine, not performative. And it is invisible to the group as a whole, because the concerns that are being suppressed never make it into the room.
The symptoms Janis identified are recognisable across organisations and cultural contexts: the illusion of unanimity, in which silence is interpreted as agreement; collective rationalisation, in which the group explains away warning signs rather than examining them; the emergence of self-appointed “mindguards” who filter information that might disrupt consensus; and the stereotyping of anyone who does challenge the group’s direction as difficult, negative, or not a team player.
What makes the pattern so persistent is that it is most severe in the groups with the best relationships. Cohesion is the precondition of groupthink. You cannot have groupthink in a team that does not care about each other. Which means the very thing the team has built with three years of effort: the warmth, the trust, the genuine affection, is the condition that makes their decision-making vulnerable.
The APAC Dimension: Musyawarah And The Consensus Imperative
In APAC organisational contexts, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia, and much of Southeast Asia, the dynamic described above is amplified by cultural frameworks that assign genuine positive value to the process of consensus-building.
Musyawarah-mufakat (deliberation toward consensus) is not merely a procedural preference in these contexts. It is a value. It reflects a genuine belief that decisions made collectively, with everyone’s perspective genuinely incorporated, are more legitimate, more durable, and more respectful of the relationships within which the decision will need to be implemented. This belief is not wrong. In the right conditions, consensus-based decision-making produces better outcomes than unilateral decision-making precisely because it draws on more information and creates broader ownership of the result.
The problem arises when musyawarah becomes the end rather than the means, when the process of collective deliberation becomes so valued in itself that the outcome of that deliberation is perpetually deferred in favour of more deliberation. When apparent agreement in a meeting masks unresolved concerns that will surface later in passive non-implementation. When the room produces consensus and the corridor produces a different, informal consensus that was never surfaced.
In these cultural contexts, the facilitator or leader who wants to improve decision quality cannot simply import the Western norm of direct challenge and majority-rules resolution. That will produce meetings where people say less, not more, because the cultural cost of open disagreement in a group setting is real and is not eliminated by being told that it is safe.
What works, in my experience, is structured approaches that create space for honest input without requiring individuals to publicly challenge the group. Anonymous digital input at key decision points. One-on-one pre-meeting conversations with each team member specifically designed to surface concerns that will not be voiced in group settings. Explicit assignment of the “critical review” role: the team member whose job in this meeting is to find what could go wrong, which externalises the challenge function and removes it from any individual’s personal social risk.
These are not workarounds for cultural obstacles. They are adaptations that work with the cultural reality rather than against it, producing better-quality decisions while respecting the relational values the team has legitimately built.
The Accountability Deficit: What It Costs
A team that cannot make decisions is not simply slow. It is systemically expensive in ways that extend far beyond the immediate project.
The most direct cost is opportunity: the competitor that moves while the team deliberates, the market window that closes, the talent that decides elsewhere while the hiring conversation continues. These are visible and quantifiable, though they are rarely traced back to the decision-making dysfunction that produced them.
The less visible cost is in the team’s credibility and morale. A team that is aware, and they always are, that it has a decision problem carries that awareness as a burden. The high performers on the team, who are most sensitive to the quality of the environment they work in, notice the dysfunction and draw their own conclusions about whether this organisation is capable of moving at the speed they want to move at. The team leader, who is in many cases a skilled and well-intentioned person, privately loses authority with each meeting that ends without a decision, because authority in a team context is built by the ability to move things forward.
And there is a subtler cost that is hardest to see from the inside: the message the pattern sends about accountability. A team that consistently defers decisions is, in practice, demonstrating that individual accountability for outcomes is not a real operating norm. That responsibility is always collective, which means nobody is truly responsible. That the consequences of inaction are more socially comfortable than the consequences of action. These are lessons the team members absorb and carry into every other aspect of their work together.
Practical Recommendations
Name the pattern directly: but not as criticism. The most useful intervention at the start of a decision-quality problem is an honest conversation about it. Not “you are all conflict-avoidant” but “we have noticed that our decision-making cycle is longer than our competitive environment requires. I want to look at how we make decisions as a team and identify what we want to change.” This frames the issue as a design question, not a character failure. People hear it differently, and it focuses the conversation where it needs to go.
Separate the deliberation from the decision. One structural change that reliably improves decision quality: build an explicit moment in every significant discussion where deliberation ends and decision begins. Before that moment, all perspectives are equally valid, all concerns are surfaced, all options are on the table. After that moment, the team is deciding: and the social norm shifts from inclusion to resolution. Most teams run these two phases concurrently without ever distinguishing them, which means the deliberation phase never has a natural conclusion and the decision phase never has a clear start.
Assign explicit accountability. A decision made collectively, with no named owner, is rarely implemented with the same rigour as a decision with a named owner and a clear deadline. The owner is not the person who decides: the team decides. The owner is the person responsible for implementation and for reporting back on outcomes. Naming an owner also creates accountability for the quality of the decision: when this owner comes back in six weeks, they will be accountable for what happened. That accountability, visible and specific, changes how the original decision is made.
Create a protected space for dissent. Whether through anonymous pre-meeting input, a structured “pre-mortem” exercise before major decisions (imagining the decision has failed and working backward to identify the most likely reasons), or the rotation of a formal devil’s advocate role, the goal is the same: to make it structurally easy for concerns to surface without requiring the concerned person to bear the full social cost of being the one who objects. Good decisions require good information. Good information requires a channel for uncomfortable truths.
Distinguish between consensus on direction and consensus on every element. The cultural value of consensus is not incompatible with decisive action, but it requires the distinction to be explicit. A team can be genuinely aligned on the direction while accepting that not every element of the implementation will satisfy everyone equally. “We are moving in this direction” is a decision. “Everyone is fully satisfied with this direction” is an unachievable standard. Making the former explicit gives people permission to disagree on elements while supporting the whole.
Relatedness Requires Productive Conflict To Survive
The team I described at the beginning of this piece eventually made their decision. Not after another month of deliberation, but after a facilitated session that surfaced, for the first time, what was actually underneath the repeated deferrals: not insufficient analysis, but two real, named disagreements that had been circling the discussion without being directly engaged. When those disagreements were surfaced, named, examined, debated with genuine directness, the decision was made in ninety minutes.
The team’s relationships survived the disagreement. In most cases, they survived it better than they had survived four months of circling, because directness acknowledged builds more trust than harmony maintained through avoidance.
Productive conflict does not threaten relatedness. It deepens it. The teams that trust each other most are the ones that have navigated genuine disagreement and come out the other side. The warm, cohesive, never-quite-deciding team is not the team with the best relationships. It is the team that has not yet tested its relationships with the friction that good relationships are built to withstand.
The harmony is worth protecting. The way you protect it is not by avoiding difficult conversations. It is by learning to have them well.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the last major decision your team made. Not the last discussion, but the last actual decision, with a named owner, a clear direction, and a date by which it would be acted on.
If you are not certain when that was, or if the conversation is still ongoing, the harmony your team has built may be protecting something it should instead be engaging with directly.
Productive conflict does not threaten good relationships. It is how good relationships prove themselves.
This is Piece 6 of an eleven-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece: The team that performs brilliantly under pressure: and burns out after: urgency as false glue, and what happens when the crisis ends.
