A subtle killer of creativity or solution oriented thinking is groupthink which occurs when groups (generally larger groups or teams) lose the benefits of independent thought and end up just agree with each other. A bit like herd thinking. Quite often people in the group just end up patting themselves on the back rather than creating something great. (Image credit: Flickr)
To avoid groupthink, we suggest learning from Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, who solves the problem with the two pizza metric. The metric goes like this – if a team can’t be fed by 2 pizzas alone then the team or group is too big and will most likely succumb to groupthink. The brain can’t handle too many people and smaller teams tend to work best. I also believe it would help bring people to meetings and perhaps better focused around core issues?
Another way we use this metric is ensure that there are enough pizza slices to go around and by implication ensure that everyone on the team has a chance to provide their own input into a problem or challenge we face. This way we avoid the dominant ones on the team taking up too much time.
Let us know what other metrics you have used or would use in the comments below.
