Two weeks ago, this column discussed five of the ten most common and important thinking traps that people encounter while innovating. These traps include common cognitive biases (making systematic errors in judgment, knowledge, and reasoning), information-processing shortcuts, and non-compliance with best practices in systematic thinking. For good results, you must avoid these traps while working on an innovation project. Here are five more traps that wait for you when developing and evaluating ideas, and when acting on those ideas.

Violating the ground rules of idea development

Once you’ve generated your raw ideas, those ideas need to be developed, thus turning idea quantity into idea quality. And, just as you did while ideating, you must follow certain procedural rules to ensure good outputs.

Using Alex Osborn’s general rules of ideation as a starting point, I developed five ground rules of idea development that must be followed if you are to design and develop strong, meaningful idea concepts:

1. Defer judgment. No killing of ideas (as during ideation, don’t discard ideas).
2. Transform quantity into quality. (Take the time to design relevant ideas and develop value-adding, meaningful solutions.)
3. The more meaningful, the better. (Design and develop realistic, meaningful idea concepts and solutions that add value by improving the quality of people’s lives, by making the world a better place, by righting a terrible wrong, or by preventing the end of something good.)
4. Combine, and improve on, ideas. (Grab, and piggyback on, ideas suggested by others in order to improve an idea or to combine it with other ideas.)
5. Be visual. (Do not only express a designed idea concept in words, but also draw it. After all, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”)

How to avoid this trap? Before the start of idea development, review the ground rules of idea development with all session participants. During idea development, participants must make an effort to comply with these rules, and the facilitator must enforce compliance.

Groupthink

Given the collectivistic nature of most Asian cultures, groupthink is a bigger danger in Asia than in other parts of the world. Groupthink occurs when members of a group try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Creative contributions, unique viewpoints, and independent thinking are discouraged and lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of diversity in opinions and discussion of those opinions.

When falling into groupthink, people in the group avoid saying things that might disturb a comfortable consensus. As a result, groupthink leads to poor analysis and evaluation of evidence and ideas — and this leads to bad thinking, bad decisions and poor results. Famous examples of disasters caused by groupthink are the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961, and the Space Shuttle Challenger catastrophe in 1986.

How to avoid this trap? Encourage constructive conflicts in opinions, ideas and evidence while evaluating an idea. Counter the tendency to preserve the cozy group atmosphere found in many corporate — and Asian — cultures by exposing the group to critical feedback from the facilitators, and by encouraging competition with other teams.

The Abilene Paradox

The Abilene Paradox is an absurd outcome in which a group of people collectively decide to do something that no individual group member actually wants. It is a common breakdown of group communication in which each person mistakenly believes that they want something different from the group and so doesn’t object.

The story behind the name is of a family that drove 53 miles to Abilene, Texas, for dinner, although each family member would have preferred to eat at home.

How to avoid this trap? Throughout the process, encourage everyone to voice any dissatisfaction or concerns they might have.

Then, before committing to the decisions, have a facilitator privately check with each innovator and make sure that they are happy with the decisions.

Non-Rational Escalation of Commitment

Non-rational escalation of commitment is when you keep doing something despite knowing that it might lead to disaster. It can appear in two forms: unilateral, and competitive. In the unilateral form, you keep going because of what you’ve done before — “We can’t stop fighting this war because if we do, those who have already died will have died for nothing.” Escalation of commitment can also result from competition — “It doesn’t matter that my bids are more than the painting is worth, but I can’t let that jerk win.”

How to avoid this trap? The best way to beware of this dangerous trap is to ask: “If you had to decide on this course of action with your current knowledge, and irrespective of the past, would you do it again?” In an innovation project, we counter this dangerous trap by scheduling regular “pit stops” at critical milestones during the activation process, where project sponsors and senior managers are asked to make independent Stop-Go decisions when reaching a critical milestone irrespective of the previous project history.

The Hindsight Trap

The Hindsight Bias describes an erroneous human tendency to critically judge the negative outcome of an action (or decision) after we know the unfavorable outcome. In other words: After finding out whether or not an event occurred, individuals tend to overestimate the degree to which they would have predicted the correct outcome. A typical example of the Hindsight Bias may sound like this: “I thought all along that we should have stopped this innovation activation project at the 2nd milestone.”

How to effectively counter this trap? The Hindsight Bias reduces your ability to learn from the past and to objectively evaluate decisions. In general, individuals and teams should be judged on the process, tools and logic of their actions and decisions. A variety of factors outside of the control of an activation team (or a decision-maker) may affect the final results. Results are easy to tell in hindsight, but are unknown in foresight. So tell everyone who falls prey to this trap and judges in hindsight: “Why didn’t you speak up and actively intervene before?”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2013. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 28 March 2013.