ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the three principal decision traps of overconfidence, groupthink and anxiety avoidance and explores their role and impact in compromising decisions, complicating action and derailing initiatives. Project managers are accustomed to avoiding and overcoming disagreements inside the team, amongst stakeholders, with suppliers and with others senior managers, sponsors and leaders. Variation is highly cherished, especially in teams, in order to avoid homogenous thinking and problem resolution. Project teams bring together a diversity of opinions, views and team members encouraging a wider spectrum of approaches designed to avoid the uniformity and conformity of groupthink and encourage diversity through challenge. In contrast, members of teams engaged in groupthink appear to conform to the preferred thinking patterns of the group but do not act against their own interests. Successful teams need the trust, courage and judgment to determine if everyone is on board for the journey.
