Breaking Free from Groupthink: A Smarter Way to Challenge Ideas and Drive Innovation
- Erin Helcl
- Mar 6
- 4 min read
Many organizations want to innovate and invest heavily in transformation and change initiatives, but often overlook creating environments where employees feel safe enough to challenge the status quo. Psychological safety, especially challenger safety, is essential for fostering bold thinking and constructive dissent. However, even teams with high trust can fall into groupthink, where comfort prevents them from questioning assumptions.
Psychological safety is the belief that one can speak up, share ideas, and take risks without fear of humiliation or punishment. It’s the foundation of high-performing teams, enabling open dialogue and continuous learning.
Challenger safety is the highest level of psychological safety, where people feel not just comfortable contributing, but empowered to challenge assumptions, raise concerns, and push for better solutions. This is where true innovation happens—but it’s also the hardest stage to reach. Why? Because challenging the status quo often involves discomfort, tension, and the risk of disagreement. Many teams avoid these difficult conversations, favoring harmony over progress.
Yet, without challenger safety, teams can fall into groupthink, reinforcing old ways of thinking and stalling innovation. That’s where the Six Thinking Hats come in. By giving structure to conversations, they normalize constructive challenge, making it easier—and safer—to rethink, reimagine, and revolutionize the way we work.
Breaking Out of Groupthink: A Conversation at Blend
This past weekend at the Business and Design Conference, Blend, I had an insightful conversation with an attendee after my workshop on building psychological safety. He shared that his team had worked together for a long time and had high levels of trust, but that trust had also led them into a pattern of groupthink.
Because they knew each other so well, they had become comfortable reinforcing each other’s ideas rather than challenging the status quo. Even though they weren’t afraid of speaking up, they weren’t actively engaging in constructive dissent either.
This got us talking about how tools like the Six Thinking Hats could help teams like his break out of habitual thinking and reintroduce challenger safety into their conversations.
By assigning different modes of thinking to the group, the Six Hats can:
Disrupt automatic agreement by encouraging intentional shifts in perspective.
Make critical thinking a structured practice, so questioning the norm feels less personal.
Encourage new ways of looking at problems without threatening existing trust.
This conversation reinforced something important: trust alone isn’t enough for true innovation. A team can feel safe but still avoid constructive challenge if they don’t have mechanisms to actively diversify their thinking.
The Six Thinking Hats offer one way to refresh team dynamics, ensuring that trust doesn’t turn into complacency, and that psychological safety includes not just support, but also productive challenge.
How the Six Thinking Hats Help Teams Challenge the Status Quo
Each hat represents a specific mode of thinking, allowing team members to step into different perspectives without personal bias. This structure helps depersonalize criticism, making it safer to challenge ideas constructively.
Example: Using the Six Thinking Hats to Rethink a Customer Experience
Imagine a team tasked with redesigning the digital onboarding experience for a financial services company. The goal is to make it simpler, more intuitive, and engaging for new customers, but the team has been working together for years and tends to default to small tweaks rather than bold innovations.
Using the Six Thinking Hats, they structure their discussion like this:
Thinking Hat | Challenger Safety Questions | What This Unlocks |
White Hat – Data & Facts | What data are we ignoring because it doesn’t fit our current assumptions? What biases might be shaping the way we interpret our numbers? | Grounds the discussion in objective data, revealing blind spots. |
Red Hat – Emotions & Intuition | What fears or frustrations are customers experiencing that we aren’t addressing? What are we afraid to say about this process? | Surfaces hidden emotional insights that could shape a better experience. |
Black Hat – Risks & Problems | If we assume our current process is completely wrong, what risks does that reveal? What’s the biggest failure scenario we haven’t fully explored? | Forces teams to confront hidden risks and test assumptions. |
Yellow Hat – Benefits & Opportunities | What is possible if we completely rethink this? What opportunities are we overlooking by playing it safe? | Highlights transformative ideas and opens doors to bold strategies. |
Green Hat – Creativity & New Ideas | What if we broke all the rules—how else could we solve this? How would we design this if we were starting from scratch today? | Encourages radical new ideas, pushing teams beyond iterative thinking. |
Blue Hat – Process & Next Steps | How do we ensure we keep challenging ourselves moving forward? What processes can we put in place to avoid falling back into old habits? | Ensures sustained challenger safety, making innovation continuous. |
Why This Works for Psychological and Challenger Safety
By rotating through different thinking modes, the Six Thinking Hats help teams:
Break out of habitual thinking (avoiding groupthink).
Encourage healthy debate without personal conflict.
Normalize challenging ideas in a structured way.
Balance risk assessment with creativity.
For teams that struggle with challenger safety, this approach provides a framework that makes questioning ideas expected and valued, rather than intimidating.
Stay Tuned For Upcoming Workshops
I’m launching virtual workshops that will help you master psychological safety, constructive challenge, and innovation frameworks. These hands-on sessions include practical exercises, group discussions, and actionable takeaways that you can apply immediately.
Designed for both leaders and team members, these workshops will equip you with strategies to challenge ideas productively, create high-trust environments, and drive meaningful change in your teams.
Crediting the thinkers behind these concepts
Psychological safety as a concept has been widely studied, with Dr. Amy Edmondson pioneering research in the field.
Dr. Timothy R. Clark later introduced the Four Stages of Psychological Safety: Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Contributor Safety, and Challenger Safety.
The Six Thinking Hats framework was created by Edward de Bono, offering a structured approach to diverse thinking and problem-solving, making it a valuable tool for fostering psychological safety and constructive dissent.
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