by Willem Broekaert
The way team members argue and resolve their differences can significantly influence outcomes for both biotech startups and the investment funds providing them with capital. At the one end of the spectrum, you have companies with cultures of conflict, which in the long run kills morale and sends talent fleeing; at the other end, you have teams with a tendency towards overly harmonious agreement, letting bad ideas sail through unchallenged.
In between these two extremes lies a particular kind of team interaction—known as constructive controversy—which is key for peak performance.
The drag of destructive conflict
Biotech teams are often composed of brilliant professionals—scientists, clinicians, regulatory experts, and investors—each bringing distinct experiences and perspectives to the mix. As expected from any combination of people, these professionals often have strong opinions rooted in their specific areas of expertise.
Without the right framework, this multitude of vested opinions runs the risk of giving rise to territorial battles. When meetings become forums to express personal frictions with colleagues— rather than arenas to resolve disagreements—they rapidly turn into emotional minefields. This can lead to team meetings dropping in frequency, as the key decision makers retreat to their silos to make their choices without interference or drama.
The result? Timelines and strategies get imposed on a team without the input or buy-in from colleagues, leading to unaligned, poorly optimized actions that are often bound for failure. Eventually, trust erodes, and frustrated people start leaving the company, seeking greener grass where they can deploy their talent in a more rewarding way.
The trap of excessive harmony
It would seem on the surface that conflict is to be avoided at all costs. But counterintuitively, teams that get along too well can be just as doomed to failure. Some organizations value consensus to the point where any amount of disagreement is seen as disruptive or disloyal. Such cultures risk falling into groupthink—a phenomenon where the desire for agreement smothers critical evaluation.
“Some organizations value consensus to the point where any amount of disagreement is seen as disruptive or disloyal.”
Groupthink is often the unintended byproduct of a leadership team with too many people from a similar background, when companies prioritize hiring like-minded individuals rather than seeking to broaden the team’s diversity.
Groupthink can also develop when a team has one or a few dominant individuals, whose forceful personalities or sterling credentials exert an outsized influence on the rest. Their views carry such weight that others hesitate to challenge them—either out of deference, or a belief that any dissent would be futile—to the point where even well-founded concerns may go unspoken.
The dangers of unquestioned optimism
In biotech companies, the undesired consequences of groupthink include overly optimistic projections, flawed trial designs, or blindness to red flags that should have triggered immediate course corrections to budget or strategy.
In investment committees, groupthink can lead to a fund rallying around overhyped technologies, or overlooking promising opportunities due to collective blind spots. These teams also tend to cling to outdated strategies, even after market conditions have fundamentally shifted.
The burst of the biotech bubble in 2020-2022 offers a sobering case study of the latter. In the aftermath, many prominent funds found themselves faced with painful losses, as valuations crashed. Industry insiders have suggested that much of the damage can be traced to internal cultures where optimism went unquestioned and dissenting voices were sidelined.
Constructive controversy: The high-performing middle ground
Constructive controversy—that’s what the best-performing biotech teams do differently.
The term was coined in the 1970s by University of Minnesota social psychologist David W. Johnson. Dr. Johnson was the first to describe the benefits of a form of debate in which team members actively seek out differing perspectives and deliberately challenge each other’s assumptions.
Critically, this is done within a framework where all participants agree that the goal of the debate is not to win an argument but to deepen understanding. As such, any questions are simply meant to test assumptions, rather than challenge other team member’s personal opinions or motives.
Dr. Johnson’s research went on to demonstrate that constructive controversy fosters more innovative problem-solving and results in better judgments. But creating this kind of culture within a team requires deliberate effort.
Building a culture of smart disagreement
Fostering a culture of constructive controversy begins with strong leadership. Team leaders need to create a safe space where their team members feel secure in their ability to speak up without fear of reprisal. To do this, leaders must demonstrate their own openness to critique, building trust in their sincerity by actually course-correcting when presented with better arguments.
Organizations can get a head start on this by giving diversity due consideration when assembling a team, prioritizing assertiveness and a blend of backgrounds, in addition to experience and technical abilities. But there are also other creative ways to formalize the process of constructive disagreement in an existing team.
In a biotech company, for instance, different team members could be invited to write competing memos arguing for alternative solutions to a particular problem, then hold structured sessions to debate the merits of each. The goal is to expose the blind spots for the different approaches, but the exercise also builds trust in the critical process.
Investment teams can also take steps to consciously include constructive controversy in their decision-making process. One method is for different investment managers to be assigned specific roles in a discussion. For example, one person could be tasked with arguing in favor of a deal, while the other plays the devil’s advocate and argues against it, regardless of their personal opinion. The back-and-forth can help to reveal weaknesses in reasoning or identify overlooked risks that might otherwise go unnoticed.As teams become comfortable with the process, constructive criticism will often start to come naturally to team members, so long as the debates are always kept respectful and arguments aren’t allowed to turn personal.
The value of intellectual opposition in biotech
In biotech, a culture of intellectual opposition is vital, because the cost of unchallenged assumptions isn’t just monetary—it’s also felt in the dashed hopes of patients waiting for treatments that never materialize, or in the quiet death of possible therapies that nobody dared to defend.
In this high-stakes industry, the science will always be a key driver, along with the strategy and money. But ultimately, the quality of a team can make or break a company—not just the individual prowess of each team member, but also the culture they foster among themselves.
By allowing for the clash of ideas instead of egos, a biotech team improves its collective chance of success, to the benefit of both company and patients.
