The Titan's Fatal Flaw Wasn't Engineering. It Was Groupthink.
The engineers saw it coming. The culture made sure no one could say so. Five lessons on groupthink for leaders who don't want to sink their companies.
The Titan sub was built to visit the most famous warning in history. It died ignoring its own.
In 1912, the Titanic held its speed through an ice field after ignoring a series of iceberg warnings. The unsinkable ship sank.
More than a century later, five people climbed into a submersible to visit the wreck. They met the same end. On June 18, 2023, the Titan sub imploded on its way down, killing everyone aboard, including the CEO who built it.
As AI continues to transform our work and lives, I can’t help but reflect on the paradox. Technology keeps getting better and better, but leadership doesn’t. We keep repeating the same mistakes.
The Titanic captain dismissed the ice warnings. OceanGate’s CEO dismissed the experts. Same groupthink, same destiny. Groupthink is always an accident waiting to happen.
After years of helping leadership teams have the conversations they’ve been avoiding, I learned one thing. The Titan isn’t an outlier. It’s an ordinary pattern at an extreme scale. Here are five ways groupthink can sink your company, and how to avoid it.
1. Kill the messenger at your own peril
David Lochridge ran marine operations at OceanGate. In 2018, he was asked to inspect the Titan. He flagged that the hull had never been properly tested for flaws. The company told him no equipment existed to run that test. Then they fired him (and sued him).
The message to everyone else was simple. Raising a safety concern is a career risk. The investigators found a consistent pattern: experts who raised safety concerns were dismissed or left the company for disagreeing with the CEO. The company culture was close-minded and pressured people into conformity.
That is how groupthink forms. Not through one bad decision, but through a pattern. People watch what happens to the person who spoke up and decide it’s not worth it.
Your culture is the behavior you reward and punish. Censor the messenger, and people stop sharing the hard truths. Reward candor, and you build a speak-up culture. You get what you pay attention to.
2. Treating external feedback as the enemy
The Titan was never certified by an independent agency. And that was by design, not chance. In a 2019 blog post, the company argued that classification slows innovation and that, by itself, it “is not sufficient to ensure safety.” Inviting outside review was framed as a brake on progress.
This is groupthink’s favorite defense. Every leader thinks they’re different. That the usual rules don’t apply to them. The conviction can be sincere, but it ignores a hard fact: over 80% of leaders aren’t self-aware. Groupthink only widens those blind spots.
Overconfidence is what makes leaders stop listening. Most ignore feedback. Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, didn’t know what he didn’t know.
The feedback that makes you uncomfortable is the one you must listen to the most. Who tends to ask the annoying questions? The auditor, the regulator, the board member. These are not your enemies. They have nothing to lose by telling you the truth. But you’ll lose a lot by ignoring them.
3. Not caring why people quit
When reporting the accident, many focused on the sub’s failed alarm. The Titan’s monitoring system was supposed to warn that the hull was under immense pressure. But even if it had worked, why wait until it’s too late? The employees have warned about that risk for years.
David Lochridge flagged the hull. He wasn’t alone. A second employee raised a critical safety concern. He watched it go nowhere and resigned. Two people walked away over unaddressed concerns. That is a signal, years before the tragedy occurred.
When key employees leave, it’s easy to focus on personality issues. We assume negative intent. Instead of trying to understand their viewpoints, we dismiss them for not being a team player.
Research for my book, Forward Talk, shows that fear is not the main reason people don’t share their thoughts. It’s futility. People go quiet when they see that nothing will change. And then they quit.
But you still have a chance to learn from them. Treat the exit interview as a feedback opportunity, not just a formality. Rather than sharing your perspective, let them share theirs. They had nothing to lose. So, pay attention.
4. Being too defensive
Stockton Rush wasn’t reckless by accident. He was chasing something bold, and innovation always breaks some things. But breaking things is not the same as breaking the people who question you. Bold leaders often blur that line: they love to challenge the status quo but resist being challenged back.
A former employee described Rush getting defensive and shutting down questions in all-hands meetings. The damage isn’t the one bruised exchange. It’s everyone else in the room, quietly deciding to keep their next concern to themselves.
We often confuse defensiveness with confidence. Leaders are supposed to look decisive. And that certainty is what makes our silence feel reasonable. If the boss is this sure, who am I to push?
Leaders don’t need to be right. They need to do what’s right. When people stop challenging your thinking, you don’t just fool yourself. You put your business at risk. Even lives.
5. Letting conversational debt compound
The first warnings about the Titan came as early as 2017. The implosion came in 2023. Six years passed between the concern no one acted on and the funeral. The US Coast Guard later ruled the deaths preventable and said Rush would likely have faced criminal charges had he survived.
The report is specific about the flaw. Carbon fiber was a novel choice for a deep-sea hull. The sub should be a sphere, not a cylinder. OceanGate built a cylinder anyway, but that wasn’t the only thing compounding. So was the silence around it.
This is Conversational Debt. The hard conversations a leader avoids don’t resolve themselves. They get deferred, and the balance compounds in silence. OceanGate paid the highest price.
If the same concern keeps resurfacing in new forms, the conversation hasn’t happened yet. Have it now, while it’s still cheap.
The debt always shows itself before it comes due. The same concern resurfaces. People keep telling you something’s off. That repetition is the signal. When the pattern keeps returning, challenge your assumptions: “What am I missing?
How to stop groupthink from sinking your company
The Titan implosion was a human tragedy. It reveals patterns leaders ignore when the stakes look small. One skipped disagreement. One concern dismissed. Each feels small. So we minimize the long-term consequences and move on.
The Titan had people who spoke up about the danger. They were ignored or fired. And conformity won.
Conversational Debt rarely comes due overnight. In my client work, I see how it builds from a pattern of small signals, each easy to dismiss. Missing one signal is human. Ignoring the pattern is a choice.
Change your conversations. Change the outcome.
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Like other technologies, AI is accelerating decisions. And in doing so, is cutting back on, if not shutting down, space for these challenges when leaders allow it to do so. In larger organizations, the voices that have the deepest understanding are often on the frontlines, and not given any voice. The challenge is how to leverage both artificial intelligence and human wisdom. A culture of belonging—where everyone feels valued, trusted, respected—is an important step in that direction.
I hear you but toxic leadership was the cause here. This causes groupthink although groupthink can occur without a clear toxic leader. In this case, it was a clear toxic idiotic narcissistic leader that was the root cause of this disaster.