Please don’t drink the Kool-Aid. And definitely not in an echo chamber.

Over the past year, I’ve been advocating about the power of peers as an effective and efficient way to work.

While peers are potent, they’re not perfect.

On the plus side, embracing peer practices provides two big benefits: improved productivity and higher engagement.

The results of Connect Consulting’s recent survey on peer practices and experience shows the value of tapping into the wisdom of fellow employees. For example, 78% of the survey respondents said peer practices help them do their job better.

Yet there’s a dark side if you and others surround yourself with “people like me” who are clones and succumb to peer pressure.  You could find yourself in an echo chamber.

In an echo chamber, you hear the same ideas over and over again as the Kool-Aid tastes sweeter and sweeter. You go along with the crowd, not experiencing diversity of thought and all the value it brings.

While preparing for my upcoming webinar Be FEARLESS: 8 Ways to Unleash Peer Power and Energize Performance  this Thursday, Oct. 24, at 11 am PT (2 pm ET), I realized that I’m awfully close to a deafening and dangerous echo chamber.

For months now in the San Francisco Bay Area, we citizens have been on the sidelines listening to and observing a protracted labor dispute—now strike—by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) union leaders against management.

In their on-again off-again negotiations, the unions and management are talking past one another, seemingly ignoring their 400,000 daily customers—the riding public.  Neither the unions nor management seems grounded in the reality of the situation. They’re caught up in their issues, not paying attention to the concerns the riding public is voicing.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I now understand that I heard some of this echo chamber rhetoric almost two years ago.

One of the unions had asked me to help facilitate at their annual conference where they were finalizing their two-year strategic plan.

As I wrote about the plan’s development in the chapter “Change Through Smart-Mob Organizing: Using Peer-by-Peer Practices to Transform Organizations” for The Change Champion’s Field Guide: Strategies and Tools for Leading Change in Your Organization (Wiley 2013), the union leaders worked hard to include members in the process, which was impressive.

About six months before the convention, union leaders started gathering extensive input from members to develop the strategic plan. The leaders arranged for about  400 phone interviews, 600 online surveys, 130 chapter meetings and 10 delegate meetings.

At the meetings, the union members had multiple opportunities to share ideas with each other and influence the shaping of the strategic plan.

Yet, they didn’t get many—if any—chances to hear outsiders’ viewpoints in a systematic manner, or learn what was important to their customers.

By relying on people they know and talking among themselves, they were building a large circle of trusted advisors that has turned into an echo chamber network.

Echo chamber networks tend to recycle ideas rather gather new ones. This can hurt performance, which negates against the improvements you can gather by tapping into the wisdom of your peers.

My lesson learned?

Continue to connect with peers; however, keep expanding your circle to include new and different voices. And question each other, including the beverages you’re serving, the ideas you’re testing and the decisions you’re making.

How well are you avoiding drinking Kool-Aid in echo chambers?

P.S. Please join me for the webinar, Be FEARLESS: 8 Ways to Unleash Peer Power and Energize Performance  this Thursday, Oct. 24, at 11 am PT (2 pm ET). You’ll learn how to maximize the value of peer practices. Even if you can’t make it live, please sign up so you can access the recording and the materials.