On Countering Group-Think

My train broke down this evening for half an hour. So I got an extra half hour to read the essay ‘What you don’t know about making decisions’ in the HBR teams book. There was one great quote in that article, from Alfred Sloan of GM.

“If we are all in agreement on the decision – then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

That is all about walking around the problem and trying to see all of the angles. As they say in the world of programming: ‘With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.’