Effective Teams Should Disagree

Groups make the best decisions when they stop thinking like a group.

(This article previously appeared in Chief Executive Magazine)

If making critical business decisions is what you do for a living, there is one book that I can highly recommend: James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

Surowiecki is interested in how groups make great decisions, and the corollary, how they end up with disasters, whether it happens to be in an election or about a racial stereotype. In many cases when decisions are disastrous, the group doesn’t represent the feelings of the individuals who form the group.

How can that be?

When the small bits don’t add up to the whole, and you see this clearly in cases like Enron and Lehman Brothers, it means collectivism was neither wise nor prudent. Even when you examine the backgrounds of the individuals involved, many were stellar thinkers with exceptional resumes, the conclusion is that they failed as a group to be the individuals they were.

To understand where they went wrong, start with the word “they.” That’s where The Wisdom of…