Good evening from Madrid.

Recently I wrote Edition 120, New perspectives, on the value of being around different people, and how their views can sharpen our own thinking and open our eyes to the wider world.

As human beings, we all carry behavioural biases: small quirks in the way we think and decide. The conventional wisdom is that bringing people together with different perspectives should cancel these out, or at least reduce their impact. For that reason, group decision-making is usually encouraged as a way to reach better outcomes.

There is real sense in that, but that is not the full picture. When we make decisions as a collective, a new set of biases can appear, and we may be far less likely to notice them. The most common is groupthink, where a group that knows each other well grows comfortable, and the focus shifts from conviction to consensus.

Earlier this week, I ran a workshop to a group of charity trustees on collective decision-making, and how they might improve their processes. Trustees are an interesting case, because they feel the weight of a decision keenly. They are deciding with other people’s money, and other people’s trust, and that pressure shapes how a group behaves in ways worth understanding.

A few patterns came up again and again.

The first is diffused accountability. When responsibility is shared across a group, no single person owns the outcome, so the instinct can be to avoid blame rather than to maximise the result. A defensible decision starts to feel safer than the right one.

The second is social dynamics. Hierarchy shapes who speaks and who defers. The most confident voice in the room tends to carry disproportionate weight, regardless of whether it is the most correct. And dissent, the very thing a group most needs, is often the most uncomfortable thing to offer.

The third is emotional. A strong sense of stewardship, combined with loss aversion heightened by reputational risk, pulls a group towards the cautious, defensible option. Not the best decision, but the one easiest to justify later.

The encouraging part is that these are problems of process, and process can be redesigned. Four changes can lead to significant improvements.

The first is to separate generating ideas from making the decision. When the two happen at once, people anchor early and the discussion narrows before it has properly opened. Pulling them apart gives ideas room for discussion before judgement arrives.

The second is to explicitly assign roles. Giving people defined parts, including someone tasked with challenging the emerging consensus, makes dissent a duty rather than a risk.

The third is to judge the process, not the outcome. A good decision can lead to a poor result, and a poor decision to a fortunate one. If a group only ever evaluates outcomes, it learns the wrong lessons. Asking whether the decision was made well, regardless of how it landed, is what compounds into better decisions over time.

The fourth is to run a pre-mortem. Before committing, imagine the decision has failed badly, and ask why. It is a simple way to surface the doubts people are reluctant to raise in the moment, and it gives quieter voices a legitimate route into the conversation.

None of this removes our biases. But it gives a group a better chance of catching them, which is more than simply putting good people in a room and hoping.

Here’s to making better decisions in the week ahead.

— AJ

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