Managing Teams in the Hybrid Age: The HBR Guides Collection (8 Books)

CHAPTER 15

Seven Strategies for Better Group Decision Making

by Torben Emmerling and Duncan Rooders

When you have a tough business problem to solve, you likely bring it to a group. After all, more minds are better than one, right? Not necessarily. Larger pools of knowledge are by no means a guarantee of better outcomes. Because of an overreliance on hierarchy, an instinct to prevent dissent, and a desire to preserve harmony, many groups fall into groupthink.

Misconceived expert opinions can quickly distort a group decision. Individual biases can easily spread across the group and lead to outcomes far outside individual preferences. And most of these processes occur subconsciously.

This doesn’t mean that groups shouldn’t make decisions together, ...