Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash Over the course of nearly two decades in the workplace, I’ve seen the inside of dozens of organizations and teams as an employee, consultant, or friendly collaborator. With rare exceptions, it seems, important decisions get made one of two ways. If an organization is particularly hierarchical or founder-driven, the leader makes the decision and then communicates it to whoever needs to know about it. Otherwise, the decision gets made, usually by group consensus, in a meeting. All too often, those meetings are decision-making disasters. Or at any rate, that’s what the research says. It might not be apparent right away — one of the sneaky aspects of group deliberation is that it reliably increases confidence in the final decision, whether that decision was a good one or not! And yet most group deliberations don’t do much to combat the many cognitive biases we carry into those groups as individuals. In fact, meetings tend to make many of those biases even worse. Studies show that several biases that are especially relevant in group settings are among those exacerbated by the group decision-making process: * planning fallacy (thinking things will get done sooner or cost less than turns out to be the case) * framing effects (seeing a situation differently depending on how it’s presented) * egocentric bias (assuming that other people are more like you than they are) * the representativeness heuristic (relying too much on stereotypes) * unrealistic optimism * overconfidence * sunk cost fallacy (doubling down on a losing strategy) Groups do perform slightly better than individuals when it comes to availability heuristic, anchoring, and hindsight bias, but the errors are still there. All of this is chronicled in an essential (if not exactly riveting) book called Wiser: Moving Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie. The duo set out to have Wiser do for group decision-making what Daniel Kahnem