The Consensus Trap
If your meetings end with comfortable consensus every time, the problem is that someone stopped disagreeing.
A leadership team votes on strategy. Unanimous. Everyone nods. “Great, we are aligned.”
But alignment born from fear is not alignment. It is silence with better posture.
Jeff Bezos borrowed “disagree and commit” from Intel’s Andy Grove. Fight for your position, then commit fully to whatever the group decides. Most organisations skip the fighting. They go straight to committing, never surfacing the risks hiding in someone’s quiet hesitation.
Irving Janis studied this and called it groupthink. The Bay of Pigs. The Challenger disaster. Brilliant people agreeing their way into catastrophe.
The best decisions are forged in tension, not comfort.