Tips for Intelligent Group Decisions
© Coert Visser (2005) The basis of all cooperative activity is integrated diversity.- Mary Parker Follett (1924) The Madness of Groups Many people distrust the behavior and decisions of people in groups. That is very understandable. Consider for instance how a group of football fans can behave. Especially in groups, people can sometimes get completely out of control. An example on a larger scale is the collective madness of many people in Germany before and in World War II. Collective madness has been known for a long time. In 1841 the Scotsman Charles Mackay wrote a book about it called: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. More recently Irving Janis presented his theory of groupthink. Janis described how teams often so strongly desire unanimity that strong pressure is put on individual members to conform. The quality of decisions suffers seriously because of this because individual team members will be less and less inclined to bring forward their own knowledg...