I'm pretty sure I've previously mentioned the points I'm about to make, I'm just not so sure I put them together in this order and explicitly drawn the connections between them.
How a group of people make decisions is pretty important to me, particularly so we can avoid failures from groupthink, and more importantly - get the positive synergies that come from bringing a bunch of people together. (As opposed to negative synergies. Both are entirely possible, and deliberately achieving a positive one is more of an art than a science.)
So let's illustrate this with one of my preferred examples:
You and your forces are trying to defend a location near a mountain range. The approaching enemy has only two options to pass through the mountains and reach your location - a wide and pretty obvious pass, and a narrow and more difficult pass.
You may choose to set your defenses up along either pass, but if the enemy doesn't do what you expect then it can leave you vulnerable.
If they choose to take the unexpected route and you expected them to come through the main pass, all your defenses may be set in the wrong location and they may surprise you and hit you from the side.
If you instead focus on the smaller pass, then the enemy may easily and quickly come through the main pass.
In the course of analyzing your options, you may decide a couple of things.
1) Set up some method of watching both passes, so that you can determine which way they are coming and shift your forces accordingly. (An intelligence collection plan, basically).
2) Set your forces so that you can easily shift to cover either pass. I.e. maybe you set up your main forces faces the big pass, but you still set a small force near the smaller pass, and you place other forces close enough that they can support either location depending on which route the enemy takes.
And so on, and so forth.
This later plan is more complicated of course, but it's also more robust and resilient and helps make sure that you're ready no matter which way the enemy comes. Hopefully.
Obviously this is better than having someone decide the enemy is going to do one specific thing, and then setting up only for that thing. First of all because your plan only will work if the enemy plays along. Also because it indicates an unwillingness to thoroughly explore the possibilities, which may or may not work out for you in this specific instance, but eventually will lead to you making a mistake. You will overlook something, and nobody will notice until it bites you in the butt.
Also, going back to positive and negative synergies, you and/or your team may easily get into pissing contests as you debate which course of action is best, and then people's egos get involved, and then they stop really focusing on the problem at hand and start focusing on defeating their own internal 'enemies'. That is, if someone argues the enemy is going to come down the main pass and someone else just as vehemently argues that they'll come down the smaller pass, it's entirely likely they will lock up all the time and energy arguing over this and then whichever plan chosen is the 'winner' of the argument, and they never bother considering how to make a more robust and resilient plan in the first place.
Whether they're right or wrong in that specific instance is, in some ways, less important than that the decision making process is corrupted and politicized and leads to outcomes that aren't actually all that good but are the result of internal politics.
In a more extreme case, you could even picture someone who firmly believes they're right dismissing the signs and signals they're wrong. As in, if they bother with an intelligence collection plan like I mentioned above, and have some sort of monitoring going on for both passes - they will dismiss the signs that the enemy is going through the other pass. If the sensors are the kind that can just tell that bodies are passing through, but may be triggered by animals - they may argue that it was just deer or mountain goats passing through.
The desire to prove you were right grows more important than actually paying attention to the signals in front of you.
But those are all mayhaps and maybes. People are unique (despite some similarities), and every time you throw a bunch of people together you will get unique combinations and permutations. The robust and resilient plan I mentioned above?
It is possible that one wise and experienced commander could come up with it on their own.
It's also possible that they're completely incompetent, but they have a wise and experienced subordinate that they're willing to listen to, and the group as a whole still comes up with a good plan.
Or it could be that they had a good brainstorming session, that the intel staff present it's three possible enemy courses of action (most likely, most dangerous, etc) and the operations folk and intel folk and all the other members of the staff work together to create that more robust and resilient plan.
What I dislike about the first two options is that they depend on one particularly wise person. First, it's never good to depend entirely on one person because if they get removed then everyone else is screwed. In war, especially, that's a bad idea since you never know when someone might get killed or injured or captured or some other thing that takes that critical person away at a critical time. It's much better to make sure you train your people right, have that leadership pipeline in place, and make sure that as many as possible have the skills you need.
Second - no one person can know everything. Plus we all have our blindspots and biases. It's better to have a group that learns how to cover for those gaps, systemically, regularly, and consistently.
Maybe at the lower level someone can master an area of expertise and not need to rely on others, but the more complicated the issue or the higher you rise, the more you will depend on other people to be the experts you need.
Even in the tech world - perhaps you're a master programmer, great at coding anything and everything.
If you get into a management position, pretty soon you will not have the time to code much. Instead, you will be managing the people under you - and they will be the ones coding.
And the thing is, skills like that are use or lose. (This is part of why the military spends so much time training. It's not like you can teach them how to fire a gun once and expect them to be ready when they go into combat. You have to do it often enough to actually retain the skills.) Going back to a techie person - they may still have skills, but it's a lot harder for them to stay up to date. Plus if some newer language starts gaining traction, or some other tech takes off? They have to put a LOT of effort into staying up to date.
Of course, most of my focus was more on issues like national security and public policy, and the issues that we struggle with there tend to be complex and wicked.
If I were to picture my ideal way of handling those, it would be to get a group of relevant experts (i.e. economists, business people, at least one person to represent the average American, and so on and so forth.) Said experts would depend on what exactly the issue being tackled is (i.e. if it's healthcare related you might need more healthcare professionals, and if it's military related you'll need the relevant armed forces represented), and would ideally have a cross section of political positions and socio-economic status.
The point is to make sure it's not all a group of people that think the same way and basically rubberstamp a decision without really reviewing it.
And you'd use some of the various tools in the kit bag for making sure the group works together productively, rather than devolving into ego battles.
Sometimes that might mean making sure they meet without the pressure of their bosses. Or maybe it means cutting in when people start pointing fingers or getting overly personal. Maybe it means breaking the ice with a question, not so much because you really need it answered, but because some of the less confident people won't speak up until someone else does it first.
There's too many possibilities, all of which depend on the people involved and their own skills. (I personally like to think I help any team I'm part of, not just because of whatever I'm hired for, but because sometimes asking the right question at the right time or bringing people back to a more task-focused mentality can bring out those positive synergies and help the team perform better as a whole... but that's all fuzzy stuff that's really, really, really hard to capture on a resume or explain in an interview.)
And now, to tie this all in with something else - our Constitution, democracy, and decision making as a nation.
As I mentioned in my scenario above, it's true that a particularly wise and experienced individual can lead to good decisions. But historically?
We've been pretty terrible about consistently putting such individuals in charge.
That's part of why we've shifted away from monarchs, I think.
Sure, you might get a particularly wise one... and then their son or daughter is average, and their grandson or granddaughter is a disaster.
Our system has its own issues - mostly, I think, that negative synergy I mentioned. People get caught up in their own egos, they get focused on being 'right' and 'winning' and lose sight of their real goals and purpose (i.e. whether the enemy comes from the main pass or the side pass, everyone wants to defeat them... unless you're a spy or saboteur or traitor of course. In the same way, whether you're Republican or Democrat I would expect that you want the United States to be healthy and strong, and that you just disagree on what would make that happen. Unless you're a spy or a saboteur or a traitor, and there's definitely been conspiracy theories going around that some of them are exactly that.)
But on a meta scale? Not focusing on the issues of the day, but looking at how our nations make decisions as a whole?
Well...
Nations, as a whole, have a tendency to get stuck and stagnate... and it's often because some group of people gain control over the levers of power and manage to block any changes they dislike.
I, like many people I think, used to believe that democracy prevented that sort of problem. That regular elections provided a systemic way of getting feedback and ensuring we had legitimate processes of change.
That any such change might be difficult, naturally. But it was possible. And without needing to violently overthrow people like the French Revolution, without an upheaval like so many other nations have had.
We could resolve them with votes.
Except...
Remember those studies showing that the preferences of the average American have little impact on policy?
... Yeah
That feedback mechanism is broken. We don't have government by the people, for the people, and of the people.
Not really.
I think that's part of why Trump happened, tbh. People are fed up with both parties because they're really not responsive to the average American any more.
I just wish they hadn't chosen someone who clearly wasn't going to do what he'd promised in that regard, but I don't want to get diverted onto that topic right now.
See, it's easy for the powers-that-be to believe that they know better, to believe that the general public is too dumb to really matter, and to think it's better for everyone if they gain control....
But that is a lie.
Or rather, it's like that point in a chess game where the decision you make will inevitably lead to checkmate.
Because generally the way that they gain control and diminish the power of the general public is by concentrating all the decision making and power into the hands of the 'trusted' few - who think exactly like they do.
In other words, it's centralizing and consolidating power and creating more authoritarian systems.
It makes them more fragile and less resilient, too.
It might work if the ones doing so are particularly wise and experienced.
Maybe.
Possibly.
But only if that 'wisdom' involves knowing how to create those decision making systems with positive synergy like I discussed above. I.e. someone who is able to bring experts in from all over. Who can ensure they have productive discussions that actually result in solid solutions, and then have the experience and skill to implement those solutions well.
It definitely isn't going to come from the people leading today's polarization. Not unless they go through some serious life changes, I think.
Oh...
And it definitely won't come when people are more concerned with manipulating data to support their politics, rather than actually caring about the truth.
If your response to scientists telling you something you don't want to hear is to decide that they're all part of some conspiracy, and then to go cherry pick someone with nominal credentials to support your belief?
You're more concerned with proving yourself right than with actually being right, and any decision-making you attempt is corrupted by that. Just like the ones trying to disregard signs that the enemy was coming through the other pass in my example earlier.
I do not know when that will come back to haunt you, I just know that eventually it will.
