The room agreed with you. You spoke first.

Consensus that arrives quickly is often a report on the order people spoke in, not on what the group actually knows.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The room agreed with you. You spoke first.

A meeting ends in agreement. Six people around the table, no serious objection, a decision made in twenty minutes. It feels like a well-run business: clarity, alignment, no politics. Six weeks later the decision turns out to have been wrong in a way that at least two of those people could have flagged at the time, and privately suspected. Nothing dishonest happened. The agreement was real in the sense that everyone in the room genuinely felt it. What was missing was independence. The group produced one opinion held by six…

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