When smart people get together, good decisions should follow right? That’s the assumption many leadership teams make when they gather to plan. But in practice, the more capable the individuals, the more sophisticated the avoidance. Conversations loop. Priorities expand. Tradeoffs dissolve into nuance. This isn’t because the team is weak, it’s because it’s human. In this article, I explore why groups do not naturally behave rationally, even when composed of rational people and how facilitation imposes the structure that rationality alone cannot.
Over the years, I’ve watched some highly intelligent teams walk in with strong intentions and walk out with no decision. Not because they lacked insight, but because they mistook insight for commitment, forgetting that groups aren’t additive, they’re emergent. As Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie argue in Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (2014), groups amplify bias unless they are structured to counter it, through independent input, diversity of viewpoint, and organized dissent. Without these design features, smart teams default to politeness, performative listening, and self-censorship and call it consensus.
This article makes three claims:
Groups do not default to rationality, they default to harmony or hierarchy
Intelligence can worsen drift, by rationalizing avoidance and deferring conflict
Facilitation introduces friction, sequence, and closure, allowing truth to surface and decisions to stick
We like to think that intelligent people, gathered around a table, will reason their way to the best outcome. But history and psychology suggest otherwise.
Psychologists Garold Stasser and William Titus demonstrated in their seminal study, Pooling of Unshared Information in Group Decision Making (1985), that groups tend to focus disproportionately on shared information, what everyone already knows, while underemphasizing uniquely held knowledge that could actually improve decisions. In their experiments, groups consistently made worse decisions than individuals who had access to all the facts. This pattern, known as the “common information effect,” reveals that groups don’t naturally aggregate insight, they flatten it. The result isn’t synergy. It’s redundancy.
Some of the most consequential strategic failures of the modern era bear this out.
In his landmark study, Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes (1972), Irving Janis analyzed the Bay of Pigs invasion, where President Kennedy’s team of elite advisors approved a deeply flawed plan with barely a whisper of dissent. The intelligence was not lacking, but the structure for disagreement was. Kennedy spoke with more than forty of the most brilliant advisors in government, “the best and the brightest,” so the failure was not likely in who he consulted, but how their input was processed. As journalist Hugh Sidey, who had unusually close access to Kennedy at the time, later recalled, President Kennedy suspected the error was structural:
“But five minutes after it began to fall in, we all looked at each other and asked, ‘How could we have been so stupid?’ When we saw the wide range of the failures we asked ourselves why it had not been apparent to somebody from the start. I guess you get walled off from reality when you want something to succeed too much. Remember, Sidey, write that book and explain it to all of us.”
The Lesson John Kennedy Learned From the Bay of Pigs, (2001).
The average person in the street could tell you that when you are the President of the United States, those who work with you are likely to feel intimidated and tell you what you want to hear. Good leaders know this and challenge their colleagues to dissent. But the egos of all of us are easily seduced, and the greater the stakes, the greater the pressure, the more raw our need becomes for reassurance, while at the same time, the more intensely we feel the responsibility to lead. Which is why the solution must be structural, and not dependent on the largesse of the most vulnerable individual, who, ironically in this case, was the President of the United States.
The same pattern reappeared in the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor responsible for the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, raised serious concerns about O-ring performance in cold weather. But the launch was under intense national, political, and organizational pressure. NASA had been averaging only five launches per year, far short of the program’s original promise of 50 flights annually. The shuttle's launch had already been delayed twice and the White House insisted that it launch before President Ronald Reagan's scheduled State of the Union address. In that context, both NASA and Morton Thiokol felt boxed in: the only perceived option was to proceed. As Diane Vaughan documented in The Challenger Launch Decision (1997), the institutional setting rewarded silence, normalized deviance, and allowed risk to escalate unchecked. The problem wasn’t technical failure it was a lack of a facilitated process for decision-making.
And in the 2008 financial crisis, highly credentialed analysts, ratings agencies, and investment banks collectively gave complex financial instruments, like subprime mortgage CDOs, AAA ratings, despite widespread confusion about the underlying risk. As Gary Gorton argued in Slapped by the Invisible Hand (2010), and as Michael Lewis recounted in The Big Short (2010), this wasn’t stupidity, it was the result of fragmented accountability, group herding, and the absence of anyone empowered to say “no.”
Across these domains of psychology, policy, science, and finance, the pattern is consistent: groups amplify risk when structure is missing. Facilitation doesn't guarantee good decisions, but it does impose the conditions where disagreement can surface, tradeoffs can be confronted, and rationality can function. It replaces politeness with process and makes productive discomfort possible.
Now let’s respond to four refutations to the need for facilitation that deserve to be addressed:
Structure kills creativity: Some argue that too much structure kills creativity, that facilitation, with its guided steps and deliberate pacing, flattens spontaneity and suppresses the surprising leaps that drive innovation. It’s a fair concern, especially in environments that thrive on experimentation and ideation. But a well-facilitated process knows when to converge, and before that point, it deliberately creates space for divergence. Having a distinct convergence point ensures that decisions get made, commitment is reached, and progress starts.
High-performing teams don’t need facilitation: Others contend that high-performing teams don’t need facilitation at all, that in cultures of deep trust and shared purpose, decisions emerge organically. That may be true in rare contexts, like elite special forces or founding partnerships, but most teams are not operating at that level of coherence. And even when they are, facilitation becomes more valuable, not less, as the stakes rise or the group changes. A system that works under pressure deserves deliberate care.
Facilitation is a leadership skill, not an external service: The best leaders know how to build alignment, invite dissent, and guide decision-making. True. But those same leaders are also stakeholders in the decisions. When they facilitate themselves, they often overstep or recede. Third-party facilitation allows leaders to fully participate without driving the process-a distinction that is often the difference between decision and deferral.
Facilitation is just another layer in the way of getting things done: Some view facilitation as just another layer of process in a world already overburdened by meetings and frameworks. It’s a valid caution. Bad facilitation can waste time for sure. But good facilitation saves time and increases its value. It ensures that what gets said in the room actually changes what happens outside it. It doesn’t replace accountability. It surfaces it. Use a competent and experienced facilitator.
If you’ve ever wondered why your smartest teams can’t seem to commit, the issue isn’t logic; it’s structure. Rational people need help behaving rationally as a group. Facilitation doesn’t replace intelligence; it releases it. It ensures that disagreement leads somewhere, that consensus isn’t a cover, and that decisions aren’t postponed in the name of more thinking. It is not a luxury; it is what makes collective reasoning possible.
Patrick Landers is VP of Strategy at Convene Lab, a strategy consultancy focused on strategic practice. Click here for a quick chat.