Five of you met
to choose a payments provider.
Two candidates.
An hour on the calendar.
Everyone had read the same comparison sheet.
Price.
Fees.
Countries.
The integration guide.
So that is what you discussed.
For fifty minutes.
The cheaper one won,
and it was a pleasant meeting.
Three months later
the problems arrived,
one at a time.
Their sandbox did not match production.
The support contract
only covered office hours
in another time zone.
A gap in their audit report
that legal had flagged.
A refund limit
that broke the way finance worked.
Each of those
had been known before the meeting.
By one person.
A different person each time.
Nobody hid anything.
Each of them assumed
it was a small point,
or that someone else had seen it too,
and the conversation
was already about something else.
Put together,
four small points
were the whole decision.
They were never put together.
In 1985
Garold Stasser and William Titus
gave groups of students
a choice between candidates
for student body president.
In one version
everyone got all the facts.
In the other
the facts that favoured the best candidate
were split up,
a different piece to each person,
while the facts everyone shared
made a weaker one look good.
The split groups
mostly chose the weaker candidate.
And the recordings showed why.
They spent their time
on what everyone already knew.
The pieces only one person held
came up less,
and when they did,
they were often dropped.
It is called a hidden profile.
Shared facts feel safe to say.
Everyone nods.
A fact only you know
sounds like a hunch.
So the meeting circles the sheet.
The fix is to get the private pieces out
before the shared ones take over.
Ask everyone to write down,
before the meeting,
one thing they know about this
that is probably not on the sheet.
Read those first.
Ask each specialist directly
what their part of the world
sees that nobody else does.
And when the room agrees quickly,
treat it as a sign
you have only heard
the part everyone brought.
A group knows more
than any one of its members.
Only if somebody
adds it up.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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