Susan Cain Quotes

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they're really not listening, or they're listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they're so right that they're not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.

When topics are complex and meaty, don't create a never-ending email thread. It's amazing how much time people waste composing and reading carefully-worded essays, when a 5 minute in-person chat would resolve the whole thing.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

So you [Romans] when you have got together in a body, let yourselves be guided by those whom singly you would never think of being advised by.

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.

Whenever we had a serious question to decide, we had a conference with the groups involved.

I've actually come to respect the most irritatingly challenging people I've worked with as really valuable in improving group decision-making and what to do and what to invest in.

At the highest level, a discussion can be good sometimes to get everyone back on their toes.

Are your people uncomfortable during meetings and tired at the end? If not, they're probably not mixing it up enough and getting to the bottom of important issues.

UNU provides a continuous feedback loop of the group's preference for a choice, as well as its conviction. People are adjusting their levels of conviction based on the completeness of their own knowledge on the subject.

There's a momentum to being committed to a group that you think is good, and there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to make your choice a good choice.

...if you can think of meetings you've attended, you can probably recall a time - plenty of times - when the opinion of the most dynamic or talkative person prevailed to the detriment of all.

Meet regularly with your business team and brainstorm. Intricate business problems are mostly resolved at brainstorming sessions.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.