Post 10: Group Failure

Group failure is a common problem, and according to Sunstein actually becomes more and more common as groups get larger. This because of two reasons: Informational and Social Influences. Informational influences may convince an otherwise skeptical decision maker about a particular course of action, simply through the inertia of the idea being repeated and build upon. Social influences work in a very similar way but depend on the person's need to fit into a group, as opposed to their ideas themselves being changed by "logic."

I would imagine that social influences are easier to recognize and in some situations fairly easy to fix. If a company discourages their employees to think outside the box or even think out loud, then they obviously have this problem. Some corporate cultures, or even individual manager's temperaments can add to this problem. If employees believe that "the nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered down." than this is definitely a problem. To fix this, managers need to be convinced that encouragement of new ideas is a necessary step to improve their company's ability to survive in a changing environment.

Informational influences can remain less of a problem if decision makers are encouraged to play "devil's advocate" and by comprising decision groups out of diverse backgrounds to result in a wide variety of thoughts and opinions coming to the group.