In the book "Noise", it is written that collective intelligence is an effective means to improve the quality of decision-making, but when summarizing everyone's judgments, it is necessary to ensure that everyone's judgments are done independently, rather than being influenced by others.
Meetings in the workplace are frequent behaviors that are designed to bring out the wisdom of the crowd, and the flow of meetings has already structurally determined the quality of the organization's decision-making. Usually the process of our meetings is to discuss in a sequential order, and then gather everyone's opinions to make a final decision. The first or second speakers will have more influence on the opinions of those who speak later, and the opinions of those who are higher in rank will have an impact on the opinions of the whole meeting. Because in the interests of all, everyone will choose the opinion that is beneficial to them, whether the opinion is correct or not; For professional issues that we are not fully sure of, we are also more inclined to adopt the opinions of others; The consistency of the brain can make us obsessed with the first opinion we made, and it is difficult for us to change our opinion. These all contribute to the noise of meeting decisions. To eliminate these biases and noises and truly exert collective wisdom, we should summarize the independent opinions of each participant before the meeting, then focus on discussing the divergent opinions during the meeting, and finally weigh the pros and cons of each plan through risks and benefits, and arrange and combine them to arrive at the optimal solution.
Only by changing the meeting process can you fundamentally correct the noise, get high-quality judgments, and truly exert the wisdom of the crowd.