What Agreement Leaves Unexamined

I’ve spent a great deal of time helping groups reach agreement on strategy. Increasingly, I am interested in what happens before that agreement: how people decide whether the evidence is strong enough, a risk is acceptable or an assumption still holds.

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein examine unwanted variation in judgments that should be consistent. Their work raises a question I think matters for strategy: how much might our assessment change simply because someone else reviewed the same evidence?

Consider a strategy review where one executive sees a disappointing result as an expected setback, while another sees it as grounds to reconsider the direction. Both may have sound reasons. One may understand a delay the other has overlooked. Or they may be applying different standards for what counts as evidence that the strategy is not working. Asking people to agree does not necessarily reveal that difference.

I don’t think the aim is to make everyone think alike. Different perspectives can reveal something important, and new evidence should be able to change our minds. What concerns me is when the standard of scrutiny changes without anyone recognizing it. A choice can survive one review and fail another without anything material about the situation having changed.

One practice the authors recommend is forming judgments independently before discussing them together. Applied to a strategy review, I would ask people to consider the same evidence and explain what it changes about their understanding before hearing the most senior person’s assessment.

The purpose would not be to count votes or average away disagreement. It would be to understand why people differ while those differences are still available to examine. Someone may have noticed a consequence others missed. We may also discover that we never agreed on what the choice depended on, or what would give us reason to reconsider it.

For me, protecting human judgment means more than keeping a person responsible for the final decision. It means making room to examine how that judgment was formed. Before treating agreement as progress, I think we need to know whether we have worked through the differences or simply stopped hearing them.