Don’t Crash the Plane
I recently got to observe a group decision-making process from start to finish. Although I’m usually a facilitator, I wasn’t this time. This time, I got to sit quietly and just listen.
And I observed something really, really concerning: a fundamental flaw in the group decision-making process that ultimately led to a bad decision despite having the knowledge that could have prevented it.
The group I sat in on was one of four small breakout groups made up of seven or so participants from the larger group of around thirty participants. They were brainstorming new ground rules for virtual meetings. They wrote down the usual rules pretty quickly:
Be present
Keep yourself on mute unless you’re talking
Remove distractions
Arrive on time
And then, someone said, “Cameras on,” to which the majority of the small group quickly nodded and agreed, some of them rolling their eyes and voicing their frustrations with participants who keep their cameras off.
Then, the dissenting voice popped up. “I work with combat disabled veterans with PTSD and neurodivergent participants. Being on camera is triggering for a lot of them.”
I thought that was a really good and valid point. But what happened next was the decision-making equivalent of a plane crash.
When there’s a plane crash, it’s never due to one thing. It’s because of a perfect storm of errors and conditions. It’s a complex series of circumstances that leads to disaster. In this case, no planes fell out of the sky, and no lives were lost. But the group lost a valuable and important insight. Let’s reconstruct the timeline of events in more detail to understand what, with the best of intentions, went wrong.
Error 1: The small group facilitator observed the initial majority agreement with “cameras on” and didn’t invite alternative views. No need: they all seemed to agree.
Error 2: Following the facilitator’s lead, the scribe wrote “cameras on” on a flipchart, which indicated closure and finality to the topic.
Error 3: The dissenter said, “I work with combat disabled veterans and neurodivergent participants. Being on camera is triggering for a lot of them.” It took a while for that participant to briefly articulate a rather complex and contrarian idea, and so missed the small window between the suggestion of “cameras on” and when it was written down. It’s an important insight, but not a suggested course of action. This is not an explicit objection to the ground rule “cameras on.” The comment is framed as a neutral observation, an addition to the pool of knowledge. The objection is, at best, implied. It’s also understandable: the speaker did not want to directly oppose the group on a closed topic with a hard “no.” If the speaker had added, “I think we need to tweak the language of ‘cameras on’ to allow for the needs of participants,” that would have moved the group to reopen the topic.
Error 4: The rest of the group members talked awkwardly around the issue of sensory sensitivity, but did not come to a crisp conclusion.
Error 5: Struggling with how to resolve the ambiguous discussion, the scribe ultimately added an asterisk to the ‘cameras on’ ground rule, implying an unstated exception.
Error 6: When the small group reconvened with the large group, the whole group facilitator used a common process for converging ideas: “Ok, we’ll start with one group. And for the other groups, if you hear a similar idea, just circle it on your flipchart so we know what’s been covered. When it’s your turn to share, just bring up the ones we haven’t heard yet.”
At this point, all the conditions were set, and the plane crash was inevitable. Another group began their report out, and sure enough, “cameras on” was on their list. The small group scribe heard it and circled “cameras on” WITH the asterisk. And when it came time for the small group facilitator to report out, she skipped “cameras on,” along with its little asterisk and the insight it implied.
The group adopted “cameras on” as a generic, unnuanced rule that could unintentionally exclude people it’s meant to protect.
If I hadn’t happened to listen in on the small group, I never would have seen it. I’m sorry to say that error 7 was mine: as a guest at the meeting, I didn’t feel safe enough to say anything and stayed in my role as a silent observer.
I could guess at what might have prevented this, but I also think this error in group process is important enough that you should spend some time thinking about it to come up with your own solutions to the problem.
What COULD have prevented this?
PS: If you want some good ground rules for online meetings, you can download a free chapter of my book, Surviving the Horror of Online Meetings, at https://www.survivingthehorrorbook.com/
