The Danger of Over-Consensus: When Too Many Ideas and Opinions Don’t Work

In this third article launching the Leverage Your Knowledge newsletter, I’m excited to talk about the dangers of over-consensus when it comes to working smarter and better.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and, if you haven’t already subscribed, I’d love you to click the link at the top. To catch up on the series, check out these other articles:

• Too Much of a Good Thing? – The Hidden Danger of Overkill
• Taming the Overthinking Monster—5 Signs (and Solutions) We All Need to Recognize
• The Danger of Over-Consensus: When Too Many Ideas and Opinions Don’t Work
• Overkill Vs. Underkill: Learning to Balance Perfectionism and Winging It

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Every good salesperson knows that you make a sale by getting people to agree. Reaching consensus is, in many ways, the foundation of business.

But what happens when there are too many opinions that get in the way of moving you forward? Consensus – the act of agreeing – turns to the Dark Side of over-consensus.

Have you ever worked on a team that couldn’t make a decision without consulting with everyone and their cat? Have you watched your team bring in more and more people into making a decision, but the outcome just got worse? Or maybe you have seen deflection techniques such as, If only we had the results from project X… If only we wait for the new VP Operations… If only we see what Manager ABC says…

Over-consensus leads to wasting time, delay, group think, and lack of critical thinking. Like its close cousins overkill and overthinking , it is the opposite of leveraging what we know.

Why does over-consensus happen?

We fear being wrong.

Looking stupid (including being wrong) is one of our deepest human fears. We will do almost anything to avoid it.

This includes booking bigger meetings, emailing more people, asking our boss, our co-workers, Siri, Google, or whoever or whatever else.

However, our fear of being wrong is tragically overblown. (For many, it paralyzes their career.)

After working with my clients for the past 15 years to drive consensus, I can recall one time where I was scolded for my interpretation of the decision and enthusiasm to drive it forward. (The criticism came from a not-very-nice, soon-to-be-former client.)

The point is, the flack you will take for driving consensus forward will be rare, at worst. It doesn’t hurt that much. Seriously, it’s worth the risk.

We don’t want to think.

The number of people you consult with grows proportionately to the reluctance of your people to think for themselves. The more people you involve, the less the thinking per individual. And, in fact, the increased risk for mistakes and missed issues.

More people creates more opportunity to tune out or defer to others. Thinking is hard work, and most people don’t want to do it.

Thinking is a form of accountability. It means making your own brain do the heavy lifting rather than relying on the (over)-consensus of others.

We don’t trust our gut.

Using our brain is one thing. Using our gut is another. We need both to trust ourselves enough to push work forward and avoid over-consensus.

The gut is our “second brain” for good reason. In Melody Wilding’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut , she explains there’s a “deep neurological basis” for trusting our gut or intuition. Your stomach has over 100 million neurons which explain its incredible processing – or “thinking” – abilities.

In our corporate world of dashboards and metrics, trusting our gut is often frowned on. (As an accountant, this is especially true for me.) But Wilding explains that “studies?show that pairing gut feelings with analytical thinking helps you make better, faster, and more accurate decisions and gives you more confidence in your choices than relying on intellect alone.”

Listen to your gut. Your “gut check” is your most efficient primal tool to help you in driving consensus and decisions forward.

How to get out of over-consensus?

Treat consensus like a sale (i.e., it takes work).

Don’t just book a big meeting (physical or virtual) and then hope by having everyone there that you will reach consensus. Consensus is something you work at. Over-consensus is the lazy way out.

If you are making a sale to an outside party, you need an attention getter, trust, patience, and a killer close (and probably a whole lot else) to seal the deal. Apply the same level of intention to your internal plan to reach the consensus you need.

Use interviews (and less big meetings).

While it may sound counterintuitive, I have learned from large-scale projects that it is easier to drive consensus through many smaller, focused discussions as opposed to big group meetings.

Embrace interviewing. By that, I’m not talking about interviewing for a job. I’m talking about a strategic conversation with another person to pull out the information you need and to build a shared framework and potential buy-in.

Let me give you an example of how effective interviewing really is. I was working for a large company and was asked to help with an analysis of a complex process. There was a team already working on the problem when I arrived, but their analysis wasn’t going very well. The team was holding big meetings, workshops, and spewing out fancy presentations daily.

Over the next two weeks, I moved the project to one-on-one or small-group interviews and away from big meetings and PowerPoint. Our interviews brought back a wealth of information. The answers we needed were literally sitting in front of us in the heads of our people. By switching to the simpler, unpretentious interview style, we collected more insight, analysis, and ideas – and consensus – than the team had for months.

Get out of big meetings. Use interviews to reduce your interviewee’s fear of being wrong and leverage your collective abilities to think and use your instinct to reach agreement.

Use note-taking and a 3-Bullet Recap.

Think of the role of your Corporate Secretary. This is the most senior lawyer in your organization. Their job is to harness decisions and consensus by the Board and Management. How do they do this? By taking notes (i.e., minutes).

You don’t need to be a Corporate Secretary to use the power of notes to build better consensus. You just need to get better at recapping what information was said.

Try this technique that I call it the 3-Bullet Recap. After your meeting, recap and share the outcome of your meeting in 3 to 5 bullets. This trick usually reveals the gist of what was agreed upon.

Decisions aren’t always “announced” in meetings as we discuss them. They weave their way into the flow of your conversation. Use your notes and the art of recapping to solidify what was agreed on--or not--to drive consensus forward.

Where do you see over-consensus at work? How can you get over your fear being wrong – and learn to trust your gut and intuition? Look out for over-consensus in your team and your organization and take the necessary steps to reach consensus without going too far.

What is your biggest challenge with Over-consensus? If you need help or to talk it through, please reach out to me at?[email protected] .

__________________________________________________________________________Adrienne is Director and Co-Owner of?Risk Oversight , a firm specializing Internal Controls, Internal Audit, and compliance and the founder of?Bellehumeur Co. ?where she is a consultant, speaker, trainer, and writer on documentation and workflow best practices and author of?THE 24-HOUR RULE—and Other Secrets for Smarter Organizations (forthcoming from BenBella).??