Gerald Ajam

Designing collective thinking

Putting capable people in the same room does not automatically produce capable collective thinking.

Status Position

Published September 2026

My thoughts about...

Why it matters

Groups introduce new information and perspectives. They also introduce conformity, status effects, premature convergence, shared-information bias, production blocking, diffusion of responsibility and social pressure.

The failures are quiet. A meeting where the most senior person speaks first, everyone agrees and the decision lands on time looks like a good meeting. It may have used a fraction of what the room knew.

What I have come to believe

Independence has to come before interaction. Once people have heard the first confident view, their own recollections and judgements drift towards it. Asking them to think and write alone first is the cheapest way to keep what each person brought.

Disagreement is too important to leave to personality. Whoever challenges a group pays a social cost for it, so challenge arrives unevenly and usually from the same few people. A procedure that asks for alternatives, such as a named critic or a round where each person states the strongest case against, turns dissent into a role people are given.

A group thinks better when its thinking sits outside its heads. A shared representation (a map, a matrix, a list of propositions on a wall) lets people point at the same thing, see the gaps and disagree about something specific. Without one, a discussion is a sequence of speeches.

And agreement is not evidence. Consensus tells you the group converged. It does not tell you the group was right, and the conditions that make agreement easy (shared information, a dominant voice, time pressure) are the same ones that make error likely.

How I approach it

I design the sequence before the content. When will people work alone, in pairs, as a whole group? When does the group generate, and when does it judge? Each change of structure changes who can speak and what can be said, so I choose them on purpose.

Then I decide what will hold the group’s thinking, and I state the decision rule at the start. People contribute differently when they know how the final judgement will be made.

In short

The position in six claims

The argument above, cut down to what travels.

  • 01

    Think independently before thinking together

    Use individual reflection, brainwriting or pre-work before open discussion where independence matters.

  • 02

    Separate divergence from evaluation

    Generating possibilities while simultaneously judging them suppresses exploration.

  • 03

    Make thinking external

    Use artefacts, diagrams, cards, maps, matrices, written propositions and shared representations.

  • 04

    Design disagreement

    Do not rely on personality to produce challenge. Introduce procedures that legitimise alternative interpretations.

  • 05

    Change participation structure deliberately

    Pairs, small groups, silent work, plenary discussion, voting, critique and synthesis produce different social conditions.

  • 06

    Make the decision rule explicit

    A workshop is incomplete if everyone contributed but nobody knows how the final judgement will be made.

In practice

The questions I ask

Before designing anything in this domain, and again when something is not working.

  1. How should information enter the group?
  2. When should people think independently?
  3. When should perspectives interact?
  4. How should disagreement be surfaced?
  5. How should divergence become convergence?
  6. How can the group avoid mistaking consensus for correctness?
  7. What representation should hold the group’s thinking?
  8. Who decides, and under what rule?

Unsettled

What I would still argue about

Open in my own head. If you have an answer, I would like to hear it.

  • Under what conditions does adding more people improve a decision?
  • How should disagreement be designed rather than merely encouraged?
  • How much procedure a group will accept before managing the procedure becomes the work.

To take away

A group thinks as well as its conditions allow. Most meetings leave them to chance.

In the next meeting you run, ask everyone to write down their view before anyone speaks, and say how the decision will be made before the discussion starts.

The ten questions Collective fallacies (opens in a new tab)
Singapore