Feynman on group decision-making at Los Alamos (1985)
What strikes me is not a bunch of people keeping their ego in check -- that helps because it ensures that all points will be heard, but it doesn't ensure coherent decision-making. What strikes me is that everybody was able to keep track of what were the major points and minor points, so they could talk through the whole range of possible objections and decide that they were all less valid or less important than the points in favor. This is how engineers talk, searching for flaws and weighing the ones they find.I think it's important for engineering decision-makers to be comfortable with this culture. It's disheartening when you have a great conversation like the one Feynman describes, the engineers are in agreement, and then the person in charge stands up and says, "Look, if everybody hates this idea, we can't be lazy and go forward with it just because we don't have a better one," or, "I guess we can't make a decision on this, because there's too much negativity and people are just going to nit-pick every idea to death!" No, no, talking through every possible objection to an idea is how you can tell that people are starting to zero in on it as the most likely best solution. The closer an idea gets to acceptance, the more thoroughly you vet it. The more it becomes clear that an idea is the best way forward, the more you start to prepare for dealing with the reality of it.This makes practical sense, but not political sense, so it seems weird and unnatural to a lot of outside observers, who expect respect to be communicated by agreement, and emerging consensus around an idea to be expressed by a shared avoidance of mentioning the downsides.