Time to pull out your rubber stamps folks, it’s decision time!

If you're serving on a funding, granting, or investment committee, you're there for one reason: to exercise your judgment. The organization values your unique insights, experience, and perspective. If the decision didn't require this diversity of viewpoints, it never should have gone to a committee in the first place.

Yet most committees struggle to actually capture and integrate these diverse perspectives effectively. Sometimes there is barely any structure involved and the final decision is an arbitrary one made by the chair, while other times the structure is so central to the process that it feels like committee members are pressing “start” on a process that drags them through steps which have such tight guardrails on it that the outcomes seem predetermined by the process.

The result? Decisions that could have been made by individuals, processes that waste everyone's time, and outcomes that don't reflect the collective wisdom that brought everyone to the table.

The solution isn't perfection, it is just about doing better than what you do right now. So what do most committees do right now?

The "Hash It Out" Method

This is probably the most common approach: get everyone in a room and discuss until you reach consensus. There's real value here as good discussions surface important issues and help reveal where different interests and perspectives lie.

But the approach is also highly risky. Without strong norms and processes, discussions can quickly become spaces where the most vocal or politically skilled members dominate. The loudest voice often wins, not necessarily the best idea.

The challenges multiply as committee size grows. Managing productive discussion among 5 people is challenging; among 10 or more, it becomes nearly impossible to ensure everyone's perspective is heard. The process moves from a test of quality to a test of endurance.

An expensive test of endurance at that! The cost of every hour of meeting time is everyone in the room’s salaries for that hour, not just snacks and coffee. Each person’s time spent deliberating could have been deployed elsewhere, maybe even doing more of the items in the committee's budget ask.

Research by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie reveals four systematic problems with group deliberation:

• Groups amplify rather than correct individual errors when members reinforce each other's biases
• Cascade effects occur as people follow the statements and actions of their predecessors rather than expressing independent judgment
• Group polarization happens as groups end up in more extreme positions than individuals would choose alone
• Shared information dominates at the expense of the unique information each member brings

These aren't occasional problems, they are systematic features of unstructured group decision-making. With all that hassle it is no surprise that people often just check out and let someone in the group make the decision on everyone’s behalf.

The "Let Bob Do It" Method

So why not just let the chair, whoever brought the coffee, or whoever talks loudest make the call? Everyone can chat, give input, and raise issues, but ultimately someone takes control of the final decision.

This approach has obvious efficiency advantages, but it fundamentally undermines the purpose of having a committee. It over-empowers one person while diminishing everyone else from peer to advisor.

More practically, it creates significant information gaps. Even the best-informed committee member has access to a narrower perspective than the committee as a whole. And there are challenging cognitive limits: most people can hold only 5-9 items in their working memory at any point, making it difficult to handle meaningful comparisons among larger sets of proposals.