Productive Committees: How to Leverage Them More Successfully

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So I'll have to admit that every now and then I pick an article just because it helps me. This is an article called Set Your Committees Up for Success. It's by T.N. Chan and Panos Markal. It's from June 2025 Harvard Business Review. I'm actually in the process of setting up a regional committee in my own organization. And so when this hit my radar this morning, perfect timing. So I did read a lot of it before deciding it was a good article for the general masses.

So it's not completely selfish, but I have to admit that this is a little bit selfish ambition here. So the article basically talks about how no matter what type of committee you need to organize, organizations rely on committees to make decisions. Really important decisions, high stakes, go, no-go types of decisions. The logic seems sound. You bring together a diverse expertise.

You bring together lots of different viewpoints, and one will identify comprehensive solutions to help you make very, very good decisions. And yet, while assembling the right people in the room is necessary for this type of decision making, it's not the last step. It's only the first step. Even the most qualified experts can fail to share crucial insights. This is because committee dynamics and unwritten norms discourage open disclosure sometimes.

They leave critical information and dissent trapped inside people's heads, never making it into the collective discussion. So from self-censorship to interpreting silence as agreement to the suppression of dissent, groups of experts routinely struggle to surface the information needed during discussions to make a good decision. The result is a graveyard of misjudgments. Ouch. I love that sentence. So we'll dig into why that's true.

Why do committees often fail at surfacing the right information? How can their fates be reversed? So we're going to talk about how simple changes to committee protocols can fundamentally shaped the incentives to share information, dramatically improving decision quality and unlocking collective intelligence. Okay, so why do committees fail? Well, the article talks about three specific types of challenges that committees face.

Number one is cognitive, two is psychological, and three, social costs. Okay, what are the cognitive costs? Our human cognitive limits often make the sharing of private information less likely. This is because unshared data often requires greater cognitive effort to recall and articulate, especially when its relevance to the current discussion is uncertain. The result is that individuals and groups naturally gravitate toward the shared and the common.

So they'll gravitate towards what's known, what's in the common pool of information, as it's easier to retrieve, it's easier to validate, and easier to discuss. And so this brings bias into committees naturally. And that bias toward the easy available, easily available, can lead teams to privilege redundancy over discovery. Okay, what about psychological cost? So sharing private information introduces a form of psychological vulnerability that individuals prefer to avoid.

Voicing a divergent viewpoint or raising a previously unmentioned concern risks being wrong, or worse, it may be perceived as out of sync with the group. This phenomenon is known as evaluation apprehension, and it can be especially acute in very hierarchical or high-status teams where mistakes carry very reputational or career penalties.

Individuals may self-censor not because they lack valuable insights, but because the psychological toll of potential judgment or dismissal outweighs the perceived benefits of contributing. So how about social costs? The social dynamics of group settings may further discourage the introduction of unshared information. Groups tend to reward consensus and cohesion, creating subtle pressure that reinforces conformity.

Discussing commonly held knowledge helps build rapport and reinforces a sense of alignment, while injecting new or contradictory data can feel very disruptive. Social motivations like mutual enhancement where members gain credibility by affirming shared understanding can lead to a cycle where members seek validation over accuracy.

And in such environments, the norms that foster harmony may be also the ones that suppress the diversity of thought necessary for a very rigorous decision-making process.

So now the article focuses on a shift in how they began to understand how to improve committees' performance. They talk a little bit about how they've worked with the Food and Drug Administration, their advisory committees. Now, these are very powerful committees. They make big-time decisions on drugs and medical devices and all the things that help keep us healthy. So they're very, very comprised of expertise and medical professionals and high-functioning people, right?

Well, in 2007, the FDA made a seemingly minor procedural change to the way the committees operated. And this is very interesting. Prior to the change, voting was typically conducted in a sequential manner. So every committee member would visibly and audibly cast their vote and explain their position one after another. And then after the change, voting was to be simultaneous. Members would all vote at the same time. And only after voting closed would they then go around and reveal their votes.

The FDA's stated goal with the change was to mitigate the possibility that members were herding, basically following each other in a herd mentality. When voting happens sequentially, early votes can initiate a bandwagon effect and unduly influence voters later in the voting order. By contrast, simultaneous voting eliminates this possibility, freeing each member to render an independent judgment based on their unique perspective.

What they found was fascinating. What they found in summary were better discussions, more dissenting voices, better decisions. In fact, one of the statistics they cite in the article is the proportion of unanimous committee recommendations decreased from 45% to 27%. And they attributed that shift on the intended goal of reducing herding behavior and promoting greater independence among their members.

In summary, a simple procedural change altered the incentives for individuals to overcome the costs that we talked about earlier and to expend the effort needed for solid discussions, triggering a cascade of behavioral adaptations. By removing that early visibility of peer votes, experts compensated by proactively uncovering one another's views during discussion.

This led to greater information revelation, which more than voting independence alone appears to underlie the improvement in decision-making performance.

So the authors offer up three recommendations towards better group decision-making. Number one. Focus on your committee process, not just the outcomes. Now, obviously, outcomes are important, but focusing on key procedural ways that the committee makes decisions are really, really important. The second thing is they really stress psychological safety, and leaders play a key role.

We must monitor and manage participation patterns, encourage genuine engagement and positively reinforce contributions that challenge the consensus or introduce new information. When members feel safe to speak and they're invited to question each other, they're more likely to surface unshared insights that are critical to robust decisions.

The last idea here is coming back to kind of the idea that kind of spark this entire article, structure pre-vote discussions deliberately and adopt simultaneous voting. So the richest moments of value creation and group decisions happen before the vote. When diverse viewpoints collide, they overlap, they cohere into shared understanding. So the article recommends encouraging committee members to direct questions to one another.

One surprisingly powerful tactic is to implement simultaneous voting using electronic buttons. That prevents members from seeing how others vote in real time. So unlike the common practice of going around the room, round robin. Simultaneous voting reduces social influence and hurting mentality when that's likely to happen. When participants know they must form an independent judgment, they engage more actively during discussion.

Our research shows that this simple procedural change can significantly enhance the quality of collective decisions. And they sum up the article by saying you cannot guarantee perfect group decisions, but you can stack the deck by deliberately engineering processes that incentivize candor, curiosity, and critical challenge. And until next time we meet in the manager lab, do good work. Thank you.