Why Smart Teams Still Get It Wrong
When Intelligence Isn’t Enough
In 2007, Nokia commanded more than half the global phone market. By 2013, it was gone, sold for a fraction of its former value. Executives later admitted the warning signs were obvious. So why didn’t anyone act?
Because inside those meetings, nobody wanted to challenge the consensus.
Teams of brilliant people make bad decisions every day. Boards approve mergers that destroy billions. Public projects run years over schedule. Small teams waste months chasing ideas that should have been killed in week one.
The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s the way group dynamics amplify the biases that trip up individuals.
The Autopilot Tax
Last month, a startup founder told me they’d been running weekly strategy meetings for six months before realizing they were just rehashing the same three points. Six months. Twenty-four meetings. Forty-eight hours of collective time circling the same drain.
“We thought we were being thorough,” she said. “We were just being thorough at being stuck.”
That’s the autopilot tax - the hidden cost of sleepwalking through decisions that matter. Research from McKinsey shows teams spend 37% of their time in meetings that add no value, while Harvard Business Review found that 67% of senior managers feel they don’t have time for strategic thinking. You’re not slow. You’re just stuck in patterns that feel productive but aren’t.
When one person runs on autopilot, they waste their own time. When a team runs on autopilot, they compound that waste across every person in the room.
How Groups Amplify Bias
Here’s what really happens when smart people get together:
Anchoring in action: Your CFO opens the budget meeting with last year’s numbers. Every discussion that follows orbits around those figures, even when the market has fundamentally shifted. You’re not budgeting - you’re adjusting.
Framing that fools everyone: “We hired 8 out of our last 10 candidates from top-tier schools - they’re clearly the best fit” sounds smart until you realize you’ve anchored on prestige over performance. You’re not hiring diverse talent; you’re hiring the same profile with different names.
Hindsight bias in real time: After a product launch flops, every warning sign feels obvious. “We should have known the market wasn’t ready.” But six months ago, those same signs were buried under optimism and momentum.
Status quo on steroids: “Our quarterly reviews have always worked” becomes gospel, even when half your team admits they’re demotivating and the other half just goes through the motions.
Together, these create decision debt - the long-term costs of shortcuts, blame culture, and missed opportunities. Like financial debt, it compounds until the bill comes due.
The 5 Gates for Teams
In The Decisions That Run Your Life, we introduced The Sanity Check: five gates you can run in under five minutes to catch bias before it sticks. The same framework works for teams - but only if it’s explicit and collective.
Loss vs. Gain – Are we protecting against loss, or pursuing a real gain?
Dissenting View – Rotate the role of devil’s advocate to normalize smart disagreement.
Evidence Mix – Put all evidence on the table before debate. No cherry-picking.
Time Check – Ask: is this urgency real, or self-imposed?
Future Self – “In one year, will we thank ourselves for this choice?”
These gates don’t require a workshop. They take minutes - but they change the room.
Give it a try yourself.
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