In 1972, Irving Janis, a research psychologist at Yale University, documented a series of catastrophic foreign policy failures that shared a singular, chilling characteristic. From the lack of preparation for the attack on Pearl Harbor to the escalation of the Vietnam War and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, Janis observed that the architects of these failures were not incompetent or ill-informed. They were, in fact, some of the most intellectually gifted individuals in the American government. Yet, when placed in a room together, their collective intelligence seemed to evaporate, replaced by a psychological drive for unanimity that Janis termed "groupthink." The Bay of Pigs remains the quintessential example: a plan so flawed that even a cursory independent review would have exposed its tactical impossibilities, yet it was approved by a committee of brilliant men who were more concerned with maintaining the social cohesion of the group than with challenging a failing strategy.

The cost of this dynamic is not confined to the history books or the halls of the State Department. In the corporate world, the committee has become the default setting for risk mitigation, yet it frequently achieves the opposite. When the Swiss national carrier Swissair collapsed in 2001—a company once so financially stable it was known as the "Flying Bank"—the subsequent post-mortem pointed directly at a board of directors that had become a closed loop of consensus. They had pursued a "Hunter Strategy" of aggressive acquisitions that drained their liquidity, yet the board, comprised of elite figures from Swiss business and politics, failed to produce a single dissenting voice until it was too late. The mechanism of failure was not a lack of data, but the social pressure to remain "collegial" in the face of impending disaster.