Sense and decide
What Only You Know
A round for the facts only one person holds
Before a decision, each person shares only information they believe nobody else in the room has. Repeating what has already been said is not allowed, and nobody states a preference until the round is done.
Borrowed from research on "hidden profiles" by psychologists Garold Stasser and William Titus, who showed that groups spend most of their discussion on what everyone already knows. Read the original source.
One session · Minutes to start · Anyone on the team can start it
Try this first
Go around the room once and ask, "What do you know about this that you think the rest of us don't?"
Use it when
A decision draws on people from different teams or roles, and the discussion keeps circling the same few facts.
Skip it when
Everyone has the same information, such as a group that has all read the same report and nothing else. It also adds little to small calls that are easy to reverse.
How to introduce it
Explain that groups spend most of their time on facts everyone already knows, and the facts only one person holds get lost. Then run a round where each person offers only what they think is new to the group: something they saw firsthand, heard from a customer, or know from their specialty. Ask people to hold their opinions about what to do until the round is over.
How to show up
Keep your own view, and any AI recommendation, out of the room until the round is done. Stop repeats politely: "We have that one. What else do you know?" When someone offers something unexpected, ask a follow-up question so the fact gets weight instead of being noted and dropped.
How long it takes
Ten to fifteen minutes before the discussion.
What makes it hard
Shared facts feel safer to mention, because other people nod along. A fact only one person holds can make that person sound less sure. Even after a new fact is said out loud, people tend to discount it when it cuts against the option they already like. Hearing other people's preferences early makes this worse.
What it looks like when it's working
Facts come up that surprise at least one other person, and the decision changes because of one of them. If the round produces only restatements of the deck, people either don't know anything different or don't think it is worth saying.
How long until it sticks
Expect a few uses on real decisions before people prepare their unique information in advance.
How you know it stuck
People arrive with a note of what they know that others might not, and someone asks "what haven't we heard yet?" before the team decides.
The idea behind it
A group's advantage over one person is that its members know different things. That advantage only counts if the different things get said and then actually used.
Where it comes from
Research basis. In Stasser and Titus's experiments, groups chose among candidates for a job. When every member could see all the facts, 83% of groups picked the best candidate. When the key facts were split across members, only 18% did, because the groups talked mostly about the facts they shared. This is one of the best-supported findings in research on groups. A combined analysis of 65 studies found that groups discuss far more shared information than unshared information, and are about eight times less likely to find the right answer when the key facts are split among members. In one set of experiments, 40% of groups found the answer when members kept their preferences to themselves until the facts were shared, compared with 7% when they stated preferences first. Nearly all of this evidence comes from laboratory studies.
Also fits: The group lands on the first answer, often the AI's
Home problem: The people who know something don't say it