“I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here… I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
Develop Disagreement
From Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive (Harper & Row, 1967), p. 148, in the chapter “Effective Decisions.” Drucker tells it as something Alfred P. Sloan, who ran General Motors for decades, was reported to have said when one of GM’s top committees reached a decision with no argument at all: everyone around the table nodded assent, and Sloan adjourned the matter instead of approving it.
Sloan’s reasoning is the point. Instant, unanimous agreement was evidence to him that nobody had actually examined the decision, so he sent the committee away to develop disagreement and, with it, some understanding of what they were deciding. Drucker’s lesson is that a sound decision needs dissent as raw material, not as an obstacle to clear away: if the only thing a proposal has going for it is that no one objects, no one has tested it yet.
The same company would later supply the cautionary version. The 2014 Valukas report, the investigation GM’s board commissioned into the ignition-switch recall, documented a habit insiders called the “GM nod,” when “everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room and does nothing.” Sloan distrusted that nod decades before it had a name.