AI will not cure GroupThink, or No. 1, Board disease. Many executive search companies define board recruitment missions regarding identifying candidates with the required expertise, but when hired, such expertise is often undermined by board pressure on consensus. Missing Consensus Celebrations of the Bestsellers 2004 Books Crowd Wisdom We encouraged the introduction of steam in dissent from individual experts.
The board now hopes that AI tools can make up for the knowledge gap despite struggling with technology monitoring. A recent Deloitte survey of 600 directors on 57 major global corporate committees in 57 countries found that even if investments surge beyond $5 trillion in that space, 50% do not understand AI use. Yes, AI can also be destroyed by supporting the repetition of traditional wisdom echo chambers rather than less well covered truths.
Popular thought pitfalls
You can extract lessons from the bestsellers of 2003 The smartest person in the room The meticulously studied narrative of Enron's collapse, written by Bethany MacLean and Peter Elkind, revealed the delusions of highly refined financial, economic and regulatory experts in management, and shared it with its board. Enron's end mise has derailed the careers of 26,000 employees, wiping out life savings along with shareholder investments. In the early 2000s, complete governance collapsed in 60 other respected companies across the industry.
A few years later, a similar toxic pathology of arrogant and greedy blind vizard was documented in a 2009 bestseller Too big to fail. In this book, Andrew Ross Sorkin documented the collapse of the venerable Lehman Brothers investment bank that ultimately hampered the entire US financial system.
A bestseller from 1972 decades ago, The best and brightestDavid Halbertum detailed the origins of escalating the role of the United States in the Vietnam War. He presented the distorted ideas of famous scholars brought to you by the brilliant diplomats, respected industrialists and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Despite their collective expertise, the consortium fell victim to shared delusions, causing a tragic quagmire escalation, killing three million Vietnamese people, nearly 60,000 Americans, and the collapse of Saigon.
A costly consensus
These classical critiques of flawed decision making due to toxic group conformity were first labelled “group thinking.” luck 1952 by William H. White. Yale psychologist Irving Janice published the first academic analysis of this pathology in 1972, first applied to foreign policymakers and later expanded to other sectors. Janice explained that the group often suppresses opposition due to false pressures of harmony and unity. The consensus is achieved by suppressing individual opposition in the face of shared self-righteousness, and the group is not ready for error.
Sadly, AI technology is not a savior for modifying group thinking, as AI suffers from the pathology of the same similar echo chamber. Working with Yale colleagues, we found that five major AI models, including Elon Musk's Groke, are false claims, with President Donald Trump's recent major public policy claims. Musk then intervened in reported apparent right wing updates, insisting that users “should notice the difference.” Glock immediately bravely spewed anti-Semitism cliches, praised Hitler and began to tolerate political violence against fellow Americans until Groke recovered the corrective guardrail
However, AI is not only targeted for “trainer” manipulation, but also at the expense of echoing the repetition of the most popular repetitive assertions in reviewed articles. I asked the same questions to five major AI platforms – Openai's ChatGpt, Prperxity, Anthropic's Claude, Elon Musk's Grok and Google's Gemini, and received different, sometimes opposite answers, reflecting the dangerous AI group thinking and hallucinations.
Clearly, the board cannot delegate or worship AI platforms to expert recruits as alternative, objective pillars of truth. Superficial group harmony and the deification of easily manipulated techniques exacerbate the weaknesses of the board. Individual directors should continue to analyze the trade-offs between strategic context and open constructive discussions and continue to do their own homework.
