The Two Big Games
Imagine a business meeting which will decide if a new project goes forward, or decide key priorities about it. There are two games that folks in this business might play re this meeting.
In the consensus game, people want to be seen has having favored the immediate winning side. Whatever decision is made by the end of the meeting, or in the next few days afterward, they want to seem to have favored that decision, and if possible also to have substantially influenced that decision.
In the outcome game, people want to be seen as having favored the decision that gave the best outcome in the long run. If the project is approved and goes well, they want to have favored its approval, but if the project goes badly, they want to be seen as having opposed approval.
Good strategies for the consensus game include holding a pre-meeting with enough allies to ensure that your alliance gets the outcome it pushes for. Or if the outcome is truly uncertain, wait until the decision is leaning a bit one direction and then throw your weight in to ensure that becomes the decision.
Good strategies for the outcome game are to study the fundamentals, estimate long term outcomes, and then “plant your flag” via a clear recommendation, preferably in writing. Even better if you can arrange to make (decision-conditional) bets on the outcome.
Now often the leader of an org that holds such a meeting sets a rule: while it is fine to voice objections during a meeting, once a decision is made, everyone must fully support it. Thus all references to having opposed the decision must disappear, and so no one should play the outcome game.
Such a rule is often justified as helping the leader play his own outcome game. The leader is trying to make good decisions, that will make him look good later when his outcomes are evaluated by superiors, and he can’t do this well if his subordinates don’t fully support him.
And so playing the outcome game is often a status marker. Most ordinary people low in orgs, or without much wealth, must mostly try to please folks around them, by seeming to agree with them and to influence them. But once you rise high enough in orgs, or accumulate enough wealth, then you may be allowed to play more outcome games.
Of course even people high in orgs play more consensus than outcome games, just among a higher set of associates. And most people with wealth to invest focus on copying the investment behavior of others, instead of trying to make their own independent investment judgments.
We can see “contrarians” as people who insist on playing outcome games even when others focus on consensus games. Thus contrarians tend to lose consensus games.
Most rewards in academia come via consensus games. One wins by getting jobs, grants, and publication now based on what prestigious folks think now of your work, or your proposals for work. Long term citations count for little, as does publishing well before others, but in low ranked journals.
Many orgs probably rot via consensus games slowly displacing outcome games. At first the founders and first employees are betting on the firm, but later folks are betting on rising in the firm, not so much on the firm itself.
Plausibly the key strength of capitalism is that it makes outcome games matter more. People good at consensus games resent that, and want to cut capitalism to prevent it.
Prediction markets are an attempt to make outcome games matter more than they now do. And so they are plausibly opposed by those who have invested in learning to do better at consensus games. Many of my other institutional reform proposals can also be seen as trying to make outcome games matter more. Please help if you can.
The requirement that all subordinates must publicly support the plan once the decision is made is an entirely logical one since they will be responsible for motivating their own subordinates in actually executing the plan and it would put their subordinates in a lose-lose position if it is known that the Boss and Boss's Boss disagreed. Which is not to say that accurate agreement/disagreement records can't be noted and tracked for outcomes within that higher echelon as an input to performance evaluations, bonuses, and promotions.
I suspect that you're up against an even bigger challenge than is apparent. For example, our elections are secret ballot and clearly the outcomes matter to everyone, so they logically SHOULD be strictly outcome games, yet even a cursory examination of voter behavior (and politician behavior) suggests that both prioritize being "wrong strong" (being seen as part of the majority, even if that majority made a mistake) rather than willing to stake out unpopular positions on the conviction that they'll have the better outcomes, thus making them more resemble consensus games.
The penalty for being responsible for poor outcomes seems less than the penalty for being "not a team player", perhaps because the majority is better able to diffuse responsibility and mutually defend each other from accountability. Even when preference cascades finally result in the majority flipping to the better policy, those who were the early dissidents against the worse policy are rarely rewarded for having been right ahead of the crowd, they're more often still damaged by the retaliation they suffered before the cascade and, at best, they are belatedly restored to good standing, having gained nothing compared to those who supported the worse policy and waited until the shift was clear to flip later.
The diffusion of responsibility, alignment with power, and being in the majority all incentivize people to "go with the flow" rather than optimize for good outcomes. If the decision turns out well, being on the bandwagon accrues an individual and collective benefit. If it's wrong, everyone shares the blame, making it inert. No single individual pays a reputational cost (unless they become a scapegoat).
Even if you had a crystal ball, without sufficient support for your perspective, sometimes there's no incentive to act or speak up. In most organizational settings, there's no way for a person to internalize a reward for being contrarian or unpopular but correct. In fact, being unpopular and correct is a dangerous combination that can leave you much more vulnerable to punishment if your presence threatens those who are popular but incorrect.
It's rare to find the willingness and the resources to run parallel experiments upon discovering significant disagreements about goals and strategies, but it can still be beneficial to surface those disagreements to inform a decision. The problem is, why should anyone register disagreement if they know there's no individual upside, only reputational risk?
An anonymous survey or suggestion box could address pluralistic ignorance, but you'd still need an additional step to transform compelling survey data into actual coordination.
As it happens, I'm building a tool that can surface meaningful preference signals, identify critical masses of support for different ideas and proposals, and enable pluralistic knowledge dissemination inside an organization to facilitate more rational decisions and counter the effects of political or bureaucratic dysfunction. It's called spartacus.app. I'd love to get impressions.