What is groupthink Janis?

Groupthink Janis is a concept in personal epistemology: Different frameworks for decisions made alone versus with others.

Example: Your team needs to choose a new database architecture. Six engineers have strong opinions. If you let the most senior person decide, you lose information from the people closest to the problem. If you require full consensus, the discussion runs for three hours and ends with a compromise nobody believes in. If you use consent-based decision making — 'Does anyone have a principled objection they can articulate?' — you reach a decision in 40 minutes that everyone can work with, even though not everyone would have chosen it individually. The framework you use determines the quality of the outcome more than the quality of any individual opinion in the room.

This concept is part of Phase 23 (Decision Frameworks) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for decision frameworks.