There are some principles that we extract from daily life through observation and experience. "Extract" might not be the right word though, because these are things that we "know" peripherally in most cases. Sometimes it takes someone to explicitly state a principle for us to experience the epiphany, acknowledging the "rightness" of the articulation by virtue of our prior experience.
A friend sent me this article, At Ground Zero, Vision by Committee by Benedict Carey, published in the New York Times. It contains these "Aha!"-moments for me:
"When making important determinations, small groups in fact often do not take into account the most relevant expertise in the room ... most small groups tend to make decisions based on information all members share about a topic, and to overlook important facts that one or several people may know but the others do not.""... the propensity of small committees [is] to drift toward extreme decisions ... When all members of a group agree on a certain issues, ... individual members tend to one-up each other and the choices become by degrees more and more extreme."
"... groups act very much like individuals under stress, only more so ... They procrastinate, calling for further information. And they become committed to bad decisions, to save face or to protect themselves against criticism."
No prizes for guessing who just came out of yet another small committee meeting.
