Why You Need To Get Rid of Your Investment Committee
Or any committee where people say "great point" before ignoring it
There are no words for what happened this week. The tragedy at the Blackstone office in New York has been sitting heavily with me—and with many of us. It’s hard to wrap your head around something so random, so violent, and so senseless. I keep coming back to that line from The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
And maybe that’s the only explanation we’ll ever get. But what I don’t want to lose in the news cycle is this: these victims were doing their jobs. Building lives. Showing up. And they were taken from their family, their coworkers, their community. So I just want to stop for a moment and say—some people leave the world better than they found it. Even if they didn’t get nearly enough time in it.
We were meeting in a different office that day while ours was under construction. It was a smaller conference room than usual—everything felt tighter, more touchy feely. Maybe that’s why I finally worked up the nerve to say something to our CIO that had been troubling me for weeks.
“Hey—I’ve been thinking a lot about our investment committee, and I’m worried that people aren’t really speaking up when they disagree. It’s a big group of us, and it can be really intimidating to push back—especially when you or [our CEO] already voiced an opinion. What if we gave anonymous feedback before the meeting? Just a chance to write down our thoughts ahead of time?”
He looked at me and sighed.
“Jennifer, if we hired people who don’t feel comfortable speaking up in investment committee, then we made a mistake.”
What I heard in that moment was: we made a mistake hiring you.
In retrospect, I don’t think that’s what he meant. (Glass-half-full, I like to think he was referring to the system, not the person.)
What I hear now, with a little distance and a lot more understanding, is that he believed they had built a culture where disagreement was welcome. That speaking up was safe. That candor would flow naturally from “the kind of people we hire.”
And they were wrong.
Like most firms are.
Because groupthink isn’t a people problem. It’s a power problem. A fear problem. A structure problem.
You May Secretly Doubt It, But You’re Still Nodding
At the time, I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing. But now, thanks to years of nerding out on behavioral science, I can name it:
Groupthink
Coined by Irving Janis in 1972, groupthink happens when the desire for harmony overrides the desire for truth. When no one wants to be the one who breaks the vibe.
And when you're in front of your boss—or worse, your boss’s boss—it’s not just uncomfortable to disagree. It feels risky.
That’s not because you're weak. It's because you're human.
As Cialdini writes in Influence, “we view an action as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”
If everyone else is on board, the signal is: you should be too.
Add in authority bias (Stanley Milgram, 1963), fear of social judgment (Schachter, 1951), and pluralistic ignorance (Prentice & Miller, 1996), and you’ve got a recipe for a room full of smart people smiling politely while the worst idea of the quarter sails through with consensus.
👮♂️ Authority Bias (Milgram, 1963)
Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist, was grappling with the Holocaust and trying to answer: “Could it happen here? Could Americans do the same?” His Milgram experiment was a famous 1960s psychology study where participants were instructed to deliver what they believed were painful electric shocks to another person. It revealed that ordinary people were surprisingly willing to obey authority figures—even when it meant harming someone—highlighting the power of obedience and authority bias. So in general, Milgram proved that people are more likely to follow instructions—or opinions—if they come from someone in power. Even if they know it’s wrong. Even if their gut says otherwise. Milgram showed this with electric shocks in a lab. Real life shows it every Tuesday at 2pm in the IC meeting.
😳 Fear of Social Judgment (Schachter, 1951)
In this study, groups were asked to discuss how to deal with a fictional juvenile delinquent. Each group had one secret dissenter—someone who consistently disagreed with the group’s preferred approach.
At first, the group tried to persuade this person. Then they started ignoring them. By the end, they voted them off the island—excluding them from future discussions.
The takeaway? People who challenge the group aren’t just seen as wrong. They’re seen as disruptive. And that’s often worse.
Which is why in many work cultures, you’ll hear someone whisper their doubts after the meeting—but never during.
🤫 Pluralistic Ignorance (Prentice & Miller, 1996)
At Princeton, students were surveyed about drinking culture. Privately, most said they were uncomfortable with how much people drank. But they believed their peers were fine with it—so they stayed silent and went along.
The researchers called it pluralistic ignorance: when everyone thinks they’re the only one with doubts, so no one speaks up.
Sound familiar? It’s the IC meeting where you’re unsure about the deal but assume everyone else is sold—so you nod. They nod. And suddenly, consensus has been manufactured out of mutual (consensual?) hesitation.
The Investment Committee as Performance Art
By the time an investment memo is circulating, the decision has typically already been made.
In fact, we used to say that if the deal didn’t get killed in the Pre-IC meeting, then something was wrong.
That made the IC meeting itself…well, performative.
A theater of due diligence. A careful dance of language and looks.
You already know who’s going to “strongly support” and who’s going to raise “just a couple questions to seem like they disagree and sound smart because they think they’re up for promotion but don’t worry, it’s not material.”
Real debate is rare. Not because people don’t care, but because most people are playing defense and thinking to themselves:
Don’t be the person who holds it up.
Don’t get labeled a “no” person.
Don’t contradict a partner, at least without running it by them first.
If You Want Dissent, Design for It
You don’t solve groupthink by hiring “strong personalities.”*
You solve it by redesigning the room.
Some structural fixes I’ve seen work:
Collect written feedback before the meeting. The one where the decision is made, NOT the performative one.
Anonymize it. Or in writing, have your leadership team publicly praise employees who voice disagreement—even when your leadership team disagrees. Especially when they disagree.
Assign a rotating “devil’s advocate” role. Bake it into the process, not the personality.
Set a rule that silence = not convinced, not silence = consent.
Or be super radical: get rid of the committee altogether. Give one person decision-making responsibility, rotate reviewers, and track decisions over time—not just in the moment.
Last but definitely not least, run a premortem: after the deal is presented, ask everyone, “Imagine it’s two years from now and this deal failed. What went wrong?” Have them write their answers before discussion in your decision-making meeting. It’s dissent—but reframed as foresight.
As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman once said, “The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.”
*On hiring: I have a colleague who’s been a CPO at multi-billion dollar company who swears by a certain hiring method. She says that in every interview for a leadership position, she researches that person and find something they care strongly about. Then, she will intentionally argue against it in the interview. If they disagree with her, she knows that authority bias doesn’t work on them.
The Real Culture Test
Firms love to say things like:
“We only hire people who aren't afraid to speak their mind.”
But that's not a policy. That's a prayer. And a thin one at that.
If you want true candor, you have to make disagreement feel safe. You have to reward it, not just tolerate it.
Because if the only people who ever push back are already bulletproof (tenured partners, beloved VPs), then you've built a culture of silence.
And that silence?
It’s the most expensive thing in the room.
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Jen’s Reading Corner
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Read Influence by Robert Cialdini. It will change your life.
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