12: Brain-to-Brain Synchrony in Collective Decision-making

All previous chapters focused on leaders' decision-making as individuals. But studying a single person's brain is not enough to fully understand social behaviors. In this chapter, we will explore how leaders can facilitate high-quality collective decision-making. One may wonder: How does a collective mind emerge from a group of individual minds? How do organizational structure, rules, and policies work against harnessing the collective wisdom of collective decision-making? Asking a group to make a decision does not necessarily ensure high decision quality. If an organization is not instrumental in generating collective wisdom, collective decision-making produces lower quality decisions than individual decision-making, as stated in Condorcet's jury theorem. This chapter introduces brain-to-brain synchrony that takes place in collective decision-making and how leaders can create an organization that promotes brain-to-brain synchrony.