Take one decision your group agreed on. Check whether the agreement was known or only inferred — and whether anyone in the room actually preferred what was decided.
Choose the decision
Not “how we decide”. One decision a group you belong to agreed on — recently, or about to be confirmed — where the agreement mattered.
Four checkpoints
Each checkpoint comes from an Executive Insight Brief. Answer for this decision, not for the group in general. “Don’t know” is an answer — often the most useful one.
Three records
Private preference, what you believe the others wanted, and what the record says are three different things. Compare them before trusting the agreement.
Your map
This map shows whether the agreement behind one decision was known or only inferred. It cannot prove after the fact that nobody wanted the decision — after a bad outcome, people reconstruct what they preferred. Unanimity is not suspicious in itself, and dissent is not wise in itself. Every checkpoint rests on a published brief; none of them supplies a cutoff.
Next step
You now know, for this decision, whether the agreement was established or assumed — and where the group’s real preferences were never asked for.
The harder part is the decision architecture: capturing preferences before advocacy hardens, keeping alternatives and objections on the record, and making the decision recognizable enough that nobody has to reopen it. That is the conversation worth having.
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Short answers first, then the briefs that read them, then essays and pages.