When the chairman was brought back in, he sat down and listened for a while and couldn’t believe things either. We watched him lean forward as if he were trying to glean more from the conversation. We then saw a black cloud form over his head; finally he slapped the table and exclaimed, “What’s going on here? You people are talking in circles and getting nowhere.” After the chairman intervened, the problem was resolved in very short order. We named this the peer-plus-one approach, and have used it since then to aid decision-making where we must.
