Usually, when people talk about “group think” they are condemning bad decisions. Yet when they talk about “consensus” they are implying that the group or crowd must be right.
When good leaders make bad decisions because advisers not only fail to speak up, but fail to even consider that better options may be available, that’s Group Think. When two people share the same view, and everyone else is afraid to speak, that’s Group Think. Group Think is when people not only fail to challenge the consensus, but fail to consider that the consensus may be wrong.
Look at almost any war, and you’ll find that the consensus behind at least one side’s leadership was wrong, and went largely unchallenged. However, war is politics by other means, and I do not wish to discuss politics.
Before getting into heated political mud fights I may wish to forget, I’ll talk about a “non-political” area, one where I’ve wasted time in debates that have turned ugly: film theory. Continue reading “Consensus or Group Think?”
Conventional wisdom* among amateur directors and beginning film lecturers is that camera directions should “never” appear in a film script. Yet, the camera is probably the one thing that separates a screenplay from a stage-play. (Okay, so there’s CGI, logos and subtitles, as well as editing overlays, but the stage can have its own version of these effects. Even animation can be achieved with a giant flip book.)
Most film students will know of the Kuleshov experiment by their second year in film school. And most historians will know who Karl Marx, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon and Napoleon Bonaparte are.