Nobody chose the voucher

Six siblings in Amman are choosing a present for their mother's sixtieth birthday.

Any one of them, alone, would have chosen well. The eldest knows she has wanted for years to visit her sister in Tunis. The youngest knows she would love to go back to the painting she gave up when she married.

But six people deciding together do something none of them would do alone. Every idea meets a question about what might go wrong. What if the trip tires her. What if she never uses the lessons. What if it looks as though some of them gave more than others. Each worry is reasonable, each outcome unlikely, and each one quietly removes something specific from the table.

After three weeks of messages, they settle on a generous voucher for a department store. Nobody objects to it. Nobody loves it. Including, privately, their mother.

This is how groups tend to behave. One person can weigh the trade-offs, accept a small risk and own the result. A group protects itself instead, either by holding out for a perfect option that never arrives or by averaging until nothing sharp is left. A great many products, buildings and services that please nobody were made exactly this way, at a far higher cost than a voucher.

The fix is not a better discussion. It is to stop discussing. Hand the choice to one sibling, agree in advance to stand behind whatever she picks, and accept that she might get it slightly wrong.

A specific gift, slightly wrong, still says that someone was thinking about her. The average of six good ideas mostly says that six people were thinking about each other.