The Consensus Trap: When a Winning Idea Is a Blind Spot

An idea that survives a meeting unchallenged isn't strong. It's may untested.

This is a dangerous illusion. Feeling aligned in a boardroom often gets confused with validation. This can create a false sense of certainty as a project progresses. But certainty is the enemy of strategy.

It creates the blind spot where a fatal flaw can hide in plain sight.

A small, perfect example of this is OpenAI's new ad.

The ad has a guy asking ChatGPT, "I need a recipe that says, 'I like you but want to play it cool.'"

he serves the recipe. All seems to be going well. But I couldn't help but think the woman tasting the dish was feigning enjoyment. Her look was giving "I'm just going to pretend to like it so I don't insult him" vibes.

It made me think: Wouldn't it be funny if the recipe were bad?

So I went back and looked at the on-screen instructions. And there it was. Two errors that any decent cook would spot in seconds.

You don't add tomatoes, then garlic. You sauté the garlic first. Then add tomatoes.

You don't add lemon juice while a dish is on the heat. You add lemon juice after you turn off the heat.

OpenAI meant to highlight how ChatGPT can fit into people's lives. But it displayed a common business mistake.

The Consensus Trap: Why a Winning Idea Can Be Your Biggest Blind Spot

The real issue here goes deeper than AI.

It’s a classic leadership blind spot that new technology has put on steroids: failing to stress-test your own narrative against reality.

I call this failure "The Consensus Trap."

It's what happens when a team falls in love with its own story.

An idea seems so powerful that a consensus forms around it. Everyone buys in. And once this happens, the story becomes shielded from the hard questions that would reveal a fatal flaw.

This is a widespread threat because it's a systemic breakdown that can rot a business from multiple angles. A story needs to be checked against a few unforgiving realities:

• The Reality of Your Data: Does the evidence truly support the story we're telling ourselves?

• The Reality of Culture: How will this be seen by the community it's meant for?

• The Reality of Expertise: Does this idea ignore a basic rule that any seasoned expert would know?

• The Reality of User Behavior: Does this brilliant solution solve a problem anyone actually has?

When these checks are missing, the results range from embarrassing to disastrous. And this failure often starts deep in the strategy room, even when you're drowning in data.

I saw this firsthand when I consulted Kohl's.

Every year we would hold the Kohl's Symposium, a week-long meeting where we would create the strategy for the next year. It was heavily data-driven, often with three or four thick binders of research we had to digest beforehand.

It was my first year there. In the room were the CMO, the Head of Advertising, the Head of Research, other leaders, and the consumer insights team. By the final day, we developed a powerful story.

On the last day, I raised my hand. "I think we don't actually have the data to prove this point."

The room pushed back: "Yes, we do."

I walked them back through the specific data points, and you could see them realize it. "Oh, crap."

The data told a different tale, but we loved our story. We drifted apart slowly, without even noticing. The last day was a scramble to rewrite the narrative.

Our detour didn't take us far from where we should've been. The end result just required some tweaks. But they were important tweaks that changed the outcome of our strategy.

And we could've missed them all because we almost skipped that final Data Integrity Check.

This breakdown is not confined to boardrooms.

It can happen in public.

And when it does, the consequences can be disastrous.

Walmart: When Commerce Clashes with Commemoration

Remember the uproar about Walmart's "Juneteenth Celebration Edition" ice cream?

It seemed obvious how bad an idea it was from the outside.

But to understand this mistake, you have to see the logic that seemed to make sense inside their walls.

The failure began when Juneteenth became a federal holiday. For a retail machine like Walmart, this triggered a standard process: the Corporate Holiday Playbook.

Their line of thinking was simple: We make themed products for the 4th of July or Pride Month. Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. So, we should create a Juneteenth product. This thinking completely missed the bigger picture.

The fatal error was miscategorizing the event.

Walmart treated Juneteenth as a commercial "holiday" instead of what it is: a solemn "commemoration" of the end of slavery in the U.S. That framing mistake, made at the start, guaranteed an offensive result.

The execution made it worse. The ice cream was a "Great Value" product, a brand known for budget pricing. This cheapened the very idea the product claimed to honor.

When photos of the ice cream hit social media, the public immediately rejected it.

The backlash went beyond the product itself. It became a furious critique of "performative allyship**"**—showing support in a superficial way without taking real action. The phrase "profiting from pain" started trending, capturing how people saw Walmart's motives.

But the story gets worse.

The depth of blindness showed when the public found out what Walmart’s teams had overlooked.

A Black, female-owned ice cream brand, Creamalicious, was already sold in Walmart stores. And one of its main flavors was "Right As Rain Red Velvet Cheesecake." The exact flavor profile Walmart copied.

This news turned disappointment into real anger.

The teams were so focused on creating a product that they failed to look at the products they already sold. And it looked like a deliberate attempt to erase a Black-owned business.

To complete the fiasco, a small "TM" symbol was spotted next to the word "Juneteenth" on the carton. The public saw a corporate giant trying to own a piece of Black history.

Walmart was forced into a humiliating public apology and had to pull the product.

It's a perfect example of a failure to check for cultural perception.

It's a costly mistake that one final Culture Check could have avoided. They just needed to ask one simple question to the right people: "How will the community we claim to honor see this?""

Boeing: When the Business Case Overrules the Safety Case

The failure at Walmart was a PR disaster. But when a company's internal story becomes so powerful that it ignores its own technical experts, the consequences can be devastating.

The story of the Boeing 737 MAX is the ultimate case study in the failure of the Expert Knowledge Check.

The entire 737 MAX program was built on a simple business idea. Facing tough competition from Airbus, Boeing's leaders decided not to design a new plane but to update the trusted 737.

The key part of this idea was that pilots would not need any new, costly simulator training. This was a huge selling point, but it became an unbreakable rule that shaped every decision that followed.

The business story became an echo chamber, a truth so powerful it couldn't be challenged, even by physics.

The collision with reality began with an engineering problem.

The new, larger engines didn't fit under the wings. Engineers solved this by moving them forward and higher up. This change had major effects on how the plane flew, causing the nose to pitch up and increasing the risk of a stall.

Critically, this meant the plane no longer flew like its predecessor, breaking the core promise.

Forced to preserve the "no new training" rule, the engineers turned to a software patch for a hardware problem: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). MCAS was designed to automatically push the plane's nose down, making the MAX feel like the older 737.

To make sure this new system didn't require training, Boeing made a series of devastating decisions:

• They ignored experts on redundancy. The system relied on a single sensor, a known weak spot on airplanes. An internal engineer questioned this three years before the first crash, but the warning was ignored.

• They ignored their own flight test experts. When testing showed the problem was worse than they thought, MCAS's power was increased fourfold. The initial safety analysis, which called the risk "almost impossible," was never updated for this much more aggressive system.

• They ignored the most important experts: the pilots. To protect the business plan, Boeing deliberately left any mention of MCAS out of the flight manuals. Pilots never knew this powerful system existed. It was a fact they hid to protect their story.

The final, brutal reality check came in the skies over Indonesia and Ethiopia.

A single faulty sensor caused MCAS to trigger in two nearly identical crashes. It made the plane's nose go down repeatedly. The pilots were fighting a powerful, hidden enemy they knew nothing about.

In the second crash, the crew followed the right emergency procedure. But MCAS had already put the plane into such an extreme position that they couldn't physically recover.

Not doing a proper Expert Knowledge Check cost 346 lives. It also caused a 20-month grounding of the fleet and cost Boeing more than $20 billion.

The 737 MAX was only cleared to fly again after the FAA required the very thing that the program was designed to avoid: full pilot training in a simulator.

When we buy into a narrative, even mounds of evidence can blind us to reality.

Quibi: The $1.75 Billion Answer to a Question No One Asked

The failures at Walmart and Boeing show what happens when a plan's execution goes horribly wrong. But an echo chamber can produce another kind of disaster: a flawed plan executed perfectly.

The spectacular, $1.75 billion collapse of Quibi is a masterclass in the failure of the User Context Check.

Quibi acted more like a big gamble than a startup. It was created by two industry giants: Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Silicon Valley icon Meg Whitman. Their idea was to create premium, "movie-quality" shows with a twist. Each episode would come in "quick bites" under 10 minutes for on-the-go mobile viewing.

The internal story was powerful. It focused on a big, untapped market of commuters wanting quality content for their "in-between moments.""

This belief, backed by the founders' powerful reputations, created a bubble where their idea seemed unstoppable.

Before a single user saw the app, Quibi raised an incredible $1.75 billion. It was the exact opposite of how successful startups work today. It was a massive, fully-formed product built on an unproven idea, with no room to learn or change course.

The entire venture was a solution designed for a user who, it turned out, did not exist. The collision with reality was immediate.

The Content Paradox: Quibi bet everything on "movie-quality" production, committing $1.1 billion to its first-year content budget. This went against how people actually use their phones for video. While Quibi invested in Hollywood polish, platforms like TikTok were exploding by championing the opposite: raw, authentic, user-made content. Lacking the immersive quality of Netflix and the participatory nature of TikTok, Quibi's shows were a solution without a problem.

Anti-Social by Design: In a now-famous disastrous decision, Quibi launched without letting users take screenshots or share clips. This choice was made to please Hollywood partners worried about piracy. It walled off their content from the engine of modern digital culture: the meme and the viral clip. It was something people expected from short-form formats. And they failed to grasp that in today's world, the value of content goes up the more people share it.

Ignoring the Real Competition: Quibi's leaders insisted they didn't compete with free platforms like YouTube and TikTok. This was a fatal blind spot. They failed to understand that all platforms compete for people's time and attention. By charging $4.99 a month, Quibi put up a huge barrier when users already had infinite free content. The market's rejection was brutal: after the 90-day free trial, as few as 8% of users paid for the service.

The result was a total collapse.

Launched in April 2020, the company shut down six months later, in October 2020.

The failure of Quibi is a cautionary tale of what happens when a powerful idea is developed in a bubble. This $1.75 billion lesson reminds us that the important question has shifted from "Can we build it?" to "Does anyone actually want it?"

How to Escape the Consensus Trap

From a flawed recipe to a flawed airplane, the root cause is the same: a narrative that was never stress tested against reality.

Your advantage will be found not in generating more ideas. But in a better process for ensuring your best ideas are built on reality.

Here are three questions to build your "final check" system:

1. Who is our designated "Red Team"? Assign a person or small group the explicit duty to challenge the prevailing narrative. Ask them to poke holes, question the data, and voice the uncomfortable truths. If everyone in the room is a cheerleader, you're flying blind.

2. What reality are we checking against? Before finalizing any decision, explicitly define your "check." Is this a Data Check ("Does the evidence still support this story?")? A Cultural Check ("How will this be perceived by the communities it affects?")? An Expert Check ("Does this idea ignore a basic rule a seasoned expert would know?")? Or a User Check ("Does this brilliant solution solve a problem anyone actually has?")?

3. Are we defending the idea or the goal? Teams inevitably fall in love with their solutions. The final check must force the question: "Is this idea truly the best way to achieve our objective, or are we just committed to it because it's our idea?"

AI, data, and brainstorms can give you a plausible narrative. A rigorous process of checks and balances ensures it is a winning one.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is there a strategy in your business right now that feels great internally but hasn't been pressure-tested against the real world? Our Strategy Clinic is a 90-minute session designed to be that objective, expert "final check" before you commit. Reply to this email, and we can set up a brief call to discuss if it's the right fit for your problem. It's the one meeting that can save you a dozen bad ones.