Yes, and there's been a lot of fascinating and hopeful studies on this in social psychology.

from wiki

Preventing groupthink

According to Irving Janis, decision making groups are not necessarily doomed to groupthink. He also claims that there are several ways to prevent it. Janis devised seven ways of preventing groupthink (209-15):

1. Leaders should assign each member the role of “critical evaluator”. This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.

2. Higher-ups should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.

3. The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem.

4. All effective alternatives should be examined.

5. Each member should discuss the group's ideas with trusted people outside of the group.

6. The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.

7. At least one group member should be assigned the role of Devil's advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.

By following these guidelines, groupthink can be avoided. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John F. Kennedy sought to avoid groupthink during the Cuban Missile Crisis.[3] During meetings, he invited outside experts to share their viewpoints, and allowed group members to question them carefully. He also encouraged group members to discuss possible solutions with trusted members within their separate departments, and he even divided the group up into various sub-groups, in order to partially break the group cohesion. JFK was deliberately absent from the meetings, so as to avoid pressing his own opinion. Ultimately, the Cuban missile crisis was resolved peacefully, thanks in part to these measures.

congress - one word, end argument

Exactly, I'm saying the group will ultimately make the better decision, based on swam intelligence, which, incidiently, dosent involve individuals being very intelligent.

Hmm, yes, we're really not sure how to define 'the economy', but no, the nazi's wern't efficient. A revision of the Nazi heirarchy by, I'm not absolutely sure, but it may have been Rommel, but he may have been dead then, but yeah, it was revised, in 1944 increased productivity by some 30%, which really gives an indication of the waste within nazi ranks. Of course, by that time, it was already too late.

One of the differences between collective judgment and that of an individual is that the collective decision need not reflect a single cohesive metric. Angels will make decisions based on what is important to angels and devils will make decisions based on what is important to devils.

Dictating a metric is equivalent to dictating an outcome.