Earl Beede calls consensus one of the Good decision-making processes. Steve McConnell (who works alongside Earl Beede at Construx Software) also suggests to ‣ when making technical management decisions. The idea of a golden mean dates back at least to Aristotle.
In ‣, commenting on compromises in decision-making, Peter Drucker is bold and practical at the same time (from his Elements of decision making):
Think through what is right: the solution that will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is given to compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to make the decision acceptable. You will always compromise in the end.
In ‣, Stephen Covey writes that despite being worse than truly creative, synergistic cooperation (as David Deutsch suggests—see below), consensus is better than any one's position alone:
In interdependent environment, respectful communication leads to compromise positions, or pleasantly enforced consensus. It's honest cooperation, but not creation. Transaction, not transformation. 1 + 1 = 1.5.
David Graeber makes an interesting note in ‣:
Buddha admired democratic organisation of North India city states and adopted it for organisation of his followers. Buddhist monasteries continue to operate by consensus to this day.
In machine learning, some Ensemble learning methods are equivalent to consensus. Ensemble methods typically make better predictions and are better regularised than individual models used in the ensemble.
Richard Hamming in ‣:
Committee decisions diffuse responsibility. Most of the time they are compromises that have none of the virtues of any path.
David Deutsch agrees with Hamming in ‣:
Good explanations are hard to vary, so a mix of two is usually worse than both. Combining two explanations requires an additional act of creativity.
Naval Ravikant fully subscribes to Deutsch's epistemological realism:
Large groups of people look for consensus, not truth.
Carmen Medina in ‣:
Consensus is a way to avoid making a decision, when you talk to the lowest common denominator.
Part of Good decision-making processes.