Not including everyone’s opinion for the sake of progress?

In my experience, this sort of counter-productive indecisive navel gazing is born from fear and just not knowing wtf they're doing. The fear can come from a few different places: \* fear that they're in over their heads; they don't really understand the problem or the proposed solution, so they're trying to slow everything down. \* fear that they'll be punished if something isn't perfect, so they try to account for every single potential thing.. which when applied to someone's personal life is called an anxiety disorder. \* fear that if they don't own the project conception, then they don't really have stake in the solution and are redundant \* fear of accountability; if they spread the decision-making across everyone, then no one person's ever really "at fault." \* fear of people; there are 1 or more total assholes on the team that bully people, and this sort of collective decision making is a way for the group to placate them. It varies team by team, but I usually find that it's born from some sort of fear. All of those can be assuaged, but it's just a matter of figuring out which one it is. Sometimes it's making a point to institute blameless incident post mortems. Sometimes it's making sure people know you'll act as the lightning rod on things. Sometimes it's giving quick demos/talks on potentially unfamiliar technologies or infrastructure patterns or whatever. Sometimes it's finding the shitty person and then making process changes to remove any avenues for them to express power. This is all the manager's responsibility, but as you get more and more senior you'll get better at backstopping bad management. Graveness aside, it's all pretty hilarious, though, because consensus-driven decision making is literally an industrial sabotage tactic in the old CIA field manual. There's a line in there about organizational sabotage, and how if you need to sabotage an org/industry, you eliminate all potential for decisive action by ensuring that all decisions get pushed through a risk-adverse consensus committee of no fewer than 5 people. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably just tell people "I've already discussed this with the CTO and this is the path they wants us to explore. If there are specific actionable concerns around the proposed solution, let's talk through them so we can address them, but this is our starting direction. It's a direction, though; it's not a 100% prescribed path. If we have to re-examine our preconceptions 3 weeks down the road, we can adapt to that. It's impossible to know everything up front. But we have a plan, a place to start and that's what we're going to do." or something along those lines. If that doesn't work or that manager undercuts you again, I'd just tell the manager that he's actively undermining the CTO's directives and making your job impossible, and that you're happy to meet with him and the CTO to workshop strategies for him to more effectively manage his team.