A well know danger of partipatory decision making is the "design by committee phenomen", a term "used to refer to suboptimal traits that such a process may produce as a result of having to compromise between the requirements and viewpoints of the participants, particularly in the presence of poor leadership or poor technical knowledge, such as needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee).