Why groups fail in the same three ways

Almost every failed group project fails one of three ways. Nobody agreed what finished meant, so four people built four different things. Nobody owned specific pieces, so everything belonged to everybody and therefore to nobody. Or nobody set a date before the deadline, so the entire project happened in the last four days.

None of those is about a bad group member, which is the story told afterwards. They are structural, they happen before any work starts, and all three are fixable in a single meeting.