I'm thinking of introducing the position of "party leader" in my campaign for one adventure to try it out  and keep it around if it goes will. We did this in my college game a while ago, the first time I ever played, and it wasn't a bad way to cut down on "analysis paralysis."

Basically, the party leader doesn't have much real power so they don't take away other players' agency,  but when the party is planning their course of action I'll sit back until they have a few good ideas out there, but when it gets to the point of discussing which door to go through for 20 g-darned minutes, I'll step in after everyone's gotten an idea out and say "ok party leader, what do you think?"

Then they make a decision and they give it a shot. If the party leader routinely makes bad decisions, the group can decide to replace them. I just think a lot of dnd parties suffer from a lack of direction, and I think from a character development perspective, characters have a lot to respond to in that case. The leader character has responsibility to think of, the other characters examine their roles/attitudes towards the leader, maybe there's some drama, a mini character arc leading to acceptance, etc.

What do you think? 

I just kicked off a new campaign - we're only one session in, so far - and I framed the campaign by starting the Characters off as members of a mercenary company, with the members all being reassigned to a newly formed "special talents and reconnaissance team".

To be honest, I did this for my benefit. In the beginning, I can just hand them an adventure as a new company contract, and off they go ( later they'll start to notice threads of commonality in the contracts weaving together to form the real campaign conflict ), and it gives the Party a reason for all these new Characters to form a Party and stay together.

However, I appointed one of the Characters the new commanding officer of the new unit, giving the role to one of my Players who a) has problems with confidence/engagement in the game, and b) actually is a retired military officer.

I have been astonished with the results. The Player in question has become much more engaged and focused on the game with their new responsibility; he's taking the wants/needs of those in his command into consideration in his decisions rather than lording over them; he's playing it with a lot of humor, it's been a real eye-opener as to how things really work in the military; and the party has been super focused, as the Party will discuss things, and then the CO will make a call. I'd estimate they got through about twice the material they normally do.

I suspect I've been atypically lucky here, but it can definitely work if the group dynamic will support it.

Unlike Vedexent, the one time I tried to present a party leader role I made a huge mistake. The person I chose ended up being a narcissistic, trolling, and generally annoying git, and that's me being polite about it.  

The concept is great, I love the idea of one person being the voice of the group when things get crazy and there are 87 different ideas floating around the table. I like the idea that when there's a difficult choice there is one person who will have final say. I also like that, if possible, you can give it to a person who really could grow from being in a leadership position. 

I say go for it, put it up to a vote, and see where it takes you. If you get as lucky as Vedexent, good on you. If you wind up in the position I had, just start removing their power slowly and turn it back into a group effort. However, do continue to have the approach that after 10 minutes of discussion you step up and ask "What's your decision."

As a side note, often times you'll see a party leader naturally form after some time. So, if the idea of a party leader isn't received well at first, you may still see it happen on it's own.

Both of those responses are kind of what I expected, since my main concern was in picking the right leader rather than worrying how everyone else would respond. It's good to hear that on average, the rest of the players don't seem to have a problem with a (good, fair) leader.

And yeah, if it doesn't work out, I'll tell them the leader thing was just part of this ceremonial hunt they're doing. 

I cut through analysis paralysis with the sword of wandering monsters. I figure twenty minutes debating which door to go through is twenty minutes of the characters standing there debating. Plenty of time for someone or some thing) to hear and get curious.

A good party leader or "Caller" who can make decisions and get the group to follow can cut down on the wasted time. It is very helpful if you have to have short gaming sessions.  When I only have two hours to play I don't want to spend twenty minutes picking a door. Just pick one and let us deal with what's behind it.

Have participated in this before. We called it the Party Compass. The idea was, as laid out above, if a decision is not reached in a reasonable amount of time the Compass would point the party in a majority direction or speed up a decision to split the party. And not lead the party by the nose, only truncate unnecessarily prolonged discussion.

With a good understanding between players and, admittedly a good choice for the first Compass, everyone really saw how it was supposed to work and did rather well when their turn arose.