Key Points

The evidence on effective group decision-making practices is robust. What’s more, much of it can be summed up in a single word — diversity.
To make better decisions we should seek diversity in information, perspectives, solutions, and criteria.
Adopting a new decision-making process may require a behavioral change approach. This involves building their knowledge and ability. But should also aim to uncover and address beliefs that may support or inhibit the process and ensure people are provided ample time and opportunities to learn and use the process.

If you find yourself regretting decisions you and your team have made — if what you thought would be great turned out to be something…much less, you may want to look at your decision-making process.

The evidence on effective group decision-making practices is robust. What’s more, we can summarize the key message from much (not all) of this evidence in a single word.

Diversity.

Take for example the highly readable summary of decision-making research by Dr. Denise Rousseau of Carnegie Mellon, (which informed this article). In it, she lays out common flaws in organizational decision-making practices and how to fix them. When you step back and look at the suggested fixes as a whole, a common factor stands out.

Diversity.

Diversifying Your Decision-Making Process

I encourage you to go deeper into the research, but, if you are looking for a simple way to evaluate your team’s decision-making practices (or informal habits) consider it from a diversity perspective. To make better group decisions research indicates we should seek diversity of:

Information: It’s common to reach for known or easily available information to inform decisions. To improve the results of your decisions, challenge yourself to ensure you are drawing from a variety of sources. For instance, stakeholder views, (which include leader’s opinions) should be combined with relevant academic research, organizational data, and where possible, expert experience. Diverse information can improve all aspects of the decision-making process, from ensuring you are accurately defining the problem/opportunity, to generating a variety of alternative solutions, to evaluating and choosing amongst those options.
Stakeholder Perspectives: The insight that people bring to a decision-making process can be highly related to their role and experiences. Perspectives can differ not only based on a person’s function in the organization (finance, marketing, IT) but also their level in the organizational hierarchy.
As Rousseau notes in her article, organizational politics always plays a role in decision-making and often is reflected in what voices are sought and valued. By capturing a cross-section of stakeholder perspectives as a matter of routine, you may not eliminate the potential for politics to put blinders on the process, but you can mitigate it.

Potential Solutions: Identifying multiple solutions to a problem is essential for good decisions. Too often, the solution suggested by the highest paid person in the room is seen as the only option. Given that tendency, leaders can play an active role in improving decision-making in the organization, by setting expectations that multiple viable alternatives be developed and evaluated before significant decisions are made.
Success Criteria: Using a single success criterion – such as cost or stakeholder value — to evaluate potential solutions is the equivalent of driving with one eye closed. At best, you are see half the road. While different types of decisions will likely require different criteria, aim to create a small set of mutually exclusive standards that help you evaluate options from a variety of angles. For example, a commonly used set of criteria for evaluating new products or strategic initiatives is desirability (do we want to do it?), viability (can we afford to do it?) and feasibility (can we do it?). By looking at potential ideas from a variety of angles, you are most likely to find that which holds the most promise for the long-term.

Adopting New Decision-Making Practices

Simple enough? If it were, we’d probably all be doing it.

Diversification of data, stakeholders, and criteria may also feel to some like adding complexity. It’s common for people to want to simplify decisions, because this provides a greater sense of control more quickly. Unfortunately, this sense of control may be short-lived if the outcome of a simplified process is a poor decision with long-term negative ramifications.

Additionally, increasing diversity in your decision making is likely to increase the time required to get to a decision. How much likely depends on the nature of the decision. It is a good bet that the more significant and impactful the outcomes of a decision, the more effort you should put into making it.

In a crises or period of rapid change, we may feel diversity is a luxury we can’t afford. It’s also true in situations of high uncertainty, we tend to make gut decisions based on emotion. Which is not always our best guide.

It’s important in times of crisis to be clear-headed about what really must be decided now, and what warrants more investigation. Creativity can also come into play. Perhaps you can develop a set of critical voices and data sources to draw from, which may not be as diverse as you would undertake under normal circumstances, but still mitigates potential blindspots. Finally, while you can’t prepare for a crisis before it happens, you can learn in advance what types of decision-making processes work under such circumstances, and ensure those are developed and ready if needed.

Finally, adjusting existing decision-making practices to be more diverse may require you to take a behavioral change approach. If a group is used to making decisions based on gut feeling, or simply adopting whatever the most influential person says, effectively using a new approach may take some effort. That will include not only educating people on what to do and providing some low risk opportunities to use the new practices, but also tapping into their motivations. If the group is truly aligned around a goal to make better decisions, which lead to better long-term outcomes, make your case related to that motivation. If their motivations lie elsewhere…such as retaining a tight hold on decision-making power or ensuring pet projects move forward…that’s the topic of another article!

Key Points

Diversifying Your Decision-Making Process

Adopting New Decision-Making Practices

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