How to make good decisions in team

Photo by Lori Greig

One person is not enough to make a good decisions, many teams are involved in the process of making decisions and it is very common to set a meeting to collaborate and make a consensus decision, it is called “Collective intelligence”.

Image by wikipedia

You should follow the following strategies to make better decisions in your team:

1. Suspend initial judgment: Avoid the straw polls or any communication related to the topic in discussion before the meeting. These talks can create an initial judgment that will automatically create barriers in your mind to make good decisions.
2. Define a goal as “problem to be solved” not a “judgment to be made”: In other words we are here to solve a problem not to find who is right or wrong.
3. Paired comparison of candidates by discussing each competency: This is a rather expensive process but if you have the time, you can compare each option and figure out why one is better than the other, this will help to base your decisions on facts not on feelings.
4. Have everyone fill a balance sheet on what is good and what is bad (fact or issues, not judgments). Don’t do it in the group (otherwise you will have correlated errors): This will help visualize better the decisions that were made and avoid focusing on commonalities.
5. “Pre-mortem” of the decision: You need to visualize what would happen if you made X o Y decision, this will help to visualize the different scenarios, especially worst case scenarios.
6. Have decision challengers or devil’s advocates on a rotating basis: You need to have someone to challenge the decisions made, it will help to expose the unique information and avoid the common knowledge effect.
7. Avoid the hidden profile: During discussions people tends to focus on information they share in common which can contribute to bad decisions because it is incomplete (it lacks unique information that only some part of the group has). You need encourage people to share the unique information and make it available to everyone avoiding in this way the hidden profile effect.

References:

• Rao, Hayagreeva (NA), Harnessing Collective Intelligence. Lecture conducted from Stanford University, Stanford, CA.