Decision making in diverse groups and teams

A potential minefield. 

The high energy from ideation and brainstorming quickly turns into frustration when it's time to make a decision.

We don't fully control the outcomes from a decision, but what we have some control over and what we can improve is the quality of our decision process.

A challenge is that we often want to accomplish two things at the same time. 

We don't want to waste too much time, and we don't want to sacrifice too much accuracy. The key to balancing this trade-off is figuring out the penalty for not getting the decision exactly right. What's the worst case that can happen?

So you have a list of ideas coming from your team, but which of them shall we pursue? There will always be one that is accountable for the final call, but there are many ways to accomplish it.

Shall we do an individual ranking where each idea must pass relevant thresholds, or shall we rank them relative to each other? What are the selection criteria to assess? What's your current constraints and non-negotiables?

Shall you do it democratically through voting? Voting is time effective and consistent. Will everyone feel a part of the decision through voting? Do you get rid of groupthink? In a voting there will be limited information and knowledge flow between the team members. Do we want that?

Or shall we just appoint a leader that makes the decision? That's probably effective, but the quality of the decision depends heavily on the leader's style and knowledge.

Will the leader involve and listen to each team member's opinions, and change their own opinions if needed? Will the leader share their thought process afterwards?

Or shall we aim for consensus? Done right, consensus can result in a high-quality decision. You share information within the team, everyone hears what everyone else has to say and can ask questions to each other. Team members also share responsibility (if not, is it true consensus).

However, consensus takes time. It's slow. At least for a new team. It can easily break down without the right team dynamics and guidelines. Does it feel a bit "leaderless"? 

And is it not a short distance from consensus to compromise where three good ideas are turned into one bad one to please everybody.

What about the consensus trap where everyone seems to be in agreement but in reality the majority disagrees without speaking up. What do you do if not everyone agrees with you at the end? Some companies swear to "disagree and commit".

Gerald Weinberg said that the trick is not to know the best method, but the best method under the present circumstances. The most effective leaders are the ones who help the team to recognize when circumstances change and to find a new decision making method that fits.

How do you make decisions in diverse groups and teams? Which forms do you use under which circumstances?

How do you decide?

We make thousands of decisions every day – some big, some small. 

What we do have some control over, what we can improve, is the quality of our decisions.

Any decision is, in essence, a prediction about the future. Making a decision is making a guess about how things might turn out.

Your decisions will only be as good as your ability to anticipate how they might turn out. 

You can rarely guarantee a good outcome (or a bad one). The goal is to try to choose the option that will lead to the most favorable range of outcomes.

Good outcomes can result from both good and bad decisions, and bad outcomes can result from both good and bad decisions.

  • Step 1, for each option under consideration, identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes.
  • Step 2, identify your preferences using the payoff for each outcome – to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your goals and values? If an outcome moves you toward a goal, the payoff is positive. If an outcome moves you away from a goal, the payoff is negative.
  • Step 3, estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding. You know enough to make an educated guess. All your knowledge, imperfect as it might be, means that your guess isn't random. The willingness to guess is essential to improving decisions.
  • Step 4, assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and dislike for the options under consideration. With the possible outcomes, payoffs and probabilities, you can now see how the upside compares to the downside, whether the possible gains compensates for the downside.

These four steps force you to assess what you know, and seek out what you don't.

Increasing accuracy costs time. Saving time costs accuracy.

The challenge for any decision-maker is that you want to accomplish two things at once: You don't want to waste too much time and you don't want to sacrifice too much accuracy. The key to balancing the trade-off between time and accuracy is figuring out the penalty for not getting the decision exactly right.

If your goal is to get certainty about your choice, you will be stuck in analysis paralysis and never be finished. Pretty much every decision is made with incomplete information.

One of the best tools for improving your decision-making is to get other people's perspectives.

When asking for input or advice, don't offer your opinion first. When you tell someone what you think before hearing what they think, you can cause their opinion to bend toward yours, oftentimes without them knowing it. Provide what the person needs to know to give worthwhile feedback – and nothing more.

The goal of good decision-making can't be that every single decision will work out well. That's an impossible goal. Embracing that fact is necessary for becoming a better decision-maker. 

Your goal is, across the portfolio of all the decisions that you make in your life, to advance toward your goals rather than retreat away from them.

"How to decide" by Annie Duke