Group Decision Making that Works (Decision Making Skills No. 4)

Hi, I'm Edward Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics. And I'm going to tell you about the Group decision making that works.

When you have a group of people that need to come to a decision, the first most important thing you need to do is to decide how they are going to decide. There are a number of ways to do that.

Here we have 5 people, a leader and four individuals, that are kind of all set up to be equals.

One thing we can do is just say everybody's vote is equal and we make no change, till everyone agrees.

That's called consensus decision making.

As you can imagine, it's rather slow. Often what we do is a modified version of that, called the democratic method of decision making. In that case we say if enough people vote yes on a change, it's ok if a few vote no; we still make the change.

But in a sense that everyone is still treated equal, and the problem with that, although it is used in a lot of boards and groups like that, is that if people have specific expertise, that expertise doesn't always get weighted.

So what we often do instead is we move to a different model. We put the manager in charge, and then we organize the team around the manager like this.

Now here again there are some choices we can make.

One thing we can do is to have the manager or the leader just tell everyone else what to do, like that. We call that a dictatorial method.

Again here we are not dealing with the expertise of the people.

Usually what happens is something more like this: the manager talks to the people, back and forth, and then makes decision.

That's what is commonly called a consultative model of decision making.

The problem with this though is again if this is really a complex issue with a lot of expertise, often what these people know is dependent on, not only the manager, but on what everybody else knows as well; and so we start to need a picture more like this: in which everyone is talking, not only to the leader, but also to everyone else.

The picture is a little bit messy, and as you can imagine you need a good meeting process to handle this complexity. In that meeting process what happens is that all of the members of the meeting TEACH.

They teach to each other, and they teach to the decider.

The decider's job is to learn as much as possible and the ultimately to decide; and that's not to decide the majority decision or decide based on popularity.

Here’s to decide what he or she thinks is best, based upon he or she has learned, even if other people don't agree. Now here is the trick: these are smart people with expertise and they are not necessarily going to agree with the decision.

So before the first decision is made, you need to have a contract with your group, called: "disagree and commit".

Disagree and commit means that everyone agrees that once a decision is made, whether or not they agree with it, they will do three things: first, they will explain the rationale of the decision when they talk about it with other people.

They won’t say: "those dopey folks made this decision!" they say WE made this decision, and here is why.

The second things is, they will align resources. That is one hundred percent compliance, whether it's their own time, their groups if they are managers, they will do what the decision requires, 100%.

The third thing, and this is a little strange, is they will continue to seek contrary evidence if they disagree, but without sabotaging the decision.

Now that's an odd balance, why would you want to do that?

The reason is although you are implementing the decision 100% you are continuing to file away contrary evidence that might not support it, putting it in a file quietly.

Why? If the decision works out, you take that file and you threw it away; but if the decision doesn't work out, then you can bring that contrary evidence back to group. And in the next decision making process, you have that much more information.

So, the next time you have a group of people that need to make a decision, before you do anything, decide what model of decision making you are going to use: consensus? Democratic? Dictatorial? Consultative? Or group consultative?

And if you are going to do consultative or group consultative decision making, be sure you have a disagree-and-commit contract before you start. It will make sure your team decisions are the best decisions they can be and it will make sure they stick.