If Larger Groups make Better Decisions, What happened to the Government?
Two heads are better than one right? And if so, three is better than two and so on. Ultimately, the U.S. Government might be the best decision body in the world? Of course, most of doubt this and on the other side of the coin we may look at other successful private organizations that try to empower people at the place of work to make decisions. Zappos, for example with their Holacracy efforts, come to mind immediately. Most Agile practices, promote the same type of thinking within a defined set of parameters.
In the book Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter, the authors discuss four independent problems with group thinking:
- Groups do not merely fail to correct the errors of their members; they amplify the errors.
- Groups fall victims to cascade effects; they follow the actions of those who spoke or acted first.
- Groups become more polarized; ending up in more extreme positions in line with the prior deliberation of the members.
- Groups focus on shared information; what everybody know already.
In most of Group Decision-making we define a problem, look at a target condition, find the root cause and then we brainstorm for an effective action. If you review the four problems stated above, how would you see a brainstorming session preventing such occurrence. It actually may amplify it. And in my experience, the best ideas seldom happen during a Brainstorming session, they typically happen after I left the session. We start with all this optimism, another area that the authors question, but what they conclude is optimism is not needed at the beginning. It is needed after the decision is reached. Now, that is not saying that we want a group of negative thinking people starting out but a degree of skepticism and realistic expectations will provide better outcomes.
The most powerful contributing factor for making better decisions is developing a diverse team based on ideas and perspectives. This team would also be anything from a group of conformists. And if you think of how decisions are derived in Design Thinking where both a divergent and consensus process is combined, you start understanding the process needed for Group Decision Making.
The book outlines both of these thoughts in great detail allocation chapters to several of the thoughts I list below:
If search is the method to identify solutions, a broad search will be better for identification, here are the important guidelines.
- Start with well-defined objectives criteria that will be applied later to evaluate solutions.
- Insulate identification from the selection.
- Start the group process (discussion, network-based pooling of information) with all individuals sharing their best solutions then provide time between group deliberation episodes for individuals to reflect and create additional solutions stimulated by their own prior solutions and the ideas contributed by others.
- Promote diverse solutions—within heads and between individuals —in the identification stage.
- Adopt means of recording and remembering the solutions generated in the identification stage. Groups often
For the selection phase, the guidelines look a lot different:
- Review the criteria for an optimal solution and, if necessary, plan for concrete operational tests of the solutions passed on the identification stage. In some applications, this is best done by adding new group members to the process who are closer to the organization’s primary leaders or consulting the users of the final product of the process.
- Do not allow irrelevant social factors such as status, talkativeness, and likability of the sources of feedback to bias evaluations.
- Adopt a decisive method of combining (independent) individual evaluations into an acceptable consensus.
The secret to Lean Thinking and this is supported by the most recent studies, show great value of small steps that can be implemented quickly. What I would call a learn by doing approach. But even before we start in this process, the authors put an emphasis on creating the proper team for a particular engagement and that seems to be more important than anything else. Unbeknownst to me at the time, these studies substantiated much or what I promoted in Marketing with PDCA and The Lean Engagement Team eBooks. Using the SALES acronym, and later defining the teams more in the latter book, has given me the opportunity to practice the principles above.
Have you thought through your process of team selection?
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