Change the rules of the game. And when achieving unanimity or consensus seems impossible, especially in professional settings, try to change the game or change the players: Advocate for majority-rule or chair-decides practices, or, alternatively, consider whether the choice itself might get assigned to a different group better positioned to reach an agreement.
Consider the example of a team of doctors considering selling its practice to a regional hospital system, as many have done over the past decade. Some are excited about the benefits: more working capital, better insurance, and greater negotiating leverage with Medicare.
But one has concerns about abandoning community-based medicine. Another laments the meager financial return anticipated from the sale due to his lack of seniority. And a third plans on retiring soon and worries about undermining their legacy. Colleagues looking to convince these three should tailor their approaches accordingly.
For the first, emphasize the community-engagement efforts of the hospital and request a seat for her on its relevant board. For the second, secure a payout increase in exchange for his support of the deal.
For the third, define an early retirement package and emeritus partner status before the sale and secure an opportunity for them to teach and mentor at the local university. Wherever you sit in an organizational hierarchy, there will be times when you seek to influence the choices and preferences of others. In these negotiation moments, use decision rules to your advantage. Tailor your strategies to the particular circumstances of each decision rule and where possible, advocate for one decision rule over the other based on your understanding of the dynamics each creates to drive better outcomes.
You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Same goes for a decision without action. And who needs a meeting process for group wishing? Not me! In his book Traction , Gino Wickman offered an acronym for these steps to make them memorable. Read on and see if you agree that taking a moment to decide how to decide before deciding makes sense. A quick level-set: I earned my degree in theatre arts and am an internet software company founder.
These studies and concepts primarily describe how individuals make decisions. And thank goodness we do! Want to hear a story about this one?
Listen to this excerpt from the RadioLab episode Choice. So why does that happen? Now extend that example to a thousand other scenarios, and you can start to see how important it is to have an emotional reaction.
This is one reason facilitators are trained to manage the emotional vibe in the room; the emotions at play in a group have a big impact on the final decision quality. In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made.
The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. It was a mistake! Most recently, 20 of 24 radiologists failed to notice a gorilla placed on a lung scan. In other words, what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see.
The good news: while many people suffer from gorilla-blindness, not everyone does. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works.
How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We're constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact -- and usually we don't even realize we're doing it.
The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do , why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individually oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail.
Our collaborative minds, on the other hand, enable us to do amazing things. Remember this when we look at the business-making perspective on decision making, which emphasizes the decisive prowess of brilliant leaders throughout history.
Business books teach how to develop your individual capacity. Important stuff, but this here communal understanding of intelligence exposes a fundamental flaw in the heroic leader mythos. First, cognitive biases. These are the shortcuts we each make to help us keep on keeping on in the face of ambiguity, overwhelming options, and limited time.
This article nicely categorizes cognitive biases based on the ways they help us navigate through the whole busy mess of things. And OMG - how cool is the poster?!!! It reminds me of one of my other favorite diagrams. Put that all together, and you can see the striking implications for decision quality.
The good news: paying attention to the biases and principles of influence will teach you techniques to get more buy-in for the decisions you need to make. Also, facilitators have techniques that help reduce the impact of all this cognitive baggage.
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences. Research shows over and over that the classic brainstorming technique fails due to groupthink.
Effective decision making requires understanding the situation and then deciding between viable alternatives. Groupthink can severely limit the number and viability of your alternatives, which is a real handicap.
The future presents a huge challenge to decision makers. Several studies on goal achievement, happiness, forecasting, and even memory I admit memory reconstruction freaks me out show that we largely build our visions of the past and future based on our current experience.
There is some very exciting work going on that can increase our chances of detecting important change early, known as weak signal detection , and some cool mathy models for increasing the accuracy of predictions. That decision might be wrong. We have no idea how things will turn out. Better make a plan to check it later. If only we lived in a world where we could control the size and scope of all the decisions we need to make! Such a lovely idea. Decision fatigue limits the number of decisions we can make well in a day.
Mark Zuckerberg made this one famous by explaining why he always wore the same gray t-shirt. He said:. I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible, other than how to best serve this the Facebook community. He goes on to cite studies that show how, as we make more decisions during the day, our capacity for reasoning through the nuances involved takes a dramatic dive.
We stop weighing all the factors logically, and rely more heavily on those gut reactions. After a full day of making decisions on the job, our ability to choose the healthy salad over the comforting pizza is totally worn out.
The gut decision wins yes, pizza! The classic research study for this one came from the Israeli legal system, where the consequences of decision fatigue are more chilling. Early morning hearing? You have a chance of getting out on parole. Later on but before the lunch break? The judge gets tired and plays it safe; no parole for you.
Decision making is a heck of a challenge. Because leaders and managers spend their days making decisions, a lot of this decision-making advice doubles as time-management advice.
Every leader faces an uncountable string of decisions; successful leaders learn to give their attention to the ones that count. This is the right place for us to start too, because the first step in making The Meta Decision in a business context is figuring out:.
Al Pitampalli recently published a new book, aimed at helping leaders get to better decisions. In it, he coins:. In other words, make small decisions fast good enough is good enough! See the video in the sidebar to hear him tell it. Time management experts take this further.
They advocate planning out your days in detail, paying special attention to allocating the most time for the highest priority activities - such as making big decisions. Then, for a power-up bonus, he throws in the 2-minute rule. Just crush that sucker. In Deep Work , Cal Newport advocates a series of rituals for the morning and evenings, designed to clear out the noise and keep you focused on the highest and best use of your time.
If Kelly was comparing the features of the different levels for the chatbot service then she would be making a value-based goal decision. Habit-based decisions occur in the basal ganglia deep in the brain. This means that people are either making a goal-directed decision or a habit decision, but not both at the same time. If you give someone a lot of information then they will switch from habit to goal-directed. If you want them to make a goal-directed decision then do give them information to review.
Let her make the habit-based decision to renew. If you are hoping that she will go up a level not down then you may want to give her data on her options as that will kick her from a habit decision to a goal-directed decision. You may have heard the idea that people can only remember, or deal with 7 plus or minus 2 things at a time 5 to 9. This actually is not true. It was a theory first mentioned by Miller in at a talk he gave at the American Psychological Association meeting.
The real number is not Refuting research includes:. People liked having more choices to choose from but they were more satisfied with their choice when there was less to choose from. So, is there anything you can do to encourage Kelly to re-subscribe and not change her level of membership? There are a number of problems that can prevent effective decision-making.
These include:. If you do not have enough information, it can feel like you are making a decision without any basis. Take some time to gather the necessary data to inform your decision, even if the timescale is very tight.
If necessary, prioritise your information-gathering by identifying which information will be most important to you. This is sometimes called analysis paralysis , and is also used as a tactic to delay organisational decision-making, with those involved demanding ever more information before they can decide.
This problem can often be resolved by getting everyone together to decide what information is really important and why, and by setting a clear timescale for decision-making, including an information-gathering stage.
Making decisions by committee is difficult. Everyone has their own views, and their own values. Sometimes, any decision is better than none. Decision-making processes often founder under the weight of vested interests.
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