Decision making case studies
I’ve previously blogged on a decision making model that involves understanding the decision making process and then the different ways a group can reach agreement and how to choose which method to use in which situation. This post covers some real case studies from my own experience that apply this model and help discuss some the issues involved.
This post won’t make sense without reading How to reach agreement in a group – autocracy vs. democracy as it contains the decision tree and questions this post refers to.
How to reach agreement in a group – autocracy vs. democracy
In the first part of this blog (A model for making group decisions) I talked about the rational decision making model and how it is the basis of making a decision. Part of that model is gaining agreement amongst a group on an option out of a set of options which becomes the decision. This part is about different ways of gaining agreement and when to use each.
This model is a variant of the Vroom-Jago (1) contingency model in situational leadership theory first developed in 1973 and then refined in 1988. My take on it changes the language here and there to alter some of the emphasis and changes the decision tree a little.
This model defines a set of decision making models ranging from autocratic to democratic and then helps you choose which is appropriate for different situations.
Decision characteristics
This model applies to decisions involving a group that have an “owner”. The owner is the person who needs the objective decided on. The owner could be the customer, a representative, the group as a whole or the team leader. An important consideration when using this model, as discussed in part 1 is knowing who the owner is and realising that it may well be different for the different decisions the group has to make.
For each type of decision that needs to be made by a group:
- Identify the owner
- Clarify the objective
- Identify the team/group involved
Decision making models
The following decision making models are appropriate for group decisions:
- Autocratic 1 (A1) – The decision owner makes the decision based on the information available.
- Autocratic 2 (A2) – The decision owner requests information from the team (not explaining the situation or why they want information) and then makes the decision.
- Consultative 1 (C1) – The decision owner explains the situation to individual members (socialising and pre-integrating the decision) but does not convene them as a group, then makes the decision.
- Consultative 2 (C2) – The group discusses the situation and then offers ideas and suggestions. The decision owner then takes the decision.
- Group 2 (G2) – The whole group makes the decision with the owner acting more as a facilitator. Reaching this discussion can be discussion leading to emergent consensus, planning poker style or explicit voting solutions.
I don’t know why there isn’t a “Group 1″… maybe we should ask Vroom.
Which one to use
These options range from autocratic to democratic. One of the interesting things is that sometimes leaders want to be democratic but don’t really need to be or are not expected to be. This can lead to a conflict in expectation of approach. A leader may wish to be inclusive and democratic but their team may just wish they’d make a decision once in a while!
The alternative also causes conflict where a group expects their opinions to be heard and taken into account but the owner ignores their voices and makes autocratic decisions. This will create distance between the owner/leader and the group/team making the team feel undervalued.
Having understood the decision characteristics and the different decision making models you can then select one by using the following decision tree to identify the most appropriate model.
Each horizontal numerical bar indicates a question for the decision owner. Answer that question as honestly as possible, in terms of how relevant it is to making a good decision then move to the next part of the tree (sometimes skipping a question bar) and see which question you should answer next. Pretty quickly you’ll arrive at a circular blob with the short name of one of the options described above. I’ve written up some case studies to help explain by example.
- Are the stakeholders known, available and engaged?
- Are the people who will be materially affected by the decision identified, are they available to join in the decision making and engaged in the team to assist in making a decision?
- Is a high quality decision/solution important?
- Is this a case where lots of alternate options can be used and it doesn’t really matter which is selected? If so then answer “no”.
- As the owner do you have enough information available to make a gooddecision?
- If the owner is unsure, or wants to involve other opinions then answer “no”
- Is the problem well understood and does it have well known standard solutions that apply in this context?
- Is it’s a standard problem with a standard (or set of standard) solutions that will work in the current context then answer “yes”
- Do the members of the team or group have to accept this decision for it to work?
- If you (the owner) make the decision yourself will the group accept it?
- Answer this honestly, being in an organisational structure that means the group should accept it isn’t good enough. This question is about the real, honest dynamic between the owner and the group. This is affected by rapport.
- Are the group members aligned with the same motives and goals as you the decision owner?
- If the other members of the group have a different mission, agenda or motives then answer “no”
- Is disagreement likely among group members in reaching a decision?
What if you don’t want to do this model? What if your stakeholders object?
So if you’ve followed the decision tree and it says you should use Autocratic 2 (full autocracy) when you were hoping for Group 2 (full democracy) what should you do? This model is a bit like flipping a coin to decide something. The important thing is not which side of the coin comes up but how that decision makes you feel. If this process highlights to you what you were really hoping for then you’ve learned something. However it’s worth looking at the decision tree and seeing why you ended up where you did, and if other’s in the group would expect the same thing.
To explore this a little I’ve described three real examples here: Decision making case studies – please feel free to add your own. I’ve quickly written:
- Agile team customer sprint demo and assessment
- Process Improvement Team way of working decision
- Process Improvement Team scope agreement
The important part of this process is to make you, your team and your stakeholders consider the types of decisions they need to make, and how they should make different types of decisions. I recommend that as part of a team charter a team describes the types of decision it will make and how it will make them. That gives stakeholders, customers and other teams the opportunity to get involved and question the decision making dynamics if necessary.
Decision making as a team building exercise
During the formation (or reinvention) of a team you can do the following exercise:
- Brainstorm the decisions the group makes. Categorise them into a few groups such as:
- Achieving team buy-in to approach and activities
- Timebox assessment, regular reflect and adapt
- Balancing scope, cost, resources, time
- For each one establish a good definition of an example decision and it’s owner.
- Each team member then puts themselves in the position of the owner (this is even better if the owner is in the room and is included) and privately follows the decision tree answering truly honestly
- Each team member then shows the resulting decision making option they’ve chosen
- Consensus or conflict is then discussed. Outliers on the scale should be discussed first.
This simple exercise will get the team to understand each others motivations and approaches to problem solving as well as open their eyes to some of this stuff from a different perspective. Finally unknown conflicts in terms of decision making way well emerge where people had different assumptions of group input vs. directive management allowing them to be solved practically before a real personal conflict occurs.
To see how I apply this stuff to self-organising teams see: What does a self-organising team really mean? Organisation!
Finally…
Try applying this approach to personal relationships and decision making, not all of it will apply but it’s interesting to see where you act collaboratively with a partner vs. when you make an autocratic decision (or expect them to) and what the justification is for such a perspective. A misunderstanding between assumed decision making models is one of the underlying causes of many personal conflict situations, you can avoid these by understanding them.
Spend some time understanding how and why you make decisions both personally and professionally and you’ll reap some great rewards.
This blog is part of a series on Holistic Communication: The linguistics of business change. Introduction, ethics and table of contents is all in the first post.
References
- Vroom, Victor H.; Yetton, Phillip W. (1973). Leadership and Decision-Making. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
- Vroom, Victor H.; Jago, Arthur G. (1988). The New Leadership: Managing Participation in Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
A model for making group decisions
I’ve been working with some interesting group structures recently which got me thinking about decision making dynamics. I’ve been using a decision making framework for a while and intend to apply it to some different shaped groups so thought I’d share it.
There are a number of irrational ways of making decisions such as divination, looking at guts or rolling a dice but generally in business we like to make logical rational decisions. However often we don’t really think about how we make decisions, or more importantly how we should make decisions.
The techniques described in this blog are applicable to any situation where a group needs to make a decision, however the language is focussed on business groups/teams.
This blog is in two parts, the first is pretty simple and obvious and covers basic decision making, but it’ll lead on to the more interesting second part about different ways of reaching agreement and when to use each method.
How decisions are made
Rational decisions are made via a fairly simple process, at least in my mind:
 Rational Decision Making |
1. Objective: We start with an objective or goal, it needs to be clearly understood and have an owner/leader2. Alternative options: we create some alternate solutions.
Idea generation is an interesting topic by itself and lots has been written, but that’s not the topic of this blog. 3. Tentative Solution: We analyse the alternates against some criteria and then choose one to be our tentative solution Again lots of ways to do this depending on your problem domain 4. Deeper Analysis: We perform deeper analysis on the tentative solution to try and ensure it’ll meet the objective 5. Agreement: We get the group to decide on the solution (see part 2) 6. Communication: We communicate the decision There’s no point making a decision unless it’s communicated! |
Person icon I used in the decision making diagram used as per attributable license from http://www.elegantthemes.com/
Different Types of decisions
The first thing to consider is that different types of decisions may need different types of decision making processes, specifically around gaining agreement and analysing options. This seems obvious to me, and is normally obvious to anyone I talk to about it, however when business change people are talking about creating/redefining a group to make some decisions they usually say how they’ll make decisions without differentiating between the types. Unfortunately common sense is often left out of planning.
A decision can’t be made unless it’s understood. To understand why a decision needs making someone, or the representative of some people, needs to have an objective which requires a decision by the group. Again, this seems rather obvious but if you consider it the other way around it means that a group can’t make a decision unless it know who wants the decision and why they want it. Apply that to many traditional management groups/boards, CCBs, business change projects, process improvement groups etc. and you’ll find it doesn’t always hold. In these cases groups are being dishonest and self-serving.
I don’t mean that you can’t make a decision without the customer present (models for that follow next) but that you can’t make a good decision if you don’t know who the customer is and what their objective is. In the case of speculative development for a market this might seem impossible but that’s what market research is for. So, given that we know how decisions are made, and that we should consider different ways to achieve agreement for different types of decision how can we actually get agreement?
See part 2 for How to reach agreement in a group – autocracy vs. democracy
This blog is part of a series on Holistic Communication: The linguistics of business change. Introduction, ethics and table of contents is all in the first post.
Mike MacDonagh's Blog 