Group Decision Making Techniques

Good decision making is an essential skill for career success generally and effective leadership particularly. If you can learn to make timely and well-considered decisions, then you can often lead your team to spectacular and well-deserved success. However, if you make poor decisions, your team risks failure and your time as a leader will, most likely, be brutally short.

The techniques in this section help you to make the best decisions possible with the information you have available. These tools help you map out the likely consequences of decisions, work out the importance of individual factors and choose the best course of action to take.

These techniques build on the tools discussed in the section on Problem Solving Tools, in that Decision Making follows on from an understanding of the situation. The section on Creativity Tools will help you to explore what alternatives that are open to you.

Do remember, though, that the tools in this chapter exist only to assist your intelligence and common sense. These are your most important assets in good Decision Making.

When a group meets, it's often the case that people who shouts loudest, or those with higher status in the organization, get their ideas heard more than others. So when it comes to gaining consensus on important decisions or priorities, how do you make sure you get true consensus and a fair decision for the group?

One technique to help with this is the Nominal Group Technique, a face-to-face group process technique for gaining consensus. A typical application is in organizational planning when a group needs to agree priorities in order to assign resources and funds.

The benefit of the technique is that the group shares and discusses all issues before evaluation, with each group member participating equally in evaluation. The evaluation works with each participant "nominating" his or her priority issues and then ranking them on a scale of, say, 1 to 10.

Nominal Group Technique is just one group process for achieving consensus. Another group consensus technique is the Delphi Method, which is used among groups of experts to make complex decisions, usually without face-to-face meetings.

• Decision making can be regarded as an outcome of mental processes (cognitive process) leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.

OVERVIEW

Human performance in decision making terms has been the subject of active research from several perspectives. From a psychological perspective, it is necessary to examine individual decisions in the context of a set of needs, preferences an individual has and values they seek. From a cognitive perspective, the decision making process must be regarded as a continuous process integrated in the interaction with the environment. From a normative perspective, the analysis of individual decisions is concerned with the logic of decision making and rationality and the invariant choice it leads to.

Yet, at another level, it might be regarded as a problem solving activity which is terminated when a satisfactory solution is found. Therefore, decision making is a reasoning or emotional process which can be rational or irrational, can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.

Logical decision making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to making informed decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and selecting an appropriate treatment. Some research using naturalistic methods shows, however, that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to fit a set of indicators into the expert's experience and immediately arrive at a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives. Recent robust decision efforts have formally integrated uncertainty into the decision making process.