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2005 ă weLEAD, Inc.
Upgrade Your Decision Making
By Jay Gary
As a small business consultant,
I keep on the cutting edge of technology. I am constantly upgrading our virtual
office software or exploring new ways of web conferencing to work with our
internal and external partners. Yet we can place so much emphasis on upgrading
our software that we overlook upgrading our team’s wet-ware. Wet-ware, or our
collective mental processes, are always the final court of appeals we use to
define problems, frame issues and make decisions.
In speaking of brain-power, I am not just
referring to your cranium as a manager, but to your group’s. Warren Bennis
says, “None of us is smart as all of us” (Bennis & Biederman, 1998). He
writes about creative collaboration in Great Groups, led by great leaders.
Contrary to our notions about collective stupidity and groupthink, James
Surowiecki (2004) claims there is wisdom in crowds. He claims no matter how
brilliant you are, you are better in a group to solve problems, foster
innovation and reach wise decisions, provided the conditions are right.
So what are the right conditions? What is
the fine print of group decision making? To answer this, let’s explore four
decision making modes and explore how team players maximize their influence
within each model. Using primary research in organizational decision making and
sense making, this article modifies Choo’s (n.d.), decision matrix to cover
four modes: rational, political, emotional and anarchy.
The
Rational Mode
The first decision making mode is rational.
When executives in a company like McDonald’s come together to decide where to
place new restaurants in their
The Rationale mode represents an ideal, an
organization at its best in terms of knowing its environment. The problems have
been defined, the courses of actions have been weighed, and the outcomes have
been predicted. All that is left is to apply group cognitive ability to
maximize profit. If you are a manager or group member in this mode, you already
know how to shine—you display your technical expertise, whether in engineering,
architecture or design, and refine the done-deal. Often when you are in the
Rational mode, the premises by which the decisions have been framed are
unquestioned and even unquestionable. But what if those premises could be
questioned?
The
Political Mode
When questions begin to arise over how you
should allocate limited resources, decision making often shifts to a Political
mode. In contrast to one choice that R&D, marketing and engineering must
reach alignment over, the issue under consideration has several options and is
ambiguous. Rather than act in a problem
search mode as in the previous model, a group in the Political mode faces a value search. For President Kennedy, the
1963 Cuban Missile Crisis represented decision making in a Political mode.
There was certainty about outcomes among his military and diplomatic advisors,
but conflicting options on how to get there. Team members in this mode know
that they have to compete internally for resources. They have to negotiate,
jockey, bargain and convince other stakeholders of the value of their
proposition.
Rather than a “clear enough future,”
Courtney calls this “alternative futures,” as your group faces various mutually
exclusive options (Courtney, p. 24). Schools and universities often operate in
this environment. Their budgets are fixed, no matter how they invest their
resources. So decisions are debated by school boards or Dean’s councils on
where to commit available resources. The benefit to group decision making in a
Political mode is that compromise often tempers extremes, as centrists did in
the Cuban missile crisis. The risk of the Political mode is that the social
pressure involved in bargaining can undermine trust and idealism (
The
Emotional Mode
The third mode of decision making is the
Emotional mode. This mode has often been overlooked in research, as emotions
are usually thought of as irrational or as clouding judgment. Yet recent
neurobiological studies “establish that emotion is indispensable in rational
decision making” (Barnes & Thagard, 1996, para. 1). Unlike the Rational and
Political mode, the Emotional mode is best suited when groups are operating in
a changing environment and face high technical uncertainty. In this context of
“a range of futures” (Courtney, p. 29), any one of which could happen, the
value of rational analysis is diminished. In this mode, the priority is often
to minimize risk and this is done by sharing ‘pain or gain’ stories. Barnes and
Thagard (1996) claim emotions act as positive or negative somatic markers in
our memory, allowing us to associate them with a prospective decision.
The benefit of this mode is it allows
groups to draw upon their social and psychological reserves to make decisions
beyond the facts. The danger in this mode is groupthink, or risky shift—that
is, members making a decision together by emotion they would not make as
individuals. Surprisingly, the best corrective to the downsides of the
Emotional mode is greater exercise of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995).
As a manager or team member you should be prepared to recognize, regulate and
marshal your emotions and memory to influence others.
The
Anarchy Mode
If a group not only faces external
uncertainty, but also internal conflict, the decision making mode becomes
anarchy, or as some descriptively call it, the ‘Garbage Can mode.’ This
evocative term describes how organizations are often mixing bins of randomly
mixed problems, opportunities and solutions. In this kind of organized anarchy
decisions don’t follow linear processes or unidirectional maps. In reality,
this mode says very little about the process
of decision making (Beach, 1997), only that order does come forth from chaos!
Courtney (p. 32) calls this quadrant “true ambiguity” and says these situations
are rare. But managers should get ready for decision making in this mode when
major discontinuities happen, or when markets are just beginning to form, as
with genetics now, or like the economy faced in the mid ‘90s with online
commerce.
The
Last Word and Beyond
Upgrading our group decision making is a
procedural science and a human art. While the Rational and Political modes can
easily be accessed in programmed ways, the Emotional and Anarchy modes suit
themselves to tackling un-programmed and unframed issues. Still research has
yet to provide the last word on decision making. The field is still filled with
mystery. One new frontier is exploring the role of collective insight (Nosek,
2004) and how groups pre-actualize the future. Otto Scharmer and his colleagues
at MIT are investigating how fields, or deeper sources of learning, often
attune groups to a future they jointly create. Their work opens up new avenues
of research relating to our collective spiritual existence Scharmer, 2004).
Bennis and
Biederman (1997) claim Great Groups work intuitively together so well because
their work gets lifted to a higher plane. “Great Groups always believe that
they are doing something vital, even holy. They are filled with believers, not
doubters and.... know they are doing something monumental, something worthy of
their best selves” (p. 5).
The upgrading of work to a transcendent
level is the kind of upgrade that goes far beyond technology. It might start by
reflecting on your decision making process, but ultimately it is an upgrade in
building mutual trust, common vision and motivation, that takes all work to
higher level.
References:
Beach, L. R. (1997). The psychology of
decision making people in organizations. Foundations for organizational
science).
Bennis, W., & Biederman, P. W. (1998,
March). None of us is as smart as all of us. Computer magazine-IEE Computer
Society, 31(3).
Bennis, W. G., & Biederman, P. W.
(1997, April). Great Groups. Executive Excellence, 14(4), 5-6.
Choo, C. W. (n.d.) FIS 2149 Administrative
decision making in information organizations: Lecture slides, retrieved
Courtney, H. (2001). 20/20 foresight:
Crafting strategy in an uncertain world.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional
intelligence.
Nosek, J. T. (2004). Group cognition as a
basis for supporting group knowledge creation and sharing. Journal of
Knowledge Management, 8(4), 54-64.
Scharmer, C. O. (2004). Theory U:
Leading innovation and change by presencing emerging futures. Retrieved
from http://www.ottoscharmer.com/TheoryU.pdf.
Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of
crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes
business, economies, societies, and nations.
Thagard, P., & Barnes, A. (1996).
Emotional Decisions. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society. Erlbaum, 426-429. Available from the Philosophy
Department,
Comments to: editor@leadingtoday.org
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About the author:
Jay Gary is president of PeakFutures,
a foresight consulting group in Colorado Springs,