🌿🧭🌳 OD30: S.H.A.R.P.E.R. decision-making in groups ∙ Introducing monthly themes ∙ OD goodies
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1. S.H.A.R.P.E.R. decision-making in groups
A lot of what happens in the world of work is a combination of decisions and actions. What if you could increase the quality of the decisions you make together with your colleagues or clients?
Torben Emmerling & Duncan Rooders from the Affective Advisory team share a framework for better decision making in groups, based on behavioral science research. Here are the 7 principles that might help you make better decisions together:
Smaller groups work better
Research suggests that, whenever possible, it is advised to aim for the often self-selected ‘natural group size of 2-4 people’, for an effective operation (Moreland et al., 2013). This way, the negative effects found in larger groups can be reduced, and the benefits of having multiple perspectives can still be guaranteed.
Heterogeneity beats homogeneity (most of the time)
Various studies have shown that groups consisting of individuals sharing the same (homogeneous) opinions and beliefs are not only consistently more confident about decisions, but they also show a stronger tendency toward confirmation bias (Schultz et al., 2007). Differently, potentially opposing perspectives can effectively mitigate group bias.
Appoint a strategic dissenter (or even two)
Various business and military examples show that appointing one person to act as a deliberate counterforce against consenting group dynamics leads to significant improvements in decision quality (for a good overview see Senor & Singer, 2011).
Rate options independently
Helps in mitigating biases and safeguarding more balanced group results independent of seniority, rank and alleged expertise. An additional benefit of independent evaluation processes is that responsibility for the decision outcome is shared by the entire group and that the creativity, transparency and objectivity of strategic decisions actually increases (Nowack et al., 2011).
Provide a safe space to speak up
People need to feel safe to speak up (Edmondson, 2018), and room for reflecting and discussing failure in an intelligent way must be guaranteed (Sitkin & Pablo, 1992). Only when all members feel comfortable and secure in sharing their thoughts and doubts about a potential solution can a group make use of its diverse knowledge and experience base.
Experts - please handle with care
Halo effects (i.e. the spillover of an impression we have about someone in one domain to other domains), attributed authority and a high level of confidence in expert judgements can easily be misleading and actually take the group along the wrong path (Kahneman, 2011).
Responsibility - share it collectively
Often, during difficult and fractious discussions, a representative is selected to govern the information-seeking and decision-making process. What sounds like a good and straightforward idea can often lead to systematic biases. (...) The simple – and yet powerful – advice to mitigate such effects is a joint declaration of shared accountability for the group’s final decision.
If this framework picked your interest, read the full article in the Behavioral Economics Guide 2020 linked below, pages 16-22.
Besides a detailed description of the framework, you'll find insights about critical patterns in individual decision-making, critical biases and critical patterns in group decision-making.
's experiment together with a monthly theme to focus on, based on your needs and interests.
How will this work?
You'll vote for a relevant theme at the end of each month
We'll announce the topic at the start of the next month
Each edition of the OrgDev newsletter that month will have 2 new elements:
an invitation to share your challenges around the topic in a discussion thread and
an invitation to share relevant resources that you've found that could help others in the community.
We'll also contribute to the discussions with ideas and tools that we found useful.
Let's see how it goes in August and September and adapt this thematic approach along the way. It’s a good opportunity to connect with fellow readers and share.
If there’s energy to connect and you find this valuable, we could explore forming a community of practice, setting up a community Slack, have community meetups, co-creating new tools and so on.
For August, the proposed theme to focus on is: "How do you engage the distributed organization?"
It's the theme that emerged most often in the conversations with our readers so far. We’ll open up voting for the September theme on 27 AUG.
What are the decisions and actions that help engage people who are not working in shared offices, like it was common in most companies?
Have you found specific resources that helped you in addressing this challenge?
Do you have specific challenges in this area?
We invite you to contribute to the discussion by clicking on the comment button at the end of the newsletter.
An alternative is to reply directly to this e-mail to send us your message and we'll post it in the thread 🧵
OD Goodies
If you like this stuff and you’re curious about some extra #orgdev.
NFX: Collection of 40 frameworks for startup founders. You might find some relevant to your work with larger organizations.
NY Times: Interview with Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, a distributed organization. A quote: ”There’s a very intangible magic that people imagine happens in an office that’s necessary for innovation or design (...) So there were a lot of biases and to be honest, it’s hardest to change when you’ve been successful doing something in the past.”
The Verge: Balanced piece about GPT-3, the latest development in AI, that might have a big impact in the world of work, especially as writing becomes more important when collaborating remotely.
Scott Young: Why having spare capacity helps growth. Applies to organizations, teams as well as to individuals.
Thanks for reading
We hope you found something useful in this edition.
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