Decision Quality Focuses on ‘WHAT’ is Right, NOT ‘WHO’ is Right

Decision-making frequently considers fuzzy information, fuzzy implications, and fuzzy thinking.  To reduce fuzziness, and improve decision quality, lead your group to focus on What is right, NOT Who is right.

By structuring your questions and meeting design, you minimize the risk of decisions made that are no more than educated gambles.

Fuzzy - Focus on What is Right, NOT Who is Right

Decision Quality Results from Focusing On What is Right, NOT Who is Right

Some organizations rely on advocacy. As issues surface, people take sides[1]. Some participants win — while others lose. By depersonalizing the input required to support a decision, you create a win-win situation. In “majority win” cultures, the most powerful arguments do not necessarily win. Rather, the most persuasive and charismatic ‘champions’ are frequently victorious. Effective facilitation and structured meeting design mitigate risks associated with poor decision quality. After all, nobody is smarter than everybody[2].

Daniel Kahneman has proven that most people decide and then they justify their decision. A structured approach forces participants to delay their decision until available evidence has been provided. Unfortunately for most, once participants have decided, much of their deliberation focuses on finding support to justify their position. Structured facilitation can stop, or at least delay, premature decision-making. Tremendous risks arise if you don’t strive to identify the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Adjustable, Relevant, and Time-based) support that improves decision quality. We hope that you value and aspire to avoid the DUMB response (Dull, Ubiquitous, Myopic, and Broad).

Some meetings even lead to anger, resentment, or jealousy that can sabotage decisions and cultures. Reverse the flow of poor decision quality by first building consensus around the purpose of the decision. Next, develop and expose available options (actions). Then force the development of decision criteria based on evidence: facts, truths, and examples that support the claims. The structured approach helps groups focus one step at a time. Finally, have a method or tool(s) prepared for comparing the options against the criteria that support the originally stated purpose.

Structured Tools Focus on What is Right

For example, do you plan on using PowerBalls, Perceptual Map, Decision Matrix, Scorecard, etc.– or some combination thereof? Scrub (cleanse or clarify) that evidence to ensure clarity and shared understanding, so that the logic and arguments no longer belong to one person. Rather rationale for the decision quality becomes owned by the entire group. Visually displaying the comparison of the various options and supporting criteria additionally helps to depersonalize the analysis.

While many methods use a projected software tool, there are advantages to paper and whiteboards that include the transfer of ownership. The presenter or facilitator usually ends up owning PowerPoint®-type slides, regardless of group comments. If you create and visually display participant content with markers, the group retains ownership and not the keyboard operator.

Remember the 3-Question Approach when scrubbing:

  1. To what extent is the input clear and understood?
  2. What critical or substantive input appears to be missing?
  3. Will the participants support the input or does something need to be eliminated?

Professional facilitators understand the challenge and importance of focus. Groups cannot move coherently to consensus when starting from ‘many to many.’  With sharp questions, a group can be led from ‘one to many.’  The Content Management tool manages the transformation from the abstract to the concrete, from the WHY to the WHAT to the HOW. Note that a single fact (WHAT) can lead to multiple Implications (SO WHAT). Each Implication can lead to many Recommendations. And there is no way to focus a discussion from many facts to many recommendations effectively. However, the ‘many-to-many’ headache describes most unstructured meetings being held right now.

By structuring your decision-making, you minimize the personal bias that lowers decision quality. With focus, you eliminate much of the scope creep in meetings that results in wasted time. You may have heard that a ‘meeting’ is where minutes are kept and hours are lost. As a session leader, you can minimize confusion using a structure that documents the entire process. Therefore, all the participants can own it at the end.

Speed of Decision-making | When Quality Not Enough

According to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Martin Dempsey,

“Power is no longer simply the sum of capability and capacity but now, disproportionately, it includes speed—speed of action but especially speed of decision-making.” (source: WSJ, Voices on the Future)

Speed of Decision-making

Race Against Time: Speed of Decision-making

For any consensual and well-informed decision, please embrace at least seven agenda steps to ensure speed of decision-making:

  • Introduction
  • Purpose of (the scope or object of the situation)
  • Options
  • Criteria
  • Decision
  • Testing
  • Review and wrap

Seven Agenda Steps Ensure Speed of Decision-making

Do not forget to begin with the purpose of the object of the decision. If not, you risk combative participants with competing purposes. Always begin with WHY the decision is valuable or important before you begin your analysis of WHAT decision appears best.

Do not forget the rules of ideation when capturing options — no discussion, high energy, etc. Set the options aside and immediately develop an understanding of the decision criteria. General Dempsey added that:

“Countering the need for speed is often the paralyzing volumes of information, which often create an illusion of control and optimal decision making.”

Here is why we rely on subject matter experts, to translate the volumes of information, into the most important factors.

Prepare in advance how you plan to scrub the criteria and what tool is most appropriate for your situation. In our MG RUSH Professional Facilitative Leadership workshops, we consider various tools that galvanize consensus around decisions including:

Technique to Ensure Speed of Decision-making

Throughout the decision step in your agenda, get the group to first deselect and agree to eliminate or delete sub-optimal options, thus reducing the number of viable options. The origin of the word ‘decide’ means to cut off,  and that increases the likelihood that your group will focus on the best candidates. NEVER allow any tool to make your decision for you, but do allow tools to help you de-select.

For testing, take the decision and compare it with the purpose developed in the second step of the agenda. Determine “to what extent” the tentative decision supports that purpose. If the harmony is strong, the meeting is over. If there are disconnects, revisit both the purpose statement and tentative decision with questions about clarity, omissions, and deletions, until you have developed a decision that the participants can “live with” meaning they will support it and not lose sleep over it, even if it is not their ‘favorite.’

What is Right by Others

Although Aldous Huxley with first attributed with saying . . .

“It isn’t who is right, but what is right that counts.”

. . . we imagine others have said something similar, in various languages, long before the 20th century. After all, the risk of poor group decisions in the past frequently resulted in death.

Karl Albrecht[3], a pioneer of the structured-inquiry method, said it best:

“As we trade in the ‘who is right’ mind-set for the ‘what is right’ mind-set. We make our organizations collectively more intelligent and more capable of meeting the changing demands of the business environment.”

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[1] Note the Type One Thinking in Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

[2] Look at James Surowiecki’s book, “The Wisdom of Crowds”

[3] See www.KarlAlbrecht.com

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN

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