16.4 Decision-Making

The quidditch team has been together for eight months, but they haven’t yet managed to decide on a name. This is a task many groups have to face, and not all groups handle it well (the Goo Goo Dolls thinks their band’s name is “kind of a stupid name”). Making decisions is one of the central things that groups do, and thankfully it’s also a research topic that has received a lot of academic attention.

Starting in the 1940s, social scientists began assembling people into groups in lab settings and giving them decision-making tasks, from simple chess problems to selecting from a list of items they would want if were stranded on the moon. In some ways, these experiments were the precursors to “escape rooms,” where a group of people is given all the tools needed to solve a puzzle and get out of a captive situation before the time runs out.

Thousands of research articles were published about these experiments, although this is one area where the “controlled vs. natural” dilemma discussed in Chapter 2 was an issue. Some critics argued that watching a group of strangers thrown together in a lab setting and given a simple decision-making task can result in findings that don’t necessarily carry over into the real world. In an experiment, the researcher can measure how correct the decision is (e.g., don’t bring a set of matches or a flare on that moon expedition; they need oxygen to work), but when a real-life band settles on an odd name like “Pink Floyd,” who’s to say that’s an “incorrect” choice? Psychologist Karl Weick noted that many groups don’t make decisions in a single meeting, free of distractions and without a history of power dynamics between members. Those lab groups weren’t given the option to just not solve the problem in front of them, but real groups put off decisions all the time, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Not all problems have to be solved, and sometimes “normal” problems fix themselves or just go away.

That said, the group decision-making literature can provide helpful guidance to our unnamed quidditch team. For example, the team can start by deciding whether they want to use a rational decision-making model, or a non-rational one (not to be confused with “irrational ”).

Rational Models

Most rational models can be traced back to a philosopher named John Dewey, who, in the early 1990s , laid out the systematic steps in making a decision. He was talking about how an individual person should think through a decision, but group scholars realized that these steps work for a group process as well. The steps evolved slightly over the years and came to be known as the Standard Agenda, which generally looks like this:

1. Identify and analyze the problem
2. Spell out criteria to evaluate the solution
3. Generate solutions
4. Evaluate those solutions against the criteria in step 2
5. Select the best solution

Two additional steps are sometimes included — implement the solution, and later go back and evaluate whether it was a good solution after all — although you could argue that decision-making ends with step 5, so those are a different kind of thing. This model is so clearly logical that it holds up well after a century.

Too bad it so rarely works in practice.

Why not?

Let’s visit our quidditch team and see what they did instead. After practice one day, this dialogue unfolded:

Brandon:   “You know, we really have to come up with a name sometime”

Willem:       “Yeah, I guess you’re right. How about Woghorts?”

Nola:          “Woghorts? Taking Hogwarts and switching letters around? No, I’m not going for that.”

Willem:       “What’s wrong with it?”

Nola:          “Just no. I hate it.”

Willem:       “Do you have any better ideas?”

Fay:            “What about an animal name? Like the Hippogryphs or something.”

Andy:         “I bet there’s a million quidditch teams that already went with that.”

Troy:           “Should we look up a list of existing quidditch team names?”

Nola:          “What good would that do? That’ll only show us names that are already taken.”

Brandon:   “Man, you really don’t like anyone’s ideas, do you Nola?”

Nola:          “I’m just trying to not waste time.”

Willem:       “How about Hagrid’s Bucket o’ Slugs?”

Fay:            “All your ideas are disgusting. Can’t we come up with something pleasant?”

Grant:         “It doesn’t have to be taken from a Harry Potter movie. What about the Wolverines or something?”

The conversation continues like this for another 20 minutes, until Grant suggests that they go home and sleep on it and resume the discussion next week. John Dewey would shake his head over how little their process resembled the standard agenda: they didn’t spend any time on step 1, never clearly discussed step 2 (although they are implicitly dancing around criteria such as “A name not taken by other quidditch teams,” “not disgusting” and “not taken from a Harry Potter movie”).  Instead, they jumped straight to step 3, and kept bouncing back and forth between steps 3 and 4 (without the “against the criteria in step 2” element), which is what most groups would do without explicitly trying to follow the model.

In my experience, groups almost always skip Step 1, cycling back to it only if they realize that the later steps aren’t working. Even if they do try to stick to the model, it takes considerable discipline to follow the steps in order, and that kind of discipline just doesn’t match the norms of this team.

If they were intent on using the model, it may help to set up a form that they could fill in. Step 2, for instance, might look like:

STEP 2: What are your criteria for a good group name?

Then they can list all of the name suggestions without judgment, and only after that start looking at how the suggestions fit the criteria:

STEP 4: How well does each suggested name match the criteria?

Even then, there will probably be some circling back to step 2, since it takes a while to identify all the criteria you want to follow. The good news is that , as shown in research by group decision-making scholar Randy Hirokawa, sticking to the steps in strict order is not important, as long as you cover them at some point.^[1]

Hirokawa’s other important contribution is an examination of the things that get in the way of Dewey’s very logical — but idealistic — model. Forms of disruptive communication that derail the process include:

1. Hidden agendas and secret goals. For instance, since Grant is dating Nola, he might want to back her suggestions just to keep himself out of trouble on the home front. Sometimes a person’s hidden agenda might be as simple as “Make myself look smart” or “Stay out of trouble”; other times, it might involve actually undermining your own group for some reason.
2. Fear-based thinking. As covered in Chapter 8, when fears show up, logic tends to disappear. Sometimes the only thing that helps you explain puzzling group decisions is to ask, “What are they afraid of?”
3. Sloppiness, laziness, and biased thinking. This includes falling into any of the logical fallacies covered in Chapter 7.
4. Undue influence of powerful members. The assumption that “the boss knows best” is deep-seated in many people, and blinds them to the fact that sometimes powerful people have bad ideas. The flip side is also true: sometimes good ideas come from surprising places, including people you might not think are credible [SEE Chapter 9]. For this reason, group decision-making experts recommend using platforms that separate ideas from people, so you can just look at an idea’s merits without knowing who came up with it.

Finally, with all this attention on steps 2 and 4, the group didn’t realize that step 5 was a little unclear: how exactly do you “select the best solution?” Stare at the chart and count up which row has the most yeses filled in, which seemed rather impersonal and mindless? What if no obvious winner is apparent? Take a vote and go with the majority? Talk it all out until they achieve full consensus?

In the end, the deciding factor was simple fatigue: they discussed numerous options until they were just tired of talking, and at that moment the option under discussion was “the Hippogryphs,” so they went with that one. They tried their best to be as rational as they could, but the final step didn’t seem very rational at all, and no one was particularly enthused about the final choice.

Non-Rational Models

What if all these steps aren’t necessary? After all, rational processes can’t guarantee good results. Chapter 8 raised the question: What if there is a bias in the preference for rationality and logic over other ways of thinking?

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking made the case that instinctive “thinking from your gut” is sometimes preferable to logical analysis. That book begins with the story of the J. Paul Getty Museum buying a marble statue for $10 million, doing 14 months of extensive research to make sure it was authentic, then having others recognize it as a fake as soon as they saw it based on “hunches” and “intuitive repulsion.”^[2] This can be easily misinterpreted to mean that anybody who thinks from their gut is always right (Gladwell emphasizes how important it is to study a subject for years before developing instincts that are worth trusting). But at the very least, it provides groups with an alternative to rigid processes like the Standard Agenda. What might those alternatives look like?

One option is brainstorming, a term that has come to mean any kind of idea generating. The person who came up with the term, an advertising executive named Alex Osborne, wanted to help his teams break out of stale old ideas and come up with new ones. He observed, for instance, that when people mixed the idea-generating phase with the idea-evaluating phase — which the quidditch team did in the dialogue above — it stops the “creative juices” from flowing. When Nola and Fay shoot down both of Willem’s suggestions, Willem might feel resentful or discouraged enough that he stops contributing to the discussion.

Osborne came up with specific guidelines about how to brainstorm, including “Withhold criticism” (Nola and Fay, if you don’t like Willem’s ideas, bite your tongues until later). Brainstorming is not a decision-making process: the goal is to end up with a lot of wild ideas instead of trying to identify a single good one. The philosophy is that stimulating creative thinking can lead to brilliant ideas just “popping out,” and when they do, you can recognize their greatness without going through any kind of Standard Agenda-like process.

Back to our team, the next time they meet, Mack (who didn’t contribute any ideas the previous time) says, “You know my favorite line in the first movie? When Hagrid says ‘Dry up, Dursley, you great prune!’ to Uncle Vernon.”

Dave chimes in, “So we could call ourselves the Great Prunes? That’s excellent!” Four or five people add that they love it too, Nola says she’ll go post the news on the social media sites, and the rest of them head off to practice.

When Decision-Making Goes Wrong

It was a nice moment: they made the decision in two minutes and told the world that the team is now The Great Prunes. Except…. It bothers Fay a little that no actual vote was taken. She didn’t want to look like a stick-in-the-mud by insisting on a formal procedure after that name “popped out” and got such a great reaction, so she figured she was probably the only one who wasn’t sure about it. Meanwhile, Willem thought that nobody else would catch that obscure movie reference and wasn’t crazy about being named after a dried fruit — but he didn’t speak up, either, because everyone else seemed happy about the name. And it turns out that even Mack didn’t intend to propose it as a team name; he just wanted to mention that he liked that line from the movie, and Dave took it and ran with it. In other words, it seemed like there was consensus among the whole team, but there wasn’t.

Management professor Jerry Harvey would say that the group had “driven to Abilene.”^[3] He coined the term Abilene Paradox, based on an incident with his family in which they took a 106-mile trip that, it turned out, no one in the family actually wanted to make. The core problem is that people in the group are acting based on what they assume other people want, and no one is clearly stating what they want.

On the quidditch team, this is what happened with Troy and his partner Lacy last Friday, when he came home exhausted and wishing to just spend the night on the couch. But when Lacy came home, Troy could see that she had had a rough week too, and he knew that she liked to relieve stress by dancing. So Troy said “Want to go out to a club?” (secretly hoping she’d say no). When Lacy heard that, she thought to herself “Not really — I’d rather stay home, but he’s so sweet, and it sounds like he really wants to go out, so sure, I guess I can do that.” But out loud she said a cheerful “Sure,” and off they went. All evening long, both of them were just waiting for the other to say it was time to go home, which neither of them did until after midnight. If either one had ever uttered the phrase “I’d rather stay home,” the night out would not have happened — but each was afraid that it would spoil the fun for the other one.

So when other members of the team didn’t express any reservations about the Great Prunes before Nola went off and posted it on social media, was it because they didn’t want to spoil the fun of the moment? Perhaps, or it may have been something even more serious.

In groupthink situations, members are actually afraid to speak up, and those that do are often attacked for it. Irving Janis (one of the developers of the 5-step persuasion model from Chapter 6) analyzed a number of cases of political disasters in which groups of smart people made disastrously bad decisions in the name of preserving the cohesion of the group. Groups in groupthink mode tend to:

1. Overestimate their moral superiority (of course we’re the “good team,” so nothing bad can happen to us) and underestimate the opposition, often demonizing or mocking them.
2. Put too much faith in their leader, assuming that whatever ideas the leader comes up with must be brilliant.
3. Ignore red flags, warnings, and alternatives: they decide on a course of action and don’t listen to any “naysayers” who express doubts or raise objections
4. Stress loyalty above all else, and attack doubters for being disloyal. If one or two people get pilloried for speaking up, everyone else in the group who has doubts keeps their mouth shut to protect themselves.
5. Impose unnecessary and unrealistic deadlines, and play the “time-shift game.” The game goes like this: if someone suggests that maybe they should take the time to consider the wisdom of an action the leader wants to perform, the response is “This is the time for urgent action; we can talk about it later.” But later when people ask “Now can we talk about it?,” the response is “What’s the point now? What’s done is done.”

The 2017 Fyre Festival seemed to exhibit all those symptoms. The music festival ended so disastrously that it resulted in eight lawsuits from frustrated concert-goers and the organizer Billy McFarland going to prison for four years for fraud. Watch the documentaries Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened or Fyre Fraud and decide for yourself if all five groupthink symptoms were present.

Groupthink doesn’t only happen in high profile cases. As a teacher, I’ve seen classroom project groups exhibit at least some of those symptoms, and several times I’ve heard students admit after the fact that they knew the project was turning into a trainwreck. This raises the question: why didn’t they speak up to prevent that trainwreck?

That question puts the onus on the doubters to say something, and in general it’s a good principle of group functioning that people should speak their minds. But there are other ways of looking at the same situation, and alternative questions one could ask. Why don’t group leaders, for example, check in and make sure they know what their members are thinking? Something like a secret ballot or anonymous survey can reveal things that people may be reluctant to say out loud.

On a more general level, a different phrasing of the question is: “What are the reasons people don’t express their views in groups?” The climate of the group might be intimidating, or members might come from cultures in which speaking up is not the norm [See Chapter 15]. And hidden agendas give members reasons not to speak their mind. At the least, group leaders should not assume they know what everyone is thinking just because no one expresses any objections, and should understand that consensus is sometimes an illusion. It takes work to find out people’s opinions, and being aware of the reasons people don’t speak up can be very valuable.

On the other hand, it can be deadly for leadership to gather opinions from group members and then not do anything with that information. My favorite example comes from 2016, when the British National Environment Research Council (NERC) spent £200 million to build a research vessel, and then told the public they wanted their input on what to name it. The top choice was “Boaty McBoatface,” earning 124,109 votes, nearly twice as many votes as all the other suggestions combined. This left NERC with the choice: honor the public opinion poll, or make their own decision? They just couldn’t see writing that name on the side of an expensive ship, so they opted for “RSS SIr David Attenborough” instead…but they did use the voters’ favorite name for a 12-foot autosub.

For some people, the lesson to be drawn here is that people on the internet don’t take polls seriously, but I see this as an example of a much more serious issue that applies to many contexts. With “empowerment” being a popular buzzword these days, many group leaders make a good show of sharing power with others. If that takes the form of asking members (or the public) for their input on decisions, it raises a question that the leaders may not have thought through: “What will you do if you don’t like that input?” They may just think, “Well, if we don’t like their ideas, we can just thank them for the suggestions and do what we want to do anyway.” Whenever I hear the phrase “We’ll take that under advisement,” I wonder if it’s a euphemism for “We’ll humor you, but there’s no way we’ll actually surrender decision-making power to you.”

The problem is that people know when their input has been sought, and watch to see what will be done with that input. If the answer, or even perception, is “nothing,” the actual power situation is made clear, which leads to resentment, bitterness, and disengagement. (See the note above about bands that pretend to be democracies but are really dictatorships in disguise). I know many workers who fill out employee engagement surveys every year, only to realize that no one ever does anything with those survey results.

Despite the silly name, the Boaty McBoatface Dilemma is a problem that no leader should ignore: if you’re going to ask for input, you’d better be prepared to actually do something with it, which means surrendering your own power.

One last decision-making problem I have observed comes when a decision is remade several times. Revisiting a decision is a good idea: perhaps it wasn’t a great idea to begin with, or perhaps the circumstances have changed. But if you revisit the same decision more than two or three times, coming up with a different solution every time, the group will never be able to keep track of the final decision. So, for instance, if you have a group that normally meets on Wednesdays at 3 pm, but in the summertime, when people’s schedules are more free, they decide that 2 pm would be easier, but then rethink the decision again and go back to a 3 pm start time, people won’t remember what the latest decision was, and some will just stay home.

If the Great Prunes decide that this isn’t the best name after all, and change it to the Hippogryphs, and then the Wolverines, people will be permanently confused about what their “real” name is. Perhaps they will do what many people did after the musician Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in 1993: they called him “TAFKAP” (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) until he changed it back in 1998. You may have done the same with “X” (formerly known as Twitter) or “Max” (formerly known as HBO Max, or was it HBO Now, or HBO Go?). To prevent the quidditch world from referring to your team as “formerly known as the Great Prunes” for the next 10 years, you should put more thought into getting it right the first time.