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 1900s , 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.