Collective Decision Making

How to create a group environment where the collective wisdom of the group will prevail

by Dan Lentz

Not too long ago, I listened to an audio book called The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. A section of the book deals with the decision-making capacity of small groups and teams, primarily in a business setting. The conclusion of most studies on small-group decision-making is that the quality of group decisions is poor when compared to individual decisions.

Why? The reason given in the book is that stronger vocal individuals in a group will tend to give their opinion, as they normally would, but non-vocal members or members with different opinions will tend to continue to be silent and avoid confrontation. Or some stay silent to avoid prolonging an unproductive group discussion. By not being heard and bringing different perspectives into the group process, the result is the expressed opinion of the few becomes the default opinion of the group. The broader group may not be unified behind that decision, but everyone defaults to the opinion of the vocal member(s). The book goes on to say, "If a group in this situation makes a good decision, it generally is because the stronger more vocal person just happened to have a good opinion."

Despite this common dynamic of poor group decisions, one of the ideas proposed by The Wisdom of Crowds is that a collective group decision (small group or large group) can and should be a better decision than any one individual in the group could make—IF, and this is a big IF, the group process includes provisions for having every member be heard without being biased by other member’s comments. But according to the book, in business and organizations, groups and teams seldom reach the best collective decision because the group process is normally flawed.

The challenge is how you create a group environment where the collective wisdom of the group will prevail. The book doesn’t provide a lot of detailed answers to this question, unfortunately. But a critical element to this group process is allowing people a safe platform to share their thoughts (and hopefully Holy Spirit promptings) with the rest of the group without the threat of immediate critique and comment by other members.

The temptation of people in all discussion-based groups is to immediately respond to each other’s comments, rather than letting each person share first and then discuss all ideas only when all have shared in safety. This process is particularly important if your group is facing the need to make a critical collective decision. If you are a leadership group tasked with frequent decisions, then getting this group process right is a big deal.

What helps make this possible? For one thing, you need to level the playing field so that everyone is heard without shame or condemnation. One of the best ways to level the playing field is through ice breakers—open ended questions that everyone answers where the responses are not critiqued. Using a series of icebreakers that progressively ramp up to the core of the decision can be useful to establish the environment and process for everyone to share in safety.

Beyond that, it’s important for everyone in the group to recognize that the best collective group decision will not be achieved without the whole group being involved through a safe, intentional, and prayerful group process.

Additionally, having key questions formulated and distributed to the group ahead of time can be powerful. This allows people to think and pray about their answer prior to the group discussion.
Here are some general sample questions that can be distributed to group members ahead of time. (Taken from www.noblecall.org.)

--What is the most pressing issue we are facing?
--What will the future be like if nothing changes?
--Based on the above, what is the one thing we cannot fail to do?
--What is the most powerful thing we can agree to ask God for?