Hello again. Let's continue our examination of group decision making by discussing several communication practices we can enact to help improve our overall decision making. Now recalling our previous video, we covered several decision making traps that groups are so prone to falling into. And as important as it is to recognize these traps, mere awareness is never enough. We also have to do something different. We have to have some affirmative response to the negative alternative. Just like if you're trying to eat a healthier diet, you can't just avoid bad foods. You also have to consume better foods. You still have to eat something. Same thing with our group decision making. If we're not going to fall into the traps we discussed last time, what should we do instead? First of all, it's important to start from the premise that anything we do to improve our group decision making will involve communication, how we interact with each other as a group. It's communication that gets us into these decision making traps, and it's communication that will help us avoid them and make better overall decisions. And remember, we're not talking about some formulaic approach that will guarantee good decisions if we just say the right words at the right time, like some sort of magic spell we can just kind of cast on our group. No, we're talking about the realm of probability, communicating in ways that increase the likelihood that we'll make good decisions, more often in our groups. Before we get into some specific communication practices, let's discuss a broader shift in our overall orientation towards how we communicate with each other in the first place. Professors David Garvin and Michael Roberto from Harvard University are experts on decision making. And their research reveals a key distinction in how people approach communication in their groups. Advocacy versus inquiry. Many people think group decision making is about advocacy. Arguing for our positions, deflecting criticism, down-playing the shortcomings of our ideas, magnifying the deficiencies of others, and generally trying to win by advancing our ideas in the group. And although advocacy certainly has its place, it is often a very unhelpful way to approach group decision making. Instead, inquiry is an alternative method where you carefully consider a variety of opinions, cooperate with others to figure out the best ideas, and engage in constructive critique, rather than suppressing descent. And the important thing here is that groups who fall into decision making traps often engage in communication that is marked by advocacy as a dominant approach. Whereas, good decision making usually demonstrates more inquiry among group members, and thus a more productive approach to group communication. The key here, suggests Garvin and Roberto, is to see decision making as more of a process versus an event. Something that unfolds over time and through countless interactions rather than a discrete moment when we shift from uncertainty to decisive action. They go on to offer five specific things we can do to practice more inquiry in our group decision making, ways to communicate with each other that nurture the process rather than restrict us to an event. First is the notion of Multiple Alternatives. It's rare that you can make a good decision with a simple up or down vote on a single idea. You need to see that idea in relation to other ideas and other possibilities. That's the best way to assess any idea, to expose the flaws that might be not be readily apparent and to surface the benefits you might not have initially considered. So don't start evaluating a plan or a solution until you have discussed a sufficient number of alternative ideas. Second, we need to engage in Assumption Testing in our groups. Any time we start making progress towards a particular plan or solution, we need to stop and revisit the assumption that those ideas are based on in the first place. Maybe the initial assumptions were correct, but things have changed recently, or maybe you come across new information that challenges those initial assumptions. Assumptions are the structural foundation of ideas, so to speak. So we need to create space and tolerance in our group discussions to assess the quality of that foundation, to test the assumptions that underwrite our plans and solutions. Next, we need to have Well-Defined Criteria in our decision making. How will we know if a proposal or idea is good? On what basis will we evaluate alternative proposals? We need to be clear about this ahead of time or we run the risk slipping into advocacy, imposing arbitrary criteria on others' ideas, and often devolving into personal disputes rather than arguing about the actual merits of various ideas. So make sure you clearly define the standards by which ideas will be assessed and what will make certain alternatives acceptable or unacceptable. Fourth, we need Dissent and Debate in our decision making processes. Now this doesn't mean we need to argue with each other all the time, but when assessing the merits of any proposal or plan or solution, we need a healthy amount of back and forth among alternatives. We need to play Devil's Advocate to see if we can find a weak points in any idea before we Implement that idea in the real world. We need to challenge the premises that our ideas are based on to make sure our plans are established on strong foundations. Eventually we do need reach a level of agreement and consensus on how to proceed, but don't jump too quickly from idea generation to idea acceptance without substantive dissent and debate. And finally, we need to ensure the perception of fairness in our decision making processes. We all know that not every idea will be implemented or accepted, and sometimes it's our plans or proposals that don't make the final cut. People are more willing to accept that reality if they perceive that the process was fair. That is, they believe that the way in which their ideas were eventually excluded was reasonable and impartial. If not, it's very tempting for people to resort back to advocacy, jockeying for position in the group and advancing their ideas shrewdly, because they don't think they're getting fair consideration. Same thing for the ideas we eventually do decide to accept. People also need to believe that we engage in a fair process to reach that decision as well. In addition to the merits of an idea, the perception of fairness for how an idea was rejected or accepted is also very important. So if we focus our attention on engaging on this Best Practices, bathering multiple alternatives, testing our assumptions, developing well-defined criteria, having dissent and debate, and ensuring perceptions of fairness. We are well on our way to creating decision making processes that are characterized by inquiry rather than advocacy, and thus, more likely to result in better outcomes more often. And our communication will make all the difference. None of these things can happen if we don't interact with each other in certain ways. Inquiry and advocacy are hallmarks of our communication practices, and subject to change as our patterns of interaction change. They are not stable properties of our group that persist regardless of how we communicate. So to wrap up, I hope you can see how we can make connections between these best practises of inquiry and the decision making traps we have learned about in the previous video. Recall how we concluded that all the decision making traps basically come dawn to two things, the quality of information our group is working with, and the perspectives people in our groups are taking. All of the aspects of inquiry we discussed in this video deal directly with these two themes. Inquiry is all about improving the quality of information that we base our decisions on, and incorporating more perspectives in our decision making so that we can have better understandings of the issues at hand and thus make better overall decisions. Next up, we'll conclude Module Two and our emphasis on group decision making by looking at Creativity and Innovation. There are times when we need more than a routine decision, when our decision making requires a degree of novelty and originality to get beyond the status quo and to come up with new ideas. So we'll explore how we can communicate in ways that foster creativity and innovation in our decision making. I'll see you there.
