Marja Fox shares guidelines for facilitators to ensure more effective group decision-making.
Business boils down to decisions: big ones and small ones, some made routinely and others episodically, by everyone from senior executives to the front line, about what to do and what not to do. Many of those decisions are made by individuals: trained, entrusted, and empowered to decide on behalf of the organizations they represent. Others are made by groups, requiring extensive expertise, dispersed accountability, and widespread buy-in.
On the plus side, group decisions benefit from a multitude of perspectives, a broader experience base and the accompanying likelihood of extended debate and consideration. Cooperative groups tend to make smarter, more creative and more effective decisions. The price to be paid for those benefits is in pace and degree of difficulty. Group decision-making can be cumbersome and unwieldy. Group dynamics can easily veer into unhealthy; competitive groups, for example, make measurably worse decisions. Achieving the full benefits of group decision-making while controlling the costs is what facilitation is all about.
Strategic decisions are frequently group-owned ones, and they are particularly challenging to do well. First, strategic questions are those that we not only don’t know the answers to, we can’t know the answers. Strategy is a set of hard-to-reverse decisions made in the face of uncertainty. We are gazing into the inherently unknown and making choices that we think will position us well as the future unfolds. There are no right answers, only better and worse ones. Secondly, most of us aren’t great strategists, even among the cadre of senior executives most often tasked with strategic decisions. It has nothing to do with our training or intelligence; rather, strategic thinking happens under conditions that are poorly suited to human learning. For the most part, humans learn through trial-and-error: do something, see the results and adjust. The more we repeat, the better we get. Strategy doesn’t play well with that formula. Strategic decisions are infrequent, so we don’t get to practice very often. And, the results of strategic decisions emerge slowly and are frequently confounded by many variables. Our general lack of practice and the uncertainty of strategic decision-making makes facilitation more challenging, but also more critical.
So, the output of great facilitation is easier, more impactful, more effective group decision-making. But, what’s the input?
Key points include:
- Managing the energy of the participants
- Avoiding individual and collective biases
- Ensuring healthy interaction dynamics
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Read the full article, Beyond the Agenda, on MarjaFox.com.