Tips for Intelligent Group Decisions

© Coert Visser (2005)

The basis of all cooperative activity is integrated diversity.- Mary Parker Follett (1924)

The Madness of Groups

Many people distrust the behavior and decisions of people in groups. That is very understandable. Consider for instance how a group of football fans can behave. Especially in groups, people can sometimes get completely out of control. An example on a larger scale is the collective madness of many people in Germany before and in World War II. Collective madness has been known for a long time. In 1841 the Scotsman Charles Mackay wrote a book about it called: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

More recently Irving Janis presented his theory of groupthink. Janis described how teams often so strongly desire unanimity that strong pressure is put on individual members to conform. The quality of decisions suffers seriously because of this because individual team members will be less and less inclined to bring forward their own knowledge based on their own experiences. Instead, they will start to echo and imitate others. This can lead to disastrous decisions.

Excessive Trust in Individual Decision Makers

It is often believed that a good remedy against the madness of groups is to give much power to extraordinary individuals. People who are aware that they cannot fully understand complex problems often believe that there are other people, more intelligent, knowledgeable and strong than they are, who do posses the answers to these problems. They are quite prepared to follow and depend on these leaders, people who do seem and or pretend to know the answers to pressing complex problems. But is this wise? No! Inspired leaders can of course be very useful to organizations. But the number of great leaders who have led their organizations astray is great. It is also unwise to give to much power to experts. Expertise can be a very useful addition to the knowledge that is already available but the value of experts and expertise is often overestimated. A clue for this can be found in the fact that in many knowledge domains the leading experts often disagree about the core aspects of their field of expertise, let alone about the details.

Intelligent Groups

The book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) by James Surowiecki provides an answer to this issue. The author fights the idea that group decisions can only be mad and lead to misery and that extraordinary individuals should therefore solve pressing problems. He says that the potential of groups is underestimated and the value of expertise overestimated:

“... the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made”.

If the circumstances are right groups can behave highly intelligent, often more intelligent than even the most intelligent individuals. Under those circumstances, groups are better at solving problems, making predictions, assessing situations accurately and deciding wisely.

Conditions for Intelligent Group Decisions

The right circumstances for collective wisdom are:

1. Diversity: when arguments, views and opinions do not differ from each other they don’t add anything to one another. Diversity guarantees that multiple perspectives are brought into the decision-making process and that a broader range of information is included.
2. Independence: when individual group members are strongly influenced by arguments, information, experiences and onions of others this will suppress the diversity of input into the decision-making process. This increases the likelihood of groupthink.
3. Decentralization: the chance to achieve collective wisdom is greatest when individuals get a chance to bring their own information and experience into the process. Surowiecki calls this ‘local experience’.
4. Aggregation: a mechanism and a process to come to an integration of the different views and opinions. It is very important to prevent that there will be too much interaction before each other to strongly so that the pressure to conform may get too strong and any deviating opinions will be suppressed.

An intelligent group does not ask of its individual members to conform to the dominant view. Instead, it has created a mechanism that resembles a democracy or a market. Individual group members get the opportunity to bring in their own information and opinions and are not forced to change their views. Their independence is explicitly protected.

A Few Tips to Improve Decision Making

The ideas in The Wisdom of Crowds can be easily translated into suggestions for improving group decision making in organizations:

1. Make sure that people with different backgrounds, positions, experiences and opinions are included in the process so that a richness of perspectives can be used.
2. Involve a considerable number of people. The more people can participate the greater the chance will be that different perspectives will be included.
3. Make sure that each participant to the decision-making process prepares very well to the decisions that need to be taken.
4. Prevent long discussions. Start early in the process with inviting people to bring forward their information and views in order to keep them from surrendering to group pressure.
5. Gather information and views simultaneously. A handy tool may be an electronic decision-making system. This helps to gather input simultaneously and anonymously (if needed). People who have worked with these kinds of systems are usually both satisfied with the process and with the outcome of the decision-making process.

Literature

1. Janis, I. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
2. Mackay, C. (1841). Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Wordsworth Reference.
3. Parker Follett, M. (1924). Creative Experience.
4. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds. Doubleday.