Tools

Group Decision Making Model: How to Make Better Decisions as a Team

There are lots of group decision-making models. Explore each and find one that works well for your group’s needs and circumstance.

The Decider is our conversational bot that helps you select a decision-making model to try with your team. You can try it both on the web or in Slack.

Background

Making decisions is an absolutely necessary function of any productive group. Without decisions, literally nothing happens. Decisions impact how we view leaders. Decisions control our fates as individuals within groups.

As your team grows, making decisions together becomes harder. As you add more people, reaching consensus often becomes too slow, and/or the compromises you have to make become too painful. In response, some teams simply put all the decision-making responsibilities on the leader, which overloads them and demotivates everyone else. But there are so many ways to make a decision together, far more than either giving everyone a say or only giving one person the authority.

Decisions are important, yet we rarely pay any attention to how we decide.

Instead of choosing the right decision-making model for the situation at hand, we either fall back on norms or simply decide for ourselves in isolation. But a knee-jerk reaction can have irreversible negative consequences, both economically and culturally within our groups.

The Decider helps you explore more ways to make a decision together and helps you understand when one model might be better suited than another.

How it Works

The Decider helps you navigate between eight different decision-making models: Autocratic, Avoidant, Consensus, Consent, Consultative, Delegation, Democratic, and Stochastic. By asking you a series of questions, it suggests a decision-making model for your team to try that’s matched to your current situation.

Our recommendations are based on exhaustive study and real-world practice by a team of organizational researchers, organizational psychologists, and experienced change agents. We have advised organizations of all sizes, across almost every industry, under almost every imaginable condition. 

Get Started

Visit TheDecider.app to try it and add it to your team’s Slack channels.

Published March 6, 2019

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