Introduction
This PowerLabs article highlights the significance of collaborative decision-making for improving outcomes and introduces the DECIDE model to guide this process.
Parts
The thorniest challenges, the places where things are really going wrong, can often be traced back to a decision point where a flawed process led to the wrong call or a hard choice was avoided. A single bad decision is rarely the whole picture, but we can do better.
Part 1: What to Avoid
Exacerbating Cognitive Biases
A senior leadership team brought in an outside facilitator to guide them through a critical strategy decision. The group had fun, but the methods used were terrible for decision-making.
High-ranking staff made persuasive pitches based on faulty assumptions about power and then sealed the deal with an activity where each person’s position was highly susceptible to groupthink. The whole process exacerbated cognitive biases and led to flawed reasoning.
When they put the plan into action, things quickly started going off track. As the pressure mounted, the leadership doubled down on the bad decision. No one wanted to risk their status and connection to the group by raising concerns or questioning the previous decision. The leadership pushed forward on a failing plan until they ran out of money and the organization folded.
Short-term Wins, Long-term Failure
Another organization had a rare opportunity to elect a champion for their cause. They chose tactics that efficiently mobilized voters but didn’t build individuals or the organization.
Once the election was over, the organization didn’t have the power necessary to defend the officeholder from attacks or sway them if needed.
At this point, they are stuck; donors have moved on, they have a fraction of the staff they had during the election, momentum has died down, and the person they helped elect is getting hammered by the opposition.
Refusing to Decide
A third organization refused to make the difficult choices and trade-offs required for good strategy.
Staff followed their interests and passions and rallied others to their projects, but it never added up to much. As Deepak Pateriya writes, they had an activist mindset and were “motivated by personal values and experiences, and informed by personal politics and tactical preferences.”
People put in heroic amounts of effort, but because it wasn’t based on a rigorous diagnosis of what’s needed, coordinated, and focused, they failed to make progress and burned each other out in the process.
Part 2: A Process to Make Better Decisions
In each case, a systematic and rigorous decision-making process would reduce the risks of bad outcomes.
One approach is known as DECIDE.
D = Define the problem
E = Establish criteria
C = Consider all the alternatives
I = Identify the best alternative
D = Develop and implement a plan of action
E = Evaluate and monitor the solution and feedback as necessary
Kristina Lu Guo, a professor at the University of Hawai’i, developed the model for healthcare managers, but it works in our context, too.
According to their paper DECIDE: A Decision-Making Model for More Effective Decision Making by Health Care Managers (2008), the process is:
D = Define the problem
What is the problem? Why should anything be done at all? What should or could be happening?
E = Establish the criteria
What criteria are desirable? What do you want to achieve in your decision? What do you want to preserve? What problems do you want to avoid?
C = Consider all the alternatives
What possible choices meet the criteria? Consider all the factors that affect the alternatives.
I = Identify the best alternative
Selection of the best alternative is based on experience, intuition, and experimentation.
D = Develop and implement a plan of action
How is the plan of action going to be implemented? What are the resources needed in the implementation process?
E = Evaluate and monitor the situation
Troubleshoot your decision. What could go wrong? What can be done to correct the problem? Gather and consider feedback — the qualitative and quantitive data of results — as necessary.
This process works well for tiny decisions in ten minutes (e.g., what should our team do about dinner tonight?) and big decisions that might take hours or days (e.g., what tactics should we use to win the campaign?).
Part 3: Avoid these Traps
Define the Problem
Don’t dive into problem-solving without understanding the problem first.
The problem we notice is often only a symptom influenced or caused by structural or contextual factors.
For example, an organization struggled with staff and members not following through on commitments. The initial take was that the individuals involved had a problem with time or task management or had a character flaw (yikes!).
It took digging to realize it wasn’t an individual failing.
The group identified several potential structural causes, such as assigning small tasks for people to complete and telling them exactly how to complete them. The solution was to create teams that own outcomes and have the support and autonomy to achieve them.
Establish the Criteria
If you think there will be conflict at the decision stage, focus the heat here instead.
Criteria are more abstract, so it is easier to work through different points of view, priorities, goals, and more.
Alignment and clarity on criteria create the foundation for working through disagreements when making a choice.
Good criteria can head off short-term thinking. For example, the following criteria from Marshall Ganz might’ve helped the organization that chose efficient mobilization over effective long-term power.
- Strategic
It results in concrete, measurable progress toward your campaign goals. - Strengthens your organization
It attracts and engages new people; it increases your community’s capacity to work together to make change. - Develops individuals
It builds your constituency’s leadership, skills, and capacity.
I add to these criteria: Staff feeling bored with a tactic or that they are too hardcore for it should not be used to eliminate it. We’re organizers with an obligation to our community to act strategically, not activists doing our own thing.
Consider all the alternatives – There are conflicting points of view (and empirical evidence) about the effectiveness of brainstorming and more nuance than can fit in this post.
In short, idea generation may be improved by giving people independent time to think, write, or draw their ideas before sharing them with the group. Don’t just ask people to start shouting out ideas.
If it’s a big decision, give people time to expand their thinking by splitting the six steps into two sessions.
- Session 1: Define the problem, establish the criteria, and consider alternatives.
- Break for lunch or the day.
- Session 2: Consider additional alternatives, identify the best alternative, and develop a plan of action.
Part 4: A Potential Next Step
If you resonated with the experiences of the three organizations, why not try the DECIDE method?
A systematic approach to decision-making might seem too time-consuming, but taking a little time in the beginning reduces the risk of solving the wrong problem, taking a shortcut that’ll we’ll regret in the future, or putting in effort that gets us nowhere.
The DECIDE process might feel clunky or overly formal initially, but repetitions make the process smoother.
Repetition is also how we change the culture of our organization to one that values deliberative processes that result in continual learning, candid dialogue, and clear decision-making.
Without better decisions, we’ll never have governing power to create the world that all of us, everywhere, need.
