Collaborative Decision Making

Decision-Making Resources > Decision Making in Business and Management > Collaborative Decision Making

Hard decisions are dependent of information and the collaboration of many people. No one person has all the information, no two people have the same values, and all see the information through different education, experiences and organization loyalty. One of the most effective ways to manage this situation and to counteract the blunders is to encourage collaborative decision making and ensure that everyone on the decision-making team understands the problem — they are working on the same issue, they have bought into the alternatives being considered, they have worked together to generate a set of discriminating criteria and they all contribute to the resolution. This builds accountability and buy-in.

People feel accountable for a decision if they play an active role in the process leading up to it. The choice that was made may not have been their first choice, but they contributed to its selection. Accountability is born from collaboration. You know you have collaboration when:

Everyone can paraphrase the issue to show that he or she understands it.
Everyone has a chance to contribute to solving the problem. This can be accomplished by participating in refining the issue, developing alternative solutions, building criteria, or contributing evaluation information.
Everyone has a chance to describe what is important to him or her.

Those who do not agree with the final decision will still be likely to support the team because they have been included in the decision-making process and appreciate the work required to reach a decision.

The terms "collaboration," "consensus," and "compromise" are often confused. Collaboration implies sharing information, consensus indicates general agreement, and compromise entails giving up a position. Compromise is like averaging or mixing too many colors of paint—the result is always brown. Consensus usually requires compromise and giving up beliefs or values.

Collaboration, on the other hand, attempts to build a shared vision, accountability, and buy-in, while some on the team may compromise their positions. Big boys and girls realize that their ideas will not always prevail, but through their contribution to the team, they are in fact an important part of the choices made.

Collaborative decision-making requires making requires more than setting up lines of communication. It requires sharing information and values in an environment that allows all voices and views to be heard. The Accord tool suite and the methods on which it is based support this need.

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