Psychology Research Misses the Reasons for Decision Making Teams

I am reading “Straight Choices: The Psychology of Decision Making” by Benjamin Newell, David Lagnado and David Shanks (Psychology Press 2006). It is a very good summary of decision making from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology. It makes some muddy topics very clear. However, it totally fails in Chapter 14, Group Decision Making. This isn’t the authors’ fault – all work on team or group decision-making misses the main points. I will get to these in a moment.

First, some background. I attempted to address this topic in Chapter 5 of “Making Robust Decisions”, cleverly titled “Teams Don’t Make Decisions, But…” The title reflects the problem with the topic. In business and technology there is always one person who signs off on a project to move it forward. This manager is the ultimate “decision maker”. But, if this person is good at what they do, for complex problems they have a team that is studying the problem and advising them about what choice to make. On this team, some of the people know about some of the information, they all have different fields of expertise and knowledge. For complex problems, no one person can know all about all of the important features of all the alternatives. Further, they bring a range of viewpoints about what is important.

So, is the manager the decision maker or the team? Depends how you draw the line around the term “decision”. If it is an event, then the manager is the decision maker. If decision-making is a process, then it is the team. I see decision-making as a process. The cognitive psychologists seem to see a decision as the event.

In “Straight Choices”, the authors summarize research on group decision making. All of the studies they sight are for very simple problems, not for problems with distributed knowledge. In other words, the toy problems the psychologists have used to study teams do not reflect what happens in business and technology. They tend to focus on the "right" answer to simple problems with a known solution. This why Chapter 14 was such a let down.

From my reading, the two main reasons to use a team are:

1. Obtain the best information when no one person can know all that is needed to be known
2. Build stakeholder buy-in and accountability

These goals mean that you need to:

1. Build an environment and a team strategy that fosters communication of the right information and buy-in
2. Suppress the effect of differences in cognitive styles (“suppress” is not the right word, but you want to level the playing field so the alphas don’t dominate, the closers don’t stop things too soon, the wafflers don’t lead to team paralysis and so forth.)
3. Guard against group think
4. Help build a shared understanding

Of the six topics itemized above, Chapter 14 only addresses Group Think. It comes close to talking about a shared understanding when it discusses consensus, but consensus is not important for a decision buy-in. (Quoting Margaret Thatcher, "To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects."). The two main goals are never discussed. It seems the cognitive research has focused on getting the “right” answers to toy problems. Most real decisions have no right answer, so the psychologists are asking the wrong questions.

In the authors’ defense, they end the chapter with “Research on group decision making is both appealing and frustrating”. In spite of this frustration, decisions are made by teams every day and I believe the key to robust team decisions is in the six items listed above. These are discussed at length in Making Robust Decisions. I just wish there was more good research on each of them so you don’t have to take my word for it.

Decision making maturity

I just returned from an ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) meeting in NYC. During my time there I discussed the concept of decision making maturity with three different groups and thought it worth writing about. Best to do in context with my career.

When I was trained as an engineer, I focused on how components and assemblies were shaped, manufactured and functioned. This element-centric view of the world is not at all unique to engineers. Businesses focus on documents, e.g. POs, recepts, memos, contracts, etc)

By the 1980s I became fascinated with the process of developing the elements. This process-centric view is recent. Sure engineers have studied and developed chemical and manufacturing processes for years, but the concept of product design processes and business processes is recent. As evidence of this, in 1990, I wrote an engineering text book about how to progress from customer need to produced product. I debated long and hard about what to title it. I finally landed on "The Mechanical Design Process", a title that proved to be right on the mark (note that its 4th edition will be out in January 2009). The use of the word "process" in the title was problematic because it was only beginning to be used to discuss product evolution.

In the early 1990s my research was about how to capture and manage the evolution of products, the rationale for form and function. This was process-centric, but not getting anywhere. In about 1995, it dawned on me that "design is the evolution of information, punctuated by decisions". That started me on a decision-centric view of the business and technical worlds.

My maturity from element through process to decision is being taken by industry. While in NYC I met with a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) guru. PLM grew out of CAD (Computer Aided Design) which was all about parts and assemblies - element-centric. PLmis currently focused on the process, i.e. the lifecycle of products. I have been trying to sell decision-centric capabilities into PLM since 2001 with no success. The push back has always been "we aren't ready for that yet" and they weren't. Now there is the beginning of interest. The product development industry is maturing through process to realize that business and technology progress is punctuated by decisions and it is the quality of those decisions that determine the product and business success.

Further, when I talked about this decision-centric view of the world five years ago to industires, audiences had no idea what I was talking about. Now I get good awareness and it is building. There is yet hope for "evolution punctuated by decisions".