At work and home, we’re making decisions all the time; sometimes making simple decisions by ourselves and sometimes working with groups to make complex decisions with significant implications.
While a number of approaches have been developed to improve decision making many fallacies still exist including:
- Intelligent people make better decisions
- Groups make better decisions
The evidence suggests that highly intelligent people are more prone to “bias blind spots“, and while groups can make better decisions under the right conditions, “groupthink” often results in poor decision making.
The ideal approach for more complex decisions therefore involves groups with members that feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, challenging the thoughts of others and managing the emotional dynamics at play that can lead to groupthink; groups in which members trust each other.
The challenge is in getting teams to this point. I’ve been working with Gareth Marlow of eqsystems.io, and Cambridge Wireless to put together a short programme to help CEOs and leadership teams of growing companies work through the issues – both the rational, and the irrational – and build alignment and better decision making within their organisations. We’ve called it “Driving Huskies or Herding Cats?” and it will run over two afternoons in February and March 2018, at The Bradfield Centre in Cambridge.
To find out more or register interest in the programme, click here.