Decision support interventions
By Etiënne Rouwette and Alberto Franco. Originally published on the Integration and Implementation Insights blog.
What are interventions to support team decision making? And how can interventions enable team decision making to become a rigorous, transparent and defensible process?
Interventions are procedures designed to improve a decision making process. Within the content of team decision making, an intervention is comprised of designed facilitated activities carried out in order to help a team achieve its goals. Team goals include generating a better and shared understanding of a situation of interest or concern, producing a recommendation on how to respond to the situation, or simply deciding what to do next regarding the situation.
Because team members are likely to have different views and goals regarding the situation, facilitation is central to an intervention. Specifically, facilitated activities are designed to encourage the active participation of team members in discussions, so that a mutual understanding within the team can be achieved. In addition, these activities also play a critical role in fostering the development of integrative solutions that create a sense of shared responsibility for their implementation.
Interventions enable team members to actively engage in divergent and convergent thinking processes. Broadly, the former involves a process of generating ideas by building on each other’s contributions. For example, surfacing team members’ different perspectives on the situation of concern requires divergent thinking. This process is also used in articulating the objectives that team members wish to realise in a situation, as well as generating creative and feasible alternatives for action.
On the other hand, convergent thinking refers to the process of organising the set of ideas and information generated by divergent thinking, and transforming it into a small set, where the resulting set may consist of ideas of a higher order, ideas typical for a category, or central ideas. Thus, a convergent thinking process will, for instance, consolidate the best ideas into a set of decision options, which would then be evaluated against a prioritised set of objectives.
Here we briefly describe two simple and four more advanced interventions developed to support divergent thinking, convergent thinking, or both.
Two simple interventions
1. Brainstorming and nominal group technique
Brainstorming is a well-known approach that encourages divergent thinking within a team. The aim is to note down all ideas that may be of interest when thinking about the decision situation at hand, in order to prevent missing anything that might be considered important. It aims to counter a number of human tendencies that stifle creativity, including a tendency to evaluate (often focused on negative aspects), and a focus on habits, self-discouragement, and timidity. Brainstorming also has two obvious limitations:
- the production of long lists of mostly unconnected ideas does not capture the relations between the different elements comprising the situation (ie., its content)
- brainstorming can make the team suffer process losses, such as causing some team members to engage in unhelpful behaviours such as sitting back and waiting for others to complete the task (‘freeriding’), or stopping searching for novel ideas because of the need to attend to what others are saying (‘production blocking’).
The nominal group technique has been developed as an alternative to brainstorming. In essence team members individually record their ideas and then present them to the group one idea per person at a time. New ideas can still be generated and added during the process. Ideas are then voted on at the end. Research shows that the number and quality of ideas generated in a nominal group technique group are higher than in a brainstorming group. For more information about nominal group technique, including making it more accessible to participants living with various disabilities, see the i2Insights contribution by Jason Olsen.
2. Clustering and prioritising
Creative, divergent phases supported by brainstorming, nominal group technique and similar methods are usually followed by a phase of convergence. Simple interventions that support convergence involve classifying ideas using formal taxonomies or typologies, or simply clustering (ie., grouping) similar ideas. Following divergence and convergence, teams often wish to prioritise results in one way or another. In essence, this involves ordering ideas on a single criterion, such as importance, feasibility, urgency, effort, and so forth.
Four more advanced interventions
There are situations comprising many issues or problems that are interconnected, and involving many stakeholders with multiple and competing interests. These features make it difficult for the team to choose where to focus. And even if a clear focus is set, proposed solutions may produce unintended consequences due to uncertainty around developments in the situation, or the actions and reactions of other parties. These situations call for more advanced interventions.
1. Group model building: understanding complex behaviour
The group model building approach was developed primarily for examining the performance of a ‘system’ by looking at the system’s past behaviour. The system under study is one that encapsulates the issue or problem that needs to be understood. A visual model of the system is built with the relevant stakeholders and used as a learning tool to explain past performance by separating causes from symptoms.
2. Group causal mapping: clarifying issues, understanding purpose and developing options
Developed within the ‘soft’ operational research tradition, group causal mapping is an approach that supports exploration of the complexity of the issues constituting the entire decision space as perceived by the team. By closely examining means–ends relationships between issues that demand attention from the perspective of team members, implied goals and options emerge during team discussions, which then inform the prioritisation of issues, goals, and subsequently, actions.
3. Decision conferencing: articulating value preferences and trade-offs
Belonging to the family of multi-criteria decision analysis approaches, decision conferencing is an intervention approach concerned with the evaluation of options or prioritisation of portfolios of options against multiple decision criteria. The approach involves a process of structuring the objectives, options, preferences, and trade-offs that are relevant to the decision situation at hand.
4. Participatory scenario development: thinking about the future
Participatory scenario development starts by eliciting ideas and data about the future from team members, and then integrating the collated information into one or more narratives. Different possible futures, or scenarios, are captured in these narratives. Team members can then place themselves in the scenarios to gain a better appreciation of what seems appropriate in terms of actions that can be taken in the present. A detailed description of participatory scenario planning by Maike Hamann and colleagues is available in their i2Insights contribution.
All the approaches above represent alternative ways of dealing with situation-relevant information. Teams that use group model building and group causal mapping spend most of their time clarifying the causal relations between different aspects of the situation. Participatory scenario development approaches structure information in another way, by writing a story on what a future world would look like. Decision conferencing also looks at the future, but not as a possible context that we might find ourselves in, but as the anticipated consequences of decisions we might make now.
Concluding questions
What are your experiences with interventions to support team decision making? Do you have examples to share using the procedures outlined above? Are there other designed facilitated activities that you would recommend?
To find out more:
Rouwette, E. A. J. A. and Franco, L. A. (2024). Engaged Decision Making: From Team Knowledge to Team Decisions. 1st edition. Routledge: New York, United States of America. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003404200
This i2Insights contribution is an extract, often verbatim, from Chapter 3, which also contains the relevant references.
Biographies:
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Etiënne A. J. A. Rouwette is a professor of research and intervention methodology at the Nijmegen School of Management at Radboud University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on cognition and communication in group decision support, applying facilitated modelling in domains such as healthcare, sustainability, and security, among others. |
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L. Alberto Franco is a professor of decision sciences at the University of Bristol Business School, UK. His main research interests are centred on the study of group decision support practice, with special attention to evaluating how cognition and behaviour affect, and are affected by, the use of decision aids and facilitated processes. |
Article source: Decision support interventions. Republished by permission.
Header image source: iStock.
