This is important...

How to improve group decision making

When it operates efficiently, a group's decision making will nearly always outperform the ability of any one of its members working on their own. This is especially the case if the group is formed of diverse members. One problem: groups rarely work efficiently.

A new meta-analysis (pdf) of 72 studies, involving 4,795 groups and over 17,000 individuals has shown that groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions...

I was just pondering something to this effect today. I'm working slowly through the idea of a GOTNV (Get out the Non-Voter) effort. My quandry is how to get nonvoters to vote. I think there is a long term dialougue and discussion that must go on between non voters and activists. We activists have to do a lot of listening. We also have to work on our ability to discuss issue that are important to non voters in a way that they feel like they understand.

I remember one day after I was on local tv talking politics with a conservative tv host (who happens to be running for govoner now) and one of my coworkers said, "I saw you on TV."

Oh yeah... how'd I do. Did I do alright?

"I dunno man I had no clue what you guys were talking about," he said with a shrug. Which blew my mind... he totally shut us out and just watched cause he knew me I guess. But it wasn't that complex to me.

We have to rengage nonvoters and I think creating productive discussions is one way that we must begin this process. I'm going to be trying to work through this idea and do something on this issue via DFA. I'm not sure what its going to look like but if you have thoughts or feedback email me at Jim.Nichols@gmail.com.

I digress... we have to start talking outside of our circle...

"...teams who talk more amongst themselves aren’t necessarily sharing useful information. Therefore, they’re not actually coming to a better result. Rather, it’s more important what the teams are talking about, than how much they are talking," said Mesmer-Magnus.

"Teams typically possess an informational advantage over individuals, enabling diverse personal experiences, cultural viewpoints, areas of specialization, and educational backgrounds to bring forth a rich pool of information on which to base decision alternatives and relevant criteria," the researchers concluded. "However, the current findings confirm that although sharing information is important to team outcomes, teams fail to share information when they most need to do so."

This is a side note, but important for Jim as he tends to be disorganized...

Another important factor was discussion structure. Groups particularly benefited from sharing unique information when they employed a highly structured, more focused method of discussion.

One of my biggest problems as Chair of the Henry County Democrats last year was my effectiveness. Part of the trouble was how scattered I can be, I do better with structure... and when it comes to decision making structure is key...