The collaborative decision making process
Posted by AxelPrice on June 2nd, 2014
Collaboration, broadly, refers to working together to perform tasks and achieve shared goals. In the business terminology, it refers to two or more individuals or business organizations working together to realize shared goals in co-operative ventures. Collaborative decision making refers to the free exchange of ideas for strategic solutions and profitable business decisions. Multiple ideas sourced from multiple sources generate the best accumulation of ideas, which facilitates better decision making. The decision making system that was developed by Robert Briggs, is called the Briggs' pattern of collaboration.
This system has six essential steps that help in collaborative decision making. First comes generate, which means generating more concepts as against fewer concepts. Second step is to clarify, meaning a switch from lesser understanding to greater mutual understanding about the concept. The third step is to organize, meaning a stronger understanding of the relationships among concepts. The fourth step is to reduce to focusing on a few worthy concepts rather than maintaining a focus on many concepts. The fifth step is to evaluate the benefit of the concepts towards achieving the specified goals. Lastly, the sixth step is a commitment among stakeholders about an action towards the stated goals.
The individuals in the decision making team must have certain attributes, to maximize the collaboration outputs. Individuals must be properly qualified, with clearly defined roles and high output processes. The decision making system is essential for promoting ideas, solutions and moving the decisions ahead. Team building tools and techniques are essential to identifying roles and choosing the most qualified individual for these roles.
While being a part of a collaborative decision making effort, negotiation skills should be top notch. Negotiations should take place throughout the process of decision making, and they are very useful in this process. Effective collaboration normally involves persons who are fully committed to the achievement of a goal as well as to completing the project successfully. Furthermore, consequences of the success as well as failure are equally shared by all. Collaboration can be called teamwork as well. Negotiations in this case would not be much of an issue, if the team consists of mature individuals’ intent on reaching some common goal.
It is often said that if the right individuals are brought together, with complete information, they would create marvelous strategies and provide excellent solutions in matters of pending decisions. If these individuals reach a consensus, that is shared agreement, on a topic, the decision will be a very well informed and polished. In response to collaborative decision making, the group enables itself to devise comprehensive, innovative and some of the most diverse ideas which consider the requirements of all team members or majority of them and support these requirements as well. Generally, many decisions that are taken by individuals are based around personal beliefs. People normally make decisions on the basis of some specific information gathered by them, which is usually screened by them using an internal criterion that they have. As such, the collaborative decisions are formed from the beliefs of the entire team. For making better decisions, one needs the involvement of all those who can be helpful in making quality decisions. Normally, people on whom the decision or the stakeholders can have its impact are included in this.
Generally, an effective decision making system is a result of collaborative decision making. This helps boost company’s decision making procedure.
