Facilitating with Ease!, 4th Edition

Chapter SevenEffective Decision Making

Helping groups make high-quality decisions is one of the most important functions of a facilitator. It's also one of the most difficult! There are a number of things that make decision making such a challenge:

• people may be trying to make a decision without having done their homework or being in possession of all of the important facts
• the key stakeholders or decision-makers may not be present
• individuals in the group may have a solution or position in mind that they spend their time advocating without being open to further input
• a few people may dominate while others hold their ideas back
• there may be real confusion about the purpose of the decision-making conversation or whether the group is empowered to decide the issue under discussion
• there may be no process in place to give the conversation structure, so the group engages in unstructured thrashing that's more emotional and subjective than it is factual and objective
• frustration may cause group members to give up their quest for a solution and resort to voting or simply moving on to the next topic without closure

To ensure that you're always facilitating high-quality decision processes, become aware of the traits of effective decision making:

• everyone is clear about the purpose of the decision-making conversation
• the group knows the extent of its power to make the decision in question ...