Meeting Management

Criteria Making

Remember the five alternatives produced in the problem-solving meeting? In the decision-making meeting, the goal is to decide which of these alternatives is the best of the five. Of course, the easiest way to do this is to put the five alternatives on an overhead, ask people to vote (majority rule), and that's that. The flaw here is not allowing for discussion and full understanding of the ramifications of each alternative—deliberation of these choices. So the end result here is not to race through this decision-making process just to get it done. It is to get everyone to consider each alternative carefully, giving special attention to the context of the situation, driving forces for and against, and who would be affected by each ...