Well welcome back again.

We're discussing problem solving and

decision making, brought to you by the University of
California, Irvine, and I'm Rob Stone. This is module three, lecture one. And in
this module, we're going to
talk about group decision making. In groups, we have to make decisions, and
there are a number of ways to do that. And depending on the kind
of decision you're making, then you need to use different methods for
doing that along the way. We're going to talk about
decision making in groups, rather than individual decision making. Although some of
these will actually be
ways to make decisions by one person. Common methods that
we're going to discuss. We can make decision by majority. We can make decision by
minority. We can make decision by an expert. We can have an authority figure,
somebody that just makes the decision, for the group,
with no input from the group at all. We can have an authority figure that will
make the decision for the group, but there will be input from the group
before that decision is ever made. And then we can have a group
decision called a consensus. And many of us have heard this term and
have some idea what it's all about. We'll try to clarify that
in just a little bit. It can be done wrong, done badly,
people can have confusion about it, or it can be done very well and be a very
good group decision making method. So we'll talk about all six of these. First one,
let's talk about majority decision making. So what's majority
decision making all about? There's some advantages to this. It's familiar, it's
fast,
many of us know how to do it, and we've known how to do this since we can
remember, when we were little bitty kids. Majority decision-making
is usually a vote. And you say, okay,
how many think we should do A? How many think we should do B? Okay, looks like A
wins that's what
we're gonna do, off we go to do that. So can we do it? Yeah. Know how to do it?
Yeah. Fast, easy? Yeah, all that stuff. There's some disadvantages. First of all,
people may not all buy into this thing. And if we're in a team,
we could leave some of our team behind. We're working in some kind of a group,
leave some of the group back behind. Because the group has done a majority
vote, that wasn't what these people agreed to, part of the group moves forward,
the rest of the group does not. We may end up, because of that, with the results of
this decision
not being effectively implemented. So some people may say, you know,
that just doesn't work. I can't go along with that,
so I'm not going to. And I'm not going to help implement this. I'm not going to be
involved in anything
else the rest of this group does. I'm just completely finished. So what we've done
with majority vote
a lot of the time is divide the group right in half. We have 51% of the group
happy,
ready to move forward. We have the rest of the group not, and if
we need this whole group to move forward together, this is not a good
way to go about doing things. So, out of all the decision-making
methods we're going to examine, never use majority
decision-making in a group. You want this group to
move forward together? Throw that one out,
scratch it off your list. You'll go, but
that's how we do it all the time! Well, okay, fine, but when you're working
with a group of people, you want everybody to work together, move forward together,
scratch that off the list. Minority decision making,
what's that all about? There are some advantages to
minority decision making. An individual or small group of people
are going to go off to do something that is part of the work the whole
group is responsible for. But the whole group doesn't have
to go off and do everything. We have a group of people put together,
because this person or this small group, they're the experts in
this one thing that our group has to do. They're the best ones to do that. They
know more about that than
anybody else in the group. There's another thing
over here we have to do. And there's somebody different. An individual or a small
group of people, and they're the experts on that part of
the work we have to do in this group. The whole group is responsible together
for all of the work we have to do, but we don't have to all go off and
do all the work together. If an organization were run like that, you
have 300 people walking over here to do this and
300 people walking over to do that and 300 people walking over to do this,
instead of 10 people doing that, 5 people doing that, 6 people doing this,
3 people doing that, 1 person doing that, and getting all
those things done all at the same time. The whole group doesn't have to go
always all together and do everything. So that means we have small groups of
people or individuals that go off and do work for the group. Sometimes, when
they're
out there doing that work, they need to make some decisions. We just need to be
clear with those
people when we send them off to do some of this work. What decisions can they
actually make? So now, we can actually have
people out doing different things. The group can do a lot of different
things all at the same time, and some people are going to have to make
some decisions for the entire group. It allows us to get a lot of
things done concurrently. We don't have to all do
everything all together. We need to make sure we
have clear guidelines for this minority group out
here making the decisions. Otherwise, they may do some things that we really don't
want to have
done in our organization. Clear guidelines on how we're going to, how these people
can make
decisions along the way. The parameters they can stay within. Disadvantages, well,
there's gonna be
some group members who don't have any involvement in making these decisions.
Sometimes there's not
the buy in that we need. Clear guidelines, agreement that the minority is
empowered to make these decisions. So if we're gonna have some
people that say, well, I wasn't involved in that decision. We've had that
discussion already. We had it upfront, before we ever even
turned our minority group loose to go do things, and
make decisions along the way. We had that discussion. We don't need to have
that discussion again. We've agreed, okay, within these
parameters, that group can make decisions. We also have another way to
make decisions, an expert. Sometimes, we don't really know
what to do to make a decision. We don't have the information. An expert does. We
bring an expert in from the outside
to make the decision for us. Some advantages to this thing, fast, it's
easy, and a lot of times we get a much more accurate decision, or much better
decision that we can make on our own, simply because we don't have
the information to make the decision. Disadvantages, again, there's nobody
in our group involved in this. Therefore, the decision, and our buy in to the
decision, is only as
strong as our trust in that expert. If we don't have much
trust in that expert, much faith in that expert,
in their expertise, their ability to make a good decision,
we're gonna have less buy in. If we really think, yeah that's the person
that really can make the decision for us, wonderful, let's move
forward with that decision. So, have the right expert. Examples. Medical and health
things, sometimes we don't have the information
to make good medical decisions. We have to be involved in our own health
and medical decisions at some point. We have to make the final
decisions about things. But we need some experts along the way
to give us a lot of good information and sometimes to make some of
the key decisions along the way, financial decisions. Sometimes in our household we
may have the parents in the household that will
finally make the financial decisions. We may get some input
from the whole family, but we've got some experts here
that really know about the money. Like, maybe mom really knows a lot
about what to do with the money and how this should be handled. So mom makes a lot
of the financial
decisions in the family, that may be true in organizations. A lot of people working
in the organization, they have no clue what's going on with
money that affects the bottom line of the organization. They know their piece in
doing
the work in the organization, that they know somehow has something to
do with affecting the bottom line, but they don't know all
the financial issues and how to make decisions about key
financial items along the way. And there are experts in
the organization that do know that. Legal decisions. Sometimes, there are just
experts
that make the legal decisions. This is what the law says. This is what we have to
do. There are organizational decisions that
are made by experts in the organization, other kinds of organizational decisions.
Sometimes there are people out in
the organization that have no clue what to do in a certain situation,
not because they're not smart enough, they don't have all the information
available to them to make a good decision. There are people who do and they make
the
decisions, the experts in these things. We're gonna look at
authority with no input. Authority with no input is when
we have an authority figure that says this is the decision. There's no input from
anybody in the group at all. There's some advantages to this. It's fast. It's
binding. This is an authority in the organization. Somehow in authority in that
group,
it says this is what we're going to do. There are some disadvantages to this. Buy-
in and support. Again, people were not involved in this,
so their buy-in and support are going to be proportional to the trust that
they have in this authority figure. Alexander the Great. All of the people that
Alexander
the Great led would go anywhere and do anything for him. Lord Nelson, who was a
famous
admiral in the British navy. We're going to start over with that. Authority with no
input,
there's some disadvantages. The buy-in and
support are proportional to the trust and a belief that we have in
that authority figure. Alexander the Great for
example, led his army, led countries, led the world and
everybody followed him, and he was a very beloved leader by the people
that he was leading forward. He started that when he was 12 years old. He did some
things that were amazing,
outstanding. People saw, oh, this is a great leader. At 12 years old,
his father brought him aside and said, son I'm going to turn my kingdom over
to you at a certain time in your life, and there's a problem with that because
my kingdom is not big enough for you. You're a strong enough,
good enough leader, that the world is the only thing that
will ever be big enough for you. We have Alexander the Great
as a great leader, there's a number of great leaders,
great examples throughout history. Lord Nelson, from the British Navy,
an amazing leader. Both of these leaders,
Alexander the Great, Nelson, they both took very good
care of the people that they lead. Nelson was such a good leader,
that when he was killed in battle, the Admiral of the Fleet sent
a signal to Nelson's ship and told his men to send Nelson's
body over to the Admiral's ship, because he was going to
take it back to England. And Nelson's whole crew
pulled out their cannons, aimed them at the other ships and
said no, we're taking them back. He's our leader,
we're taking him back to England. And they completely disobeyed all
the orders that they were given and they took Nelson's body back to England. He was
a beloved leader again,
he took good care of people. A lot of times, we'll have good
leaders that they are good leaders and there's a lot of buy-in and support for what
they're doing because they are really
looking out for the whole group. We have other times when
we have some leaders, they're not looking out for
the whole group. They're looking out for themselves. And so
you can all think of people like that. And they make decisions
that nobody cares about, nobody buys into,
because they don't care about the group. They care about themselves. So, the belief
and
trust we have in the authority figure has a whole lot to do with
authority with no input.