Elements of a social decision making culture

Social Decision Making is a collaborative culture, a distinctive way of thinking. Here are the nine elements to build on.

TRUST. Encourage people to share ideas, problems, and emotional intelligence.

Create an environment where people feel safe to share. Make sure employees know their suggestions will be taken seriously by peers and superiors. Support dialogue and let people know their questions and suggestions, also the hard and the uncomfortable ones are valued and taken seriously. Promote open communication and honor emotions in your decision making.

IDEATE. Build brainswarming into each decision.

To ensure finding good solutions, you need to have enough insight, understanding, and ideas. New and out of the box thinking is often relevant for complex and new situations. Give people enough time to think things through without being too much affected by the ideas of others. This is best done in silence. You should also solicit feedback from group members at key decision points to ensure vital information is never overlooked. A good way is to include brainswarming into each relevant decision making situation.

COLLABORATE. Share information and increase collaborative communication.

A collaborative culture is a distinctive way of thinking. Success requires collaboration — we can’t make it on our own in today’s world. Encourage important communication and collaboration. Create situations for open dialogue, and ensure the relevant communication is documented. You need to log the important collaboration and make it visible to the different stakeholders.

Document plans and key discussions to eliminate the “he said/she said” nature of spontaneous conversation. This will help create accountability and trust while providing audit trail and a base for evaluation and learning.

MOTIVATION. Resist the urge to direct.

Important reminder. Resist the urge to direct, but motivate instead. Learn from the successes of self-managing teams. If you are the boss, allow employees to contribute and tackle problems on their own before immediately jumping in with a solution. People become empowered and passionate about their work once they have a say, feel the meaning, and are able to engage.

ACCOUNTABILITY. Assign roles with RACI and adjust group sizes to create commitment.

CARE. Nurture, reuse, relate and summarize decisions.

Accountability comes from clear roles and empowerment. Assign roles, use RACI in your decision making, and include people early on in the process. Accountability is key to getting the most out of true collaboration. Assigning roles ensures everyone knows what is expected of them. RACI describes the roles of participation and is very useful in clarifying roles and responsibilities in decision making. Keep decision groups large enough to avoid tunnel vision but small enough to preserve a close-knit dynamic where everyone knows each other.

TIME. Timing is everything. Set due dates and use them in your decision making, execution, and tasks. Make the schedule visible for all.

Even though we are sharing a lot and working digitally — actually also due to that, it becomes necessary to also Nurture your digital collaboration, reuse, relate, and summarize your decisions. The digital work also needs caring.

No decision is born alone. Record and complete activities in decisions, reuse beneficial decisions as templates, and create connections to related decisions. Finally, group and classify related decisions in plans for bigger context. This creates a database of decisions to rely on in long-term planning.

LEARN. Learning is a process, and our decision making provides lots of opportunities to learn and improve.

Consider timing as a factor in decision making, is it the right time to decide? Outline the timeline and duration for the decision making. After reasonable incubation of the problem or idea at hand, it is time to set the timing for the progress of the decision making. The timetable creates the necessary sense of urgency among the stakeholders. Remember to agree when to evaluate the decision making, process, and outcome.

DIVERSIFY. Honor diversity of opinions and insights.

When involving more people, you gain more understanding. You should respect the different tones in the discussion, seek and honor the diversity of opinions and insights. Decide how to decide. Remember that your organizational culture and your own attitude decide how openly people want to express their opinions and on the other hand, are ready to be influenced.

Build documented evaluation into your decision making for understanding the outcome and impact. The best way to learn from poor decisions is to evaluate them and detect the places where you have errors in understanding and find new routes to overcome them in the future.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.