Organisational Behaviour #7 - Decision Making and Creativity

[samvara]

This was fun and very relevant, I found myself constantly thinking about how we make decisions in AD&T and looking at how the class made decisions in our group activities.

We also had our 3rd group test, individual score was 70% and group score was 90% - yay team! I should have used the hedging system and split two of my choices - would have picked up half marks for them.

After the test we got split into groups of seven and given a piece of wood with a nail in it and 12 more nails held together with an elastic band (that we were not allowed to use in the actual challenge). The task was to balance all the loose nails on the head of the standing nail - lecturer said not many teams get the solution, gave us 10 minutes to play then continued the seminar.



The Rational Choice Decision Process we looked at is not the one I've linked to but it does have some similar ground. We talked about this initially so we could use it to contrast what we actually do to what we think we do. This model assumes we are primarily rational beings and that we go through a process where we:

1. Identify problem or opportunity
2. Choose the best decision process
3. Develop alternative solutions
4. Choose the best alternative
5. Implement the selected alternative
6. Evaluate the decision outcome -> return to step 1

In real life, most of us go through a process that looks more like Sam's Giant Ball of Angst.

Problem Identification is difficult, problems don't come pre-announced or pre-defined and we identify them through both logical and emotional means, we receive them distorted by other's perceptual biases, filter them through our existing mental models, block out information that is negative or threatening to us, don't always diagnose problems correctly, jump to conclusions prematurely and often try to apply solutions we already know to new problems (when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

Things wot we can do to fix that are:

1. Be aware of or perceptual and diagnostic limitations (I don't want to listen to negative people *cough* voices of reason :p, I like movement towards goals and get frustrated with drawn out decision making)
2. Recognise how our mental models restrict our understanding (I'm an analyst and a project manager, I think in terms of process and outcomes)
3. Consider other perspectives (I need to make sure I get input from technical, non-technical, human-relations etc)
4. Listen to others (what do my colleagues think, how do they perceive the situation)

Making Choices is also difficult; our goals are often ambiguous, conflicting and come without overall agreement. We can only process a limited amount of information at a time, and we process sequentially (which means we don't look at everything at the same time, we pick our way through it). We might think we have objective standards but we tend to evaluate against an implicit favourite - something we were attracted to early on that maybe isn't an ideal benchmark. We hope we have good quality information but it becomes distorted by our own perceptual biases and due to pressures, we aim for the ideal solution (decision objective) but often settle for the 'good enough' choice (satificing).

Emotions and Making Choices: we assign emotional reactions to things automatically, our moods and emotions affect our decision making process. This is not necessarily a bad thing, listening to our emotions aids us in our decision making process. I have learned to never make life changing decisions when overtired, underfed and in need a good hot shower. Brushing my teeth also has a profound affect on my ability to cope when things are particularly fragile.

Intuition and Decision Making: To be honest, this sounded more like 'intuition' is now a cool word for 'gut reflex' except intuition is when you were right and gut reflex was just you going off what your emotional thermometer was reading. It could be argued that intuition is when you're actually using your vast knowledge and experience (just very fast), and gut reaction is when you're having an emotional reaction that may or may not be justified but I imagine it's pretty hard to tell them apart. Presumably after the fact you'd be able to trace your intuition back to what caused you to make that decision.

Things wot we can do to fix that are::

1. Systematically evaluate alternatives (yes, give even the ones you don't like some air time)
2. Balance emotions and rational influences (know thyself)
3. Scenario planning (imagine possible future uses/outcomes)

Escalation of Commitment: I give you Concorde, a fantasy of avionics so powerful that minor details like lack of economic feasibility took the backseat to developing the dream (I was in love with it too). This is where, for whatever reasons, it looks like it would hurt more to stop then to keep going and hoping for a miracle. Sometimes that pain is measured in the egos of leaders or in cutting losses in the face of hypothetical gains. Causes of commitment escalation:

1. Self-justification (but it was a brilliant idea - and it was mine)
2. Prospect theory effect (tendency to think existing loss is not as bad as potential gains are good - lottery)
3. Perceptual blinders (what bad news?)
4. Closing costs (it will cost HOW much to shut down?)

I used to face this all the time when Rogaining - knowing how much time to allocate to trying to get an individual control before accepting you've missed it and moving on is critical, as is knowing when you're too injured to keep going. Our bext route planning involved having proposed bail routes (injuries), knowing what we could cut from the plan if we were short on time (milestones) and lots of even shorter term indicators so we didn't waste time (goals & milestones) faffing about in a 'broad gully' going 'I'm sure it's here somewhere' (darn those broad gullies). We improved our scores considerably when we adopted a '5 mins then we re-evaluate' process.

About this point my team got the nail problem and were horribly smug about it. Well I was very smug! We tried a large amount of solutions, gave everyone who wanted to try anything a shot and were passing diagrams around quietly during the presentation which finally culminated in a solution and a large block of chocolate which we then ate ;)

Evaluating decisions can be improved by:

1. separating decision choosers from evaluators (which seems obvious, don't audit yourself)
2. establish 'bail' points (know when you're going to quit *before* you start)
3. involve several people in the evaluation process (spread the knowledge, experience and responsibility around)

Employee involvement in decision making is pretty varied; there are different levels and forms of involvement. Possible benefits are better problem identification, more and better solutions generated, increased likelihood of making the best choice and higher commitment to decisions once they have been made. This works best when the problem is new and complex (high level of investment and creative energy), when employees have relevant knowledge that may not be available to the leader (and let's face it, employees always will), when employee commitment is important to success, and where there is risk of conflict (I gotta go look that one up because I don't fully understand it)

Creativity is defined as developing an original product, service or idea that makes a socially recognised contribution so I hope you feel good about yourself now :p The characteristics of creative people are:

1. Above average intelligence
2. Persistence
3. Relevant knowledge and experience
4. Inventive thinking style

Creative work environments:

• Have a learning orientation, they encourage experimentation and tolerate mistakes
• Offer intrinsically motivating work, significant, high autonomy, feedback
• Practice open communication and have sufficient resources
• Manage team competition and time pressure effectively (complex matrix of effects on creativity)

Things we can do to further enhance creativity include redefining the problem (review, explore), play (storytelling, scenarios) and cross-pollination (I like the idea of doing this with little brushes but acknowledge it will probably involve sitting around in a meeting chatting to other teams, information sessions and working groups).

We talked about Edward de Bono and his six thinking hats - my mother was keen in him when I was little so I've read some of his stuff on lateral thinking and teh hats which is very cute and quite useful - if only for helping you identify that what you do habitually is only one tool in a positive arsenal ;)

We then broke to do the Plane Crash Survival game in our fabulous group of seven. I chose not to widely advertise that I've done it several times now (and didn't blog my last team building excursion it seems. Go DW search!) and relied on my wits and arguments to try and convince people of  my choices. Could not budge the group on the 'stay or go' issue and we all probably died in the wilderness despite my flailing about hypothermia, injuries and needing to stay put and be rescued. *grins* It was good fun! I quite like the scenario where the boys insist on leaving, carry the girls and then we eat them when they die. We did however, rank our items very well despite the compass and steel wool being completely out of place and came in with an overall score of 22 (team score vs expert score) which means if we *had* stayed put we may have lived - this won us more chocolate which I ended up taking to work and feeding to the test team who also appreciated it.

We talked about how to overcome involvement challenges, how collectivist and low power-distance cultures are more inclined to work together, how managers can be trained to be facilitators and how other stressors (employee and union resistance) can be addressed through developing trust and involvement.

Blocks to Creative Teamwork include social loafing (slacking off socially or mentally), conformity (desire for acceptance lowering creativity of team), production blocking (not getting time to speak and be heard), groupthink (where groups aim for consensus, not variety of solutions), group polarisation (where teams sometimes make more extreme decisions than individuals), downward norm setting (where the lowest performer in the team sets the bar), time constraints (where teams take longer to make decisions) and evaluation apprehension (where you believe people are SILENTLY JUDGING YOU and do not contribute your best ideas - or even your wacky ones).

...and then we stopped - next week: Teams!

Comments

[ungemmed]

I really like reading your writeups! They make me want to take the class you're taking, which given the subject area is high praise...

(I was badly burned recently by an IT in Business course that used words like "visioning" all the time. The back of the textbook had a glossary of popular countries for outsourcing; they were sorted by cost, political instability, and average English proficiency.)

[samvara]

Yay! I'm finding it very energising, the classes are easy to focus in and leave me trying to find strategies for winding down enough to sleep - which given we finish at 9pm on a work night is an issue!


I'm hoping I'll have the same reaction to the more finance oriented units later in the course...