Before we dive into the decision making process itself, let's discuss a little bit what we call the decision making metamodel. Or when do we need to make a group decision at all? In our example, the team was asked to make a group decision. And they were confused by that. They were thinking about involving an expert to take an expert decision, we might think, Is it really necessary to involve the entire team in a decision that can be taken by an expert alone? Isn't it too much waste?

We use the room yet and Iago model to identify the situations where we do need the team to make a decision. The model offers us a simple binary decision tree with a couple of questions. That guide us along making the meta decision of whether we need a group or an autocratic decision making process. Based on the answers of the questions, which we can discuss a bit later, we can arrive at three different styles of decision making. The first style is the autocratic decision making. In this case, the decision maker is one individual and he can use either the information he he or she already has, or the information that he or she collects individually from team members to make the decision alone.

The second case is when we make the consultative decision making. In this case, we can also use some information from the team members individually or even collect the team as such and discuss the decision collect information from the whole group together. Still, in the end, it's one person the decision maker. Taking the final decision alone is different than the third style of decision making the collaborative decision making. In this case, the decision maker is more a facilitator for the team, and he facilitates the discussion so that the team together can come to a consensus to assess which approach is most appropriate for situation. The model offers a few questions that support you to analyze the case.

The first question to ask is, is the quality of the decision important? Is it a vital decision for the team and your organization that requires significant attention Next, we ask is team commitment important to the decision? If the decision is not so important, and you don't need to ensure team is committed, you quickly arrive at the option of autocratic decision. Just take it and inform the team. In many organizations this might apply to less important everyday challenges for managers, such as on which specific date we shall start applying a new corporate guideline that has been introduced in the organization. If think commitment is important, we need to continue exploring.

The next important aspect is Do I have enough information to take the decision in case further information is needed. We go forward. We need to lose At the problem itself, too, is it well structured? Do we know what we need to solve? Exactly? In some situations when the answer is no, we might need to go to the team engaged in a group discussion to clarify the problem.

Giving teams support on a decision might be very important in some cases, if we consider, we will have the support of the team, we might still decide on our own taking some consultation with the team. However, if we are working in an environment of mu team empowerment, where people are used to taking part in decision making, we might need to go for a collaborative approach. A couple of more questions can further streamline our meta decision making does the team share organizational goals, if no, they might not be on a good basis to collaborate on a solution. Finally, we work with people and they have different viewpoints and opinions that might generate tension and conflict. If we believe conflict is likely to occur, we need to look for a team centric rather than autocratic approach. So this was the room yet on Iago model.

Now here is the challenge to you. Just go out and try to apply it to the next decision making challenge that you have good luck