All 1 entries tagged Groupthink

Robust Decision Making– 1st Reflection

We unconsciously make hundreds of decisions every day either by ourselves or as a group, because it is our duty to cope with. I believe that making decisions by self is one of the differences between being mature and being a person who deals hard time with making decisions, so it can be seen as an indicator of self-development. Surely, sometimes the decisions that we’ve made might not right, although we aim to choose optimum ones. Actually, it is inevitable, because human is not a perfect creature; however, it does not mean that we cannot reduce the vulnerability of decisions.

In this module, we, as future leaders, have learned some tools and approaches to make right decisions. I think that it is too optimistic to say that now we are always going to make right decisions in every environment (at work, at home, etc.) until now; however, no doubt that these tools and methods will contribute a lot during deciding phase. For instance, “Tree Analysis” not only is one of the tools which helps making reasonable decisions, but also compares every option’s outcomes, such as cost and time, one by one by converting them to branches of trees. After visualization, the person or team who is/are going to make decision is able to choose the best option among others. To sum up, the tools like tree-analysis will simplify the complex situations and convert them to more understandable level than usual, so basically despite making any decisions for us they only show us a perspective of view from which we need to look.

In these two days, although some topics were duplicated, it gave me different point of view to evaluate the alternatives of decisions. Lastly, I want to talk about groupthink. Although being a group has beneficial points, there are some obstacles that reduce efficiency of making decisions in groupthink which are illusion of invulnerability, belief in group morality, rationalization, shared stereotypes, self-censorship, direct pressure, mind guards, and lastly illusion of unanimity. We need to avoid coming across these situations which I mentioned above in order to convert team effort to team success in the long-term, because these eight symptoms affect badly making decisions, and may lead running into bad outcomes afterwards.

: 12 Mar 2014 17:24 |  Tags: Decision Decision Making Groupthink Mbe Rdm Tree Analysis Wmg |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem