Dynamics of Group Decision Making

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From Vol. II, Issue 2 of Imagine! with thanks to the ADR Diversity Blog for the link!

when the group is confronted with an issue that their accepted wisdom cannot address, then they begin to talk. They start to look at the topic from many different perspectives. There are complaints and suggestions, discussion of what has been tried and failed, arguments about alternative ways to pose the questions, and so on.

Kaner calls this process the "Divergent Zone", where the group diverges from the initial question in order to address it fully. After a while, so much has surfaced that some in the group begin to get nervous. There can be calls for "process check" and the facilitator may wonder if things have gotten out of hand.

When people start to think about all of what they have said, it just doesn't seem likely they will be able to wrap it up. This, says Sam Kaner, could be called the "Groan Zone", in which the group really has to grapple with all the aspects of the problem, all the parties involved, and so on. Here is where workshops can easily collapse, because facilitator and group lose their nerve.

The challenge is to know when and how to converge -- to bring the many themes and concerns together into an agreement that the group can discuss. This process of pulling a wide variety of points towards a decison point Kaner names the "Convergent Zone". Here the group carefully seeks a way to formulate what has to be decided.

Finally, the group grapples with the decision as they have agreed to state it. It can be as simple as yes / no or as complex as pages of detail. This phase of making the agreement is the "Closure Zone".

What Sam Kaner does for us here is to offer a way of seeing a meeting in which new material arises, differences are discussed and conflict occurs, not as some aberration to be deplored, but in fact a normal, manageable process. The group can anticipate when and why it will be difficult. Naturally no clear process can guarantee a quality outcome, but it can indeed free a group from fear of wasting their time and energy in pointless struggle.