Numbers aren't the only culprit when group decisions go wrong
Source: HR Daily (16.07.2025) - Subscription service
It's true that including more voices can lead to better workforce strategies, but the quality of group decision-making is being undermined by factors at both the macro and micro level, according to an expert facilitator.
The fact many organisations are making their decision-making processes more inclusive is a good thing, says The Change Company director Paul Donovan.
"There is this awareness that it's better if we're all involved in this decision somehow, because it will be a richer discussion, and we all need to buy in," he says.
However, involving bigger or more diverse groups doesn't necessarily lead to better decisions, he tells HR Daily. This is playing out across Australia, with employees at all levels frustrated by meetings that go nowhere.
How to design useful decision-making conversations is barely talked about anywhere, but it's frankly something most managers could be applying almost every day.
Paul Donovan
One reason why group decision-making is failing is the increasing amount of stress in workplaces, Donovan says.
"In that context, groups become less functional in making decisions. We tend to descend to more primitive aspects of operating, individually and collectively, in the context of stress. And that really damages the quality of decision making."
The second issue is that "democracy is declining".
"We're in a context of a smaller and smaller amount of democracy on earth... and organisations are mirroring this by becoming increasingly centred in their power decisions."
But perhaps most importantly, Donovan says, there's the fact that, "we haven't, after all these decades, successfully transferred knowledge to the everyday manager on how to structure and run decision-making processes".
"It amazes me," he says, "but organisations still haven't truly picked up how to collaboratively make decisions".
What's going wrong?
When an organisation decides it wants to develop a strategy collaboratively, or to utilise and reflect more viewpoints, and more diverse perspectives, the main obstacle is that it simply doesn't know how to do so, Donovan says.
A common approach is to hold a meeting and invite a diverse cohort. But when this fails to produce useful outcomes, leaders tend to place the blame on the number of people involved.
"That is a problematic response to the problem," Donovan says. Sometimes there are too many people in a meeting, but often, the real issue is the leader's inability to run it in a way that gives everyone present a voice, and puts those voices to constructive use.
"[Leaders] don't know how to design – actually architect – the conversation with appropriate questions, sequenced in a useful way... because this knowledge is just not taught," he says.
"It's not taught in any MBAs... How to design useful decision-making conversations is barely talked about anywhere, but it's frankly something which your everyday manager could be applying almost every day."
Avoiding common mistakes
As a result, groups that come together to make decisions tend to repeat the same mistakes, Donovan says.
One is that they "circle" information-sharing as a group, without ever shifting into decision-making mode. This often prompts someone with a degree of seniority to lose patience and say, "Okay, maybe we should just do this", and the group accepts the decision because of the person's rank.
This is "a terrible process" that bypasses several useful steps, Donovan says.
"Often decisions like that experience a significant lack of buy-in, and bosses become frustrated when, three weeks later, there's so little action in this space. But it's because the meeting never built enough generative tension, creative tension, around the actions that issued from it."
Alternatively, if there's not someone who proposes a decision, conversations might circle without ever resulting in one.
"That's a significant source of frustration, and that happens all the time as well; that's very, very, very common," Donovan says.
Another major cause of failed meetings, which he has seen play out "over and over", happens when different people in the meeting are all speaking at "different stages".
"In the absence of anyone really knowing anything much about how to guide groups and design decision-making processes, everyone just shoots from the hip," Donovan explains.
"Some people are much more orientated to talk about actions, so they're just going straight into actions. Others are more likely to want to talk about what the actual problem is, so they start doing that. Others like to brainstorm and generate options for actions straight away, and others like to analyse... But all of that's happening simultaneously."
Eventually, as in the scenarios above, the meeting ends with everyone frustrated and exasperated, and no decision, or a leader makes a call independently of the group.
The problem here is that the leader hasn't considered a crucial question: "How do we diverge before we converge?" Donovan says.
"That is the fundamental underlying structure of good group decision-making, and it's hardly ever understood by groups and hardly ever enacted," he says.
In a further article, Donovan sets out a framework for effective group decision-making, using the example of a meeting about falling employee engagement scores. Premium members can click through to read it, or upgrade your basic subscription here for access.
