How Do You Make Better Inclusive and Efficient Group Decisions?
There are numerous documented merits of group decision making (here’s one, and another one), aside from the reality that most of our work today requires collaboration and decisions made in groups. From your elementary school project to climbing the professional ladder, enjoying and being good at teamwork is lauded as a necessary skill for you to be a desirable candidate at interviews. And yet teamwork isn’t a skill you can hone alone or get better at by yourself. It’s also riddled with annoying, frustrating and persistent problems. There’s always that free rider in a team whose slack you’ll have to pick up, feeling both personally responsible and resentful. It doesn’t look like we’ll be going away from teamwork anytime soon (and for good reason), so what if we tried to isolate and solve some of the most identifiable and irritating problems with group decision making through better design and technology?
Enter Defora, a collaborative decision making platform that aims to make group decision making not only easier but enjoyable and interesting. Defora, which stands for Deliberative Decision Making Forums For All, was conceived out of two brilliant bursts of inspiration — one, the idea that creating an environment where people could fairly and honestly engage with each other could help us overcome some common challenges to working together every day. Second, the belief that sophisticated privacy technology should have a better role to play in our services and platforms today, especially when it comes to data accessibility and ownership. Although the collaborative app market is big and no doubt you already use a minimum of three in your daily and professional lives, there is a surprising vacuum when it comes to decision making apps. Coordination and logistics? Check. Collaborative writing of reports and sharing files? Check. Streamlining group members’ activities toward a decisive group result? Not really.
The beta version of Defora will launch soon, and we had our first official showcase in Geneva, Switzerland on November 12, at Campus Biotech. The showcase was included in a broader theme of blockchain and democracy and we saw audience members from major international organizations, cyber specialists, local government and green financing. The reception was received positively with enthusiasm about the potential Defora presented to impact organizational cultures and governance positively, with many inquiring about the possibility of integrations and expressing interest in our patented privacy technology in today’s world of hyper-awareness around data. We’re just a month shy of our launch and what better time to write a Medium article about a platform we hope will simplify group decisions and encourage a culture of open dialogue and deliberation.
The core idea behind Defora is that some identifiable and distinct problems with group decision making as a whole have an outsized impact on the quality of the decision, and can be solved through a well-designed platform. These identifiable problems, which are commonplace but routinely ignored as an inevitable consequence of social interactions, are broadly twofold: the absence of effective communication between peers and across the organizational hierarchy, and absence of good moderation that consistently guides individuals’ effort toward a decisive outcome.
Absence of effective communication happens both ways: people may be unwilling to share their opinions or people may be unwilling to listen to other opinions. The latter is easier to identify and asses. After all diversity training and inclusivity is all about reducing and eliminating cognitive biases to stop individuals from using stereotypes to prevent listening to the other person. Not listening to your target user and customer base can result in bad products and services — and these problems still routinely happen across a range of industries as companies fail to include relevant perspectives, lived experiences of groups who will be directly affected by the decisions, resulting in faulty and incomplete information.
But why would people be unwilling to share their opinions, especially if they feel strongly about it?
Social and peer pressure plays a large role in preventing an open and free exchange of ideas because you are cautious about how you might be perceived, especially to someone in a higher position in-charge of your promotion and salary. Wanting to be seen as likeable and friendly among your peers prevents constructive feedback and dialogue, which doesn’t seem that big of a deal from a personal perspective, but from an organizational perspective can be hugely detrimental.
Remember that scene in Tuca and Bertie where Bertie is bulldozed over in a meeting by the loud, obnoxious embodiment of toxic masculinity Dirk? How many of us have had to deal with colleagues and teammates who were prototypically over-confident, stole our better ideas without giving us any due credit, and had a foghorn voice in meetings that mowed down everyone else’s voice? Power dynamics is both the reality of most workplaces where a form of organizational structure and hierarchy explicitly helps a small dominant group make decisions without taking into account the opinions of everyone else who is affected by the decision, and implicit hierarchy and privileges where certain individuals with the loudest voice are able to crowd out other marginalized voices.
Power dynamics, cognitive biases, social & peer pressure, and incomplete information make teams reach bad decisions that are exclusionary as they miss out on better-unspoken solutions and reinforce each other to create toxic work environments. Wisdom of crowds, a major advantage of group decisions, is only achievable by knocking down barriers of an exclusionary decision making process.
Beyond that, even if your organization is inclusive and at the wave of the new frontier of companies that embrace workplace democracy, it is vulnerable to lack of moderation and unclear expectations that make decision making processes confusing, inefficient, and ineffective. Never-ending discussions to solve a problem and make a decision are rendered futile as they do not reach an outcome and result, and can leave participants exhausted and disillusioned about the process. Who hasn’t sat through a four-hour meeting that quickly derailed from its agenda, having an existential crisis and wondering if eighteen year old you made the right decisions at university? Furthermore, the presence of facilitators and moderators in a decision making process can result in a double whammy as the facilitator or moderator is given considerably more power and relied upon to be impartial and unbiased without counter checks, inevitably reintroducing the problem of power dynamics.
While decision making might never be perfect and require widespread social changes, Defora minimizes the possibility of reaching a bad decision through its technology and innovative features. Its ‘voice’ and anonymity feature solves the problem of power dynamics, cognitive biases, social & peer pressure and incomplete information by encouraging a vibrant participatory process. Its carefully designed UI/UX based on an ideal of a comprehensive decision flow signposts expectations and streamlines participation, serving as an unbiased and impartial facilitator and solving the problem of a lack of moderation and unclear expectations.
How can you make decisions on Defora?
A comprehensive decision making process must be inclusive, allow space for all participants to equally participate without fear of repercussions, integrate feedback loops in every step, and be flexible according to each team or community’s needs. Defora is designed based on our notion of the most comprehensive decision flow.
Individuals who share the same affiliation or interests and need group decisions can create or join groups on Defora. Within a group, a decision making process can be swiftly set up following customizable activity templates available on the platform.
Currently, there are three main activity templates on Defora based on different priorities and needs — discussion activity template, review activity template and vote activity template.
Discussion: Discussion can be used for ideation, brainstorming or even suggestion boxes. Members can exchange their opinions on a topic or issue through posts, comments, and likes. At the end of a discussion, the template generates a word cloud and the opinion with the highest number of likes is selected as the top opinion.
Review: Review can be used for product or service surveys, consumer surveys, performance evaluation, and self-evaluations. Members can review performances, strategies or participate in surveys. At the end of a review, the template generates a simplified results page for a quick bird’s eye view and a detailed page for more insights.
Vote: Vote can be used for any decision making needs that require members to select preferred options among a set of predetermined options. Members can vote on issues, comment on voteable options, and input additional options if they find the predetermined set unsatisfactory. At the end of a vote, the template generates the result where the option with the highest number of votes is selected as the top option, as well as a list of additional comments that members might have had for each option.
Activities are also accompanied by an option to include points that can be used within the app’s ecosystem to encourage and incentivize participation. However as our primary vision and goal are to design a space for inclusive and efficient decision making that helps you reach better group solutions, our point system is designed to avoid negatively interfering with the way people participate in activities.
Decisions are complex and multifaceted and can require more than one discussion. Activities can be interlinked endlessly across the same topic, allowing users the flexibility of addressing unresolved problems or tangents from prior activities. All linked activities are easily viewable as a thread and activities that are linked to others are denoted by a banner that informs members that prior context and decisions exist.
Transparency and accountability are important foundations for good decisions. Every activity is archived, every step of the way and made accessible to participating members. Archives help members enforce decisions, keep track of internal discussions and outcomes, measure performance and be inspired.
How do we create an inclusive decision making process?
To prevent a Dirk in your organization from bullying other voices into silence and power dynamics from preventing potentially pioneering ideas from being expressed, participation on Defora is based on a feature called ‘voice’ to encourage equal opportunity of speech. ‘Voice’ is the ability to contribute and participate in activities on Defora. It is distributed equally to all participating members in recognition that every member has something important to contribute and to prevent individuals with the loudest voice or most authority from dominating the process. To moderate the process toward a tangible outcome and guard against inefficient, lengthy discussions with no clear direction, voice is also distributed in a limited capacity and can be exhausted. This also serves to prevent trolling on the activities as members will have a limited number of voice to express their own opinions and engage in the process.
E.g. 1 voice = 1 opinion/comment
4 voice = 4 opinions/comments
The number of voice equally distributed to each member can be set when creating a new activity. If you believe a member has something valuable to add to the activity, or can succinctly represent your views, you can delegate your voice to them. Alternatively, if you have exhausted your voice, you ask other members to delegate their voice to you.
Now that you’re given a guarantee that what you say will be heard, acknowledged and matter in the group decision, how can you get over social and peer pressure that can range from light-hearted teasing to serious questions about keeping your job despite recognizing bad decisions, or worse being subject to unethical behaviour in the organization?
Defora solves this by including the option to create anonymous activities where the display name of participating members are hidden. In such activities, Defora will assign randomly generated names to each member that will change across different activities, even in the same group. Yet, while many platforms already allow users to be anonymous, they are hardly lauded as paragons of organizational productivity and good faith discussions. A critical reason is that despite an anonymity feature, users may distrust the technology and remain hesitant to participate openly for fear of very real negative consequences in the real physical world, such as being fired for questioning a supervisor. To create a platform that fosters open participation by members while minimizing fears of disclosure, Defora uses its patented AAID technology (Authenticated Anonymous Identity) to prevent users’ digital footprint across different activities and groups from being traceable. The technology allows Defora’s servers to generate a unique one-time permit for each activity, making a user’s contribution on a group, across activities, untraceable even in the unlikely scenario if Defora’s servers were compromised. This also helps us approach archiving, which is different from the conventional practice of storing your data. AAID generates a unique one-time permit for each activity to prevent a traceable digital footprint, and only you can access your entire activity log on the platform (a future article will be dedicated to AAID and privacy).
Who can use Defora?
Anyone can use Defora and that’s exciting! As long as you need decisions to be made in a group, you’re already a priority user in our books. Broadly, Defora can be used for ideation, conflict resolution, and evaluation across public policy and communities, organizational culture and management, and education and academia.
We’re open to requests for integrations and customizations for your team and organization to use Defora. We’d love it if more people were able to use Defora to move toward a better culture of open and honest dialogue, and are always open to any feedback you are willing to share with us.
The beta version will soon be available to download for free on Google Play and App Store and we can’t wait for you to try out Defora!
If you’re interested in hearing more about the nitty-gritty of the app or reading about our executive summary or even learning about our patented AAID technology you can shoot our team a quick email or reach out to us on any of our socials (we’re on instagram and twitter) for us to get back to you! You can also subscribe to our newsletter for more updates and interesting insights into group decision making by clicking on our logo below!
