Essay: Decision making and group think

Experimental Essay
Most important learning from the murder mystery task is understanding the importance of group coordination, handling uncertain situations, and the advantages and disadvantages of working in groups and teams. Diversity played a key role in solving the murder mystery, as people with different cultures, and backgrounds concentrated on different types of information, which helped us to collect rich information. Each person from the group had at least one unique information, sharing unique information and individual perspectives helped us to make the best decision. Differentiating general information from unique information is also important while performing group tasks.
There are some uncertain situations while performing group tasks like hesitating to share their individual understanding and different information to the group, thinking that others might not agree with it or they might laugh and make fun of it. They will realize their mistake after knowing the result. Sometimes, dominating individuals taking quick decisions by convincing the group to think only from his/her perspective can result in failure. Finally, group thinking; when everyone from the group agrees to the same thing, so they can go with the flow by avoiding all the unusual and unfamiliar findings can also result in failure. These are some of the uncertain situations that can happen when working in groups.
To handle these uncertain situations collective information can be used to make the decision rather than considering individual perspective, this can give an accurate and sometimes completely different result. Making the group understand their ideas by sharing mental models and transactive memory to make sure everyone is on the same page can help the group make better decisions. Ranking alternatives instead of choosing one strategy that the whole group agrees, can help the group know the best alternative based on the ranking and this can also save the group from group thinking.
I was surprised by the impact of diversity and collective information on the decision-making process. The information that I was paying attention to and taking notes of is mostly different compared to my other group members. The diversity factor helped us in having unique information from different aspects of the given task. The impact of collective information in decision-making process surprised me the most because I’ve experienced a similar situation in the past, when I was working at NTT data; every team from my project nominated 2 members (1st and 2nd priority) for an emerging performer award and also gave some reasons for the nomination, but the person who won the award wasn’t the 1st priority of their team. I had this question for a while, ‘How did the 2nd priority of a team win the best award?’, now I feel I know the answer to this, ‘collective information’.
Most important learning from Everest simulation task is understanding our own individual goals, the importance of communication, leadership, creativity, and contribution of every individual from the group. I’ve learned to start understanding individual goals first, discuss the plan with the group members, make sure everyone is on the same page, and then start the progress of the task. Role of every individual is important in a project, every individual should contribute and make some progress, and its leader’s responsibility to track everyone from the group, know the status, provide updates, and making sure everyone has same mental models. Finally, I’ve also realized the importance of creativity and understanding the outcomes way in advance are crucial in any projects or group assignments and communication is the key to success.
In Everest simulation, I was surprised that each person had different inputs and hidden profile for the challenges. Moreover, I was surprised because we ended up not doing well after using all the concepts from the class which made me realize all mistakes that we made were new (like communication issues, and lack of leadership skills) and silly. I realized the importance of communication by the end of the simulation.
I’ve learned some advantages of working in groups and teams like having a richer pool of information whereas individuals have limited information. Groups have higher chances of learning from the difference in opinions and validation of solutions. Groups are more efficient and have unique perspectives compared to individuals. Disadvantages of working in groups and teams are a tendency to groupthink, conflicts within the groups, time-consuming to make decisions, and sometimes being solution mindedness are some of the aspects that can be harmful to groups and teams.
I’ve been working as a Data Analyst for more than 3 years now, I’ve also been part of a portfolio management project and few business analysis projects. As a data analyst, we first plan strategies like ‘What kind of data to consider, Impact of the data to the outcome, and how can the data help the organization to be beneficial in future’. So, everyone from the group come up with a decision and most of them are not flexible in changing their opinion. But, most of the times employees with more experience will give their opinions first, then the group will go with the drift and they don’t share their strategy. As I’ve learned that groupthink is not beneficial, I wouldn’t repeat my mistake now. I will analyze according to my understanding and I’ll let the group know my strategy, and I will also pay attention to the other strategies and make a decision by ranking alternatives or by taking collective information.
All the concepts that I learn in this class are most applicable to my business analyst projects and the portfolio management project. Every decision that we make for the business or an organization deals with a group, and group decisions just like the murder mystery and the Everest simulation. Everyone has a role in the project and each role has different goals, after the Everest simulation I’ve realized that I have to understand my individual goal first and discuss how to achieve each individual goal while achieving the group’s ultimate goal with group members. As I’ve understood the impact of leadership and communication, I will definitely apply the concepts of leadership and also improve the richness in communication by creating shared understandings and higher levels of trust. I would not repeat the mistakes that I’ve done in Everest simulation, as a leader I will make sure that everyone is on the same page and understood the group’s decision. I’ll give importance to everyone’s opinion and make a final decision considering everyone’s explanation.
But in my current career we analyze the business of an organization, for example, let’s consider a famous restaurant is planning to start their business on the Main Street of Newark. Considering all the input information, we prioritize their goals, here groups decision comes into play; I can apply the concepts that I learned from murder mystery and Everest simulation to make help my team make a decision. So, we consider their future profits as the first priority and so on. Then we make a plan on how to decide where exactly they should locate (considering revenue, sales, and profit). Here, I will make sure I won’t let the groupthink take place from my side. There are many more areas like group meetings, strategy discussions, and decision-making processes where I can use the concepts from the class to my career.