Social decision making is a process that involves diversity of opinions, skills, and experience with an aim at through collaboration reach consensus decisions. Essentially, it is a methodology developed for organizations to manage the whole life cycle of decision making for efficiency – everything from collaboration and proposal, to execution and evaluation.

Quite intuitively, as confirmed by studies as well, more diversity among the decision makers results in better decisions. Social decision making captures the diversity and uses it to your organization’s advantage. With everyone’s different experiences the problem is considered from many angles. In fact, even the “village lunatic” questioning everything the authorities do plays an important part making it impossible for them to make uninformed decisions. This way decision makers must stay focused.

For a Sales Representative it goes without saying that they aim at shortening the sales cycle, but it is in fact equally important to close the gaps between purposing, deciding, and executing a decision, and later evaluating of course. By doing this there will be alignment between the different phases and a common understanding of the process which will streamline the workflow.

One concrete example is including all relevant people even in the early stages of the decision making life cycle to create ownership, a vested interest, of the decision. This results in a much faster and more efficient execution of the decision since everyone is on board and have the same idea of what the goal is.

On the same note, it is quite characteristic for a modern knowledge worker to feel more ownership of their tasks when they are given more responsibility. The self-determination theory introduces the drivers behind human motivation, namely the need for competence, autonomy, and social relations.

Engaged people feel like they are mastering their daily tasks, but also in control of their own life. In addition, it is important that we feel like we are a part of a group. We all want to do something meaningful, be good at it and be surrounded my people who appreciate us. These desires can originate from internal or external sources. Creating a working environment where your colleagues can thrive will trigger their internal motivation to perform the best for the firm.

Having an inclusive environment and an overall better mood is beneficial for the decision making in your organization. By inclusion of all relevant people to all stages of decision making you encourage your coworkers but also collect more points of view to the table. Read more about how to create an inclusive environment in our recent blog post Creating a strong social decision making culture. Why not do all this digitally?

Fingertip has created a social decision making application for organizational decision making designed to make the whole decision making life cycle transparent and measurable, never forgetting to include the relevant stakeholders. With the one-month free trial you can explore the enormous business opportunities of better decision making yourself.