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What you don't know about making decisions.

D A Garvin¹, M A Roberto

¹Harvard Business School, Boston, USA.

Harvard Business Review

|September 12, 2001

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Effective decision-making involves shifting from an advocacy mindset to an inquiry process. This inquiry approach fosters collaboration and leads to superior outcomes by considering diverse options and ensuring all viewpoints are heard.

Area of Science:

Organizational Behavior
Leadership Studies
Decision Science

Background:

Traditional executive decision-making often views it as a singular event, overlooking the complex process involving power dynamics, politics, and organizational history.
The prevalent advocacy process, where participants argue for preferred solutions and selectively present information, is identified as a particularly unproductive method.
This contrasts with the more effective inquiry process, which emphasizes collaborative exploration of multiple options to find optimal solutions.

Purpose of the Study:

To highlight the critical differences between advocacy and inquiry decision-making processes.
To provide strategies for transitioning from less effective advocacy to more productive inquiry in organizational decision-making.
To offer a framework for assessing and improving decision-making processes in real-time.

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Main Methods:

Analysis of common decision-making processes within organizations, contrasting advocacy and inquiry models.
Identification of key factors for transitioning from advocacy to inquiry: managing conflict, ensuring viewpoint consideration, and timely closure.
Development of a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of decision-making processes during their execution.

Main Results:

The advocacy process, characterized by contest-like arguments and selective information sharing, is significantly less productive than an inquiry process.
Transitioning to an inquiry process requires deliberate attention to fostering constructive conflict, ensuring genuine consideration of all viewpoints, and establishing clear closure protocols.
Leaders who recognize decision-making as a complex process and adopt inquiry methods achieve better outcomes than those who treat it as an event they control.

Conclusions:

Shifting from advocacy to inquiry is crucial for enhancing organizational decision-making effectiveness.
Successful implementation of the inquiry process hinges on balancing divergent ideas during deliberation and forging unity for action.
Effective leadership in decision-making requires a nuanced understanding of process dynamics and the ability to foster both exploration and decisive action.