This process of collaborative decision-making will ensure an interdisciplinary approach to a difficult problem, it will engage the participants, and it will advance the solution forward to the next stage of resolution. More importantly, it will bring the participants closer as co-workers by fostering new connections and modeling collaborative behaviour. 

Businesspeople are are generally trained to succeed and thrive in competitive environments – both inside and outside their organizations. This is a very good thing, except when it comes to situations where a team’s inability to collaborative leads to a suboptimal solution to a specific challenge. 

Collaborative decision-making (“CDM”) can be a powerful method to get to a solution when the problem itself is so messy that half the challenge is getting a handle on defining it before you even start. The following roadmap is a six-step process for facilitating CDM in groups of people who are experts in their subject matter, but not necessarily in integrative collaboration techniques. 

1. Gather the Right Group

A collaboration-based solution will only unfold if the people involved have one part of the answer somewhere inside them. If the problem is complex, the team has to be complex. And multidisciplinary. And interdisciplinary. Don’t worry about their ability to get along – you’re going to take care of that as part of the process. Whenever you get two or more together there will be politics and entrenched behavior patterns. You’re going to get them to set that all aside, but it will take some effort. 

2. Role of Humility 

CDM runs into some practical challenges when used in a business context and the most important one is rarely discussed. Using CDM to tackle difficult problems requires a certain level of humility, because a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional approach to problem solving requires the participants to be comfortable letting go of their idea if something better comes along. This is often the point where collaboration falls apart; when people’s identity and personal value proposition is tied with always being The One With The Idea.

A sense of good-natured humility is something that is often in short supply in most business contexts. Businesspeople are trained – formally at B-School, and informally on the job – that humility is the one thing most likely to get you fired or worse: marginalized. In most business contexts humility is tantamount to weakness, and in rough-and-tumble world of survival of the fittest, humility will put you at the bottom of the food chain.

Here’s the problem with that. When we get Darwinian and talk about survival of the fittest, we’re misconstruing what Darwin actually meant. Even the most cursory reading of Darwin will show that he was referring to the species that best fit their environment (thus “fittest”); the one that best adapted to its surroundings. That species might not be the strongest, fastest, or have the biggest biceps, but it knows how to work with the others nearby.  

Regardless of what you think of Darwin and his use or misuse, the fact remains that for our society survival of the fittest usually means survival of the bullheaded. We all have healthy egos and that’s awesome, but when you’re facing an intractable, amorphous, difficult problem that demands the very best thinking from many different people with complementary perspectives, the bullheaded are doomed to extinction. Until you get to that standing-in-a-field-at-night-looking-at-all-the-stars-and-feeling-insignificant moment, knowing you’re just one part of the solution process, you’re never going to effectively collaborate. 

3. Faking Humility 

For a team to engage in effective CDM it requires a level of humility, in the sense that if you’re going to effectively collaborate each individual involved needs to be able to let go of their idea as soon as they see a better one come along. A CDM team dynamic will only work if each individual sees their personal value as being one who contributes great ideas to the process, not “My idea has win.” Understanding human nature and the reality that you can’t magically instill the right amount of humility into hard-driving, power-hungry (i.e. “normal”) people, how can CDM stand a chance? 

Easy! If the group doesn’t have sufficient humility, get them to fake it.

Let’s assume we have a “wicked” problem; one that has no clear definition or obvious solution, and we want to get a team to tackle it. Here’s how it can work. 

One hallmark of an insufficiently humble (i.e. “normal”) person is they don’t actively listen to others, so first off we force them to actively listen to each other. My favourite way to do this is to get people in a circle around the room, have one person step forward and say three words, make a gesture, and step back. Then everybody in the circle – at the same time – steps forward and mimics exactly what that person said and did. If you do it right, it will look vaguely cultish.

Please understand that I hate group exercises with a burning passion. There are those who love them, but that’s not me. Despite my personal biases, the fact is that in the right setting, done the right way, they are incredibly powerful. This little exercise is great for a few reasons. First, it forces people to actively listen to someone else. You have to pay attention or you won’t be able to mimic what they just did and then you’ll look like a loser, or worse: a Non-Team Player. Second, it levels the playing field. I’ve done this exercise with pretty much any level of executive, professor, employee, etc., and nobody escapes the good-natured goofiness of this. Third, it lets people play a bit. Collaboration should have an element of fun, and this is a great way to start that mindset off. And I will promise you that there is always one person who does something completely goofy – usually the quietest one in the bunch. 

When this little exercise is done, you’ve started to get people to fake humility. They’re actively listening to each other, their status is temporarily suspended, and they’re having fun.

4. The Analogue 

Let’s assume the team is actively listening to each other, their status is temporarily suspended, and they’re having a bit of fun. Now what?

Wicked problems are “wicked” because they are amorphous and ill-defined, so if you’re going to solve it you need to pierce that veil of obscurity and drag it into the cold, hard light of reality. If you can’t tackle the problem head-on, tackle the next closest thing that you can get your hands on. Literally get your hands on. An effective way to do this by creating an analogue of the problem, work on solving that, and gradually work your way up to the real thing. 

A great way to create the analogue is to get them to somehow physically embody the problem and start bringing it into reality. The problem is amorphous, so force it into some kind of physical form.

One way that’s worked well for me is to get people into threes and challenge them to embody the interaction between a new brand and its customer. For example, two people are tasked with embodying a fictitious and unusual brand; the stranger the brand the easier it will be to embody it. I like to use something like Guess Jeans Airlines, because there is nothing less appealing than having to sit in seats made for anorexic models and being served a few leafs of lettuce for a meal by a stick figure with attitude. The remaining person in the trio plays the role of the customer, and together they all play out how the interaction between that brand and the customer might unfold. What is the counter attendant like? How do the flight attendants behave? How is the cabin decorated? What do the other customers look like, etc?

As people get comfortable creating this analogue of the real problem they are able to put aside their concerns of the day and really get into the mindset of identifying elements of an experience that until a few minutes before did not even exist. By giving them the challenge of doing this with a problem that’s only just out of their reach, you are able to warm them up for the main event to come, in which we’ll start to gradually add elements of the real problem at hand.

Now that the process is underway, it gets much easier.

5. From Analogue to Prototype 

Once people are engaged have started engaging on the analogue of the real problem and the juices are flowing, it’s time to start the real work. At this stage, take the analogue and turn it into a prototype of the solution. Now it gets real. 

I’ll start with an example. A recent client was a group of science school teachers who were challenged with the task of “increasing student engagement.” This was a great example of an amorphous problem with no clear source or solution. I used the fictitious (I hope) airline started by Guess Jeans, and had them collaborating on what that brand experience might be like. When it came time to get down to the real problem at hand, I switched up the exercise like this: Now, instead of being airline representatives, they were school admissions professionals charged with the responsibility of explaining to parents how their school keeps students engaged. 

The effect on the room was electric. 

We had the right people in the room, they were primed and ready to collaborate, and they were warmed up. Now that the real problem at hand was on the table, the room’s energy went ballistic – as it always does at this stage. 

The key to success at the prototype stage is to put people in a different frame of reference than they normally would be, because looking at a challenge from the perspective of an Other is an excellent way to make an old challenge new again. In this case it was teachers playing the role of admissions/sales. In the process of selling something yet-to-be-created, they create the roadmap to the solution. 

6. From Prototype to Solution

To this point people have engaged in small teams and now it’s time to get the entire group together. If you’re going to be interdisciplinary, you need to make sure that all the different perspectives are mixed together, and that may not have happened to this point. 

The process looks like this. Everyone needs to be together in as close a space as possible, comfortable and practical. The moderator needs to have a large whiteboard (preferably two) available. Then you ask each small team to explain the outcome of their interaction. What was discussed? What was effective? What was persuasive? How did it feel? Etc. Then you encourage the groups to interact and discuss each other’s experiences. This is where the different perspectives start to emerge and engage with each other. 

The role of the moderator at this stage is to act as qualitative researcher, listening for emerging themes and noting them down on the whiteboard. By the end of this important session, the whiteboard will be covered in thoughts, and the moderator will start circling common themes – preferably using a red coloured marker for clarity – and reflecting that back to the team. The moderator should try to develop consensus from the group on the following items: 

1.What do we agree on? 

2.Where do we disagree? 

3.What should we do next? 

4.Who will lead the charge?