Introduction and Episode Question

[00:00:03] Paul: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:08] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig.

[00:00:09] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:11] Karen: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, how can we narrow our choices?

[00:00:19] Paul: One of the things that lives in that collaborative space is decision making, as a group. And this is the second of two episodes about things that we find help groups to make better decisions and to make decisions better, that improve the experience we have of the decision making process as well as the results.

[00:00:38] Paul: So last episode in episode 266, we talked about helping the group to identify what do they value, what are the factors that they want to consider when they're evaluating various choices that they might have.

The Importance of Narrowing Choices

[00:00:50] Paul: And today we wanna talk about another tool that we find is really useful, which is narrowing choices. We find that when groups have just completely wide open, we could do anything. They often founder, and when they have too many choices?

[00:01:05] Paul: The experience is not great and they're more likely to not make a great decision. So it's useful to be able to narrow from a larger set of choices to a smaller set of choices to an even smaller set of choices.

[00:01:16] Paul: So we wanna talk a little bit today about why that's useful, but perhaps more importantly, how can we do that? What are tools and techniques and ways of narrowing the set of choices that are under consideration by a group when they're making a decision. 

Defining and Listing Choices

[00:01:30] Karen: So to start with, you have to know what choices you have, and this in and of itself can be a narrowing. So even though it sounds like it's like a broadening, make your whole list. I find it useful at the start of a meeting to say, okay, so I think the choices we're thinking about are A, B, C. Maybe there's a range within there, but like, here's the definition of what I think are our range of options.

[00:01:56] Karen: Is there anything other than that that anyone thinks is an option? Because if we can get a sort of, what I call a mini consensus, a process consensus around, okay, this is our list. And there's nothing else that we need to consider that wards off. The later on when somebody thinks they're losing, so they bring up their, you know, cousins, uncles, I don't know what viewpoint that isn't this relevant because. Right.

[00:02:21] Karen: You get these crazy things that come in. But if we've already said we're not gonna go off in that other random direction. And sometimes there's even something that has been talked about in the group, but I've talked to enough people to know, like there are a lot of people afraid of it, but there's nobody who actually wants it.

[00:02:39] Karen: So it can be worth saying, okay, so I know there's been conversation about this X choice, and my sense is nobody actually wants it. Is that true? That can save us from hours of, but we shouldn't do X because dah, dah, dah, and I really don't wanna do X because. We don't even have to have that conversation if we can clarify at the beginning that X is not one of the list.

[00:03:02] Karen: So the first mechanism for narrowing is actually part of defining the choices, because that also defines what's not the choices. 

[00:03:12] Paul: The great part about that is also you sometimes, I've done this, I see this happen where someone is kind of making some sort of argument and then you eventually realize that they're arguing against something that no one is actually even proposing that you do. And by making it clear that that's not being proposed, it can be really useful, because it heads those kinds of things off.

[00:03:35] Paul: You're like, I don't think we're talking about doing that kind of thing. And you look around and everybody kind of nods their heads and they're like, yeah, we're not talking about doing that. So the person goes, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know. Right? They feel bad but making the list helps define what you are and aren't talking about.

[00:03:51] Paul: And I find it useful at that initial, like, what are our set of choices? What are we even considering here? Anything that anybody has any interest in goes on the list. I think you want to make that as broad as possible. Sometimes it's like, well, we wanna make sure we only have three proposals.

[00:04:09] Paul: I'm like, this is not the point to be fussy, because now we're gonna start arguing about what should even be on the list at this point. It really is, anybody comes up and you have to be clear about that. You have to say, look, we're just harvesting things that anybody has any interest in or any idea on.

[00:04:26] Paul: We're not endorsing any one of these. I think that's a really useful thing to say is these are candidates. And this is where it's useful to flag, we are going to narrow these down, but right now we just wanna get a sense of what we are and aren't talking about. So when you make that list and you say, is there anything else, I will take anything that anybody else comes up with, because if it's a bad idea, you'll winnow it out later.  

[00:04:52] Karen: Yeah. This isn't the time to argue about what goes on the list or not. Eventually we may have to get there, but at the beginning, everybody needs to feel included. So sometimes you're making a decision. We're only going to do one of the things. We have so many options, and one of them is the thing that we're doing.

[00:05:08] Karen: Sometimes you have a sort of list of decisions to make. Are we gonna do this or that or that? But we might do three of the five, or we might do none of them, or we might do whatever. 

Using Buckets to Simplify Decisions

[00:05:20] Karen: I once was asked to facilitate a meeting that had 60 things that had been recommended by an architect as a possible thing that could be done to save costs really was what it was after. But there were 60 things and 60 individual decisions was gonna be insane. So I started with, here's a list of things that the architect thinks are going to save money and nobody's gonna notice. And I think they're an easy win. And I made a bucket. So this is one of your strategies for winnowing things down is buckets.

[00:05:55] Karen: So here's a group of things that I'm pretty sure we're all in agreement about. And before we say yes to the bucket, is there anything we need to take outta the bucket? So, is everybody good? If everybody's good, that whole bucket done and we're done. And if anybody's like, no, that one I'm not okay with, then it comes out of the bucket, goes back on the list, but you can still get the rest of the bucket done.

[00:06:18] Karen: And you can also have a bucket. In that case. I had a bucket of things that the architect was like, it's not really gonna save money and you're not gonna like it. Like it was an idea that came up, but we need to deal with it. But it's not a good idea, right? So again, bucket. Are there any of these things people wanna still have a conversation about?

[00:06:36] Karen: It comes out of the bucket, but you could, I think I got 20 things off the list in two buckets in five minutes done. And, you know, four or five things came out. So, we had to talk about those then. But that's a huge way to kind of narrow your scope. And so you can kind of put things all in. If you can bucket things together based on some kind of criteria and say, seems like we know where we are with this. That's really efficient. 

Consent Calendars and Temperature Checks

[00:07:02] Paul: Yeah, I'm remembering, my younger days, serving as a page at the Iowa Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, which is a giant in decision making body. But one of the things they would begin many of the sessions with was what they called the consent calendar. These are the things that we think are largely unobjectionable.

[00:07:18] Paul: We will take a single vote to pass the whole thing, and anyone can make a motion, and with a second, something can be moved from the consent calendar to the regular agenda of things to discuss. It's a very easy way to get through a lot of stuff quickly and what's nice is it builds in the possibility that you were wrong, that no one would object.

[00:07:40] Paul: So you're not just saying, does anyone object? Right? And if they object, now we get bogged down. You're just saying like, we think no one objects. Is there anything that anyone wants struck from the list? Again, like that first technique we talked about, anybody wants something out of that bucket, great, no problem.

[00:07:54] Paul: We put it into our regular, we need to make a decision bucket, you know, kind of thing. It allows you to get through a lot of stuff because then what we're really doing is we're now making sure we're spending the appropriate time and focus. On things based on how much time and focus they deserve. 

[00:08:11] Karen: Yeah. So that's one of probably my favorite, like, we'll clear that one out. And then what happens is as you narrow and as we move along, each step of narrowing gets a little more challenging. It can get to a point where you, okay, now we just have to have the conversation.

[00:08:28] Karen: Hopefully we've had the values conversation. So sometimes out of that I can say, so this is looking back to, episode 266 again. Based on the values, we decided that environmental is our number one value and choices two, three, and four really don't have an environmental component to them.

[00:08:49] Karen: How do we feel about wiping those out? But it has to come from the group. Even if I know there were people who were kind of interested in those. If I can point back to a decision we've made about values. Then I can propose to get rid of them without a lot of conversation. And some groups will let you do that.

[00:09:05] Karen: Some groups will have to take time to talk about all of them and so be it. But if they will let the facilitator kind of grab the essence of the group and make some proposals for dropping some things out, it feels heavy handed as a facilitator to do it, I will say. I mean, I feel like I'm kind of pushing on people a little bit.

[00:09:27] Karen: But if I do that, then we can have half the median time and people like that a lot and probably the decisions are better.

[00:09:33] Paul: Well, and what you're doing there is what we actually are recommending, which is narrowing the set of choices under consideration. Because when we have fewer things, we make better decisions, right? There's all sorts of research and cognitive science about decision fatigue and analysis paralysis and like the paradox of choice and things like that.

[00:09:51] Paul:  So being able to, through whatever move you have to be able to say, just even going, it seems like this one is not gonna get through. We're talking about A, B, C, and D. And it seems to me from the conversations we're having, D isn't going to be our final choice. Could we just, you know, let's check and then using whatever mechanism you have, can we eliminate D from consideration?

[00:10:15] Paul: You are not saying we should do A, you're saying, can we agree we're not gonna do D? And this is the kind of building alignment things that we've talked about in group decision making in the past that's useful. Those are actually small wins that are helpful for the group to go, Hey, we haven't made a decision yet, but we've narrowed it down to only three.

[00:10:33] Paul: We started with 17. And that sense of momentum builds trust in the process as well. When we continue to founder amongst these 17 different things, we feel like we're never gonna make progress. We're never gonna make this decision. It's just gonna be awful. I was in a group recently where it was, there were six things under consideration and we had to pick one.

[00:10:53] Paul: And after the first thing, like we were just kind of going. Are we gonna get here at all? And then just, you know, we kind of started the next meeting by saying, I'd love to get people's sense of what our top three are. And there was actually an incredible amount of agreement in the group about what the bottom three were.

[00:11:11] Paul: And so we didn't have to talk about them anymore. And now the group had a win to be able to say, okay, so now we don't need to be distracted about those things anymore. We can really focus on these three things, and so eliminating some choices can actually be an easier move that we often don't recognize is available to us. 

[00:11:32] Karen: Yeah, and this is the point at which I think it can be really useful to do what's called temperature check. So, we're gonna look at each option and everybody rank it one to five. Five is, I love it. One is, I am absolutely opposed to it. like, where are we landed on this? I like spectrums for this too, where you say, love it at one end of the room, hate it at the other end of the room.

[00:11:53] Karen: And people stand on that line, like how strongly they feel. And sometimes just getting that data and people look around and go, okay, for this to fly, we'd need group support of it. And I'm the only one who likes it, so okay, I can let go of it. And that lands in a different way than like, if you just do a discussion group and everybody says what they think, like it takes too long, people lose interest.

[00:12:14] Karen: Like, the visual of where are we, like how much support do we have for it can really be helpful. And other times you do that spectrum and only one person likes it and it's important to stop and say, so what is it that you like about it? And because of that clarity of that one person who's like, no, but this is the thing about it that's really important.

[00:12:32] Karen: People, oh, I wasn't thinking about it that way. And people will literally move to the other side of the room. So it's a chance to catch the, like most of us are so stuck on one idea that we're missing an important idea, but it's also an opportunity to say, okay, I'm the only one who really values this idea.

[00:12:49] Karen: Like I got heard, everybody heard what my idea was about it, and they still don't like it, and so that's not gonna work. So I think getting some visual sense of where people are, not as a final vote necessarily. Like, let's figure it out. So that I know where I am. Because if I know I'm at odds with a group that helps me go, okay, but that's 'cause they're not seeing something I need to communicate it or, oh well, if I'm on my own here, the group isn't all gonna wanna go there, so I need to let go and it's a lot easier to do that if you can see where it is.

[00:13:24] Paul: And what that points to, this is sometimes one of my biggest frustrations with groups and their lack of process, is the value of doing what you're talking about, right? Temperature check. Sometimes, you know what we call a straw poll, which is a non-binding assessment of support for something.

[00:13:42] Paul: And that can then, because it reveals to the group what's going on. If the only time you're ever assessing support for something is when you're making a deciding vote, you're missing out on that kind of group information. And I see that a lot. And so I think that being able to do a straw poll, a temperature check.

[00:14:00] Paul: Being able to do it with something like a spectrum, then with a debrief as you've described, is the really rich way of doing it. But even if it's just for each of these, like, what's your level of support for this one to five? We go through each of them.

[00:14:13] Paul: Everyone simultaneously reveals, you know, in Zoom or on cards or with the fingers or whatever it is to get that information in the group and that can help us decide what do we wanna eliminate at this point. It may also reveal at that point we are all super excited about one option and none of the rest of them.

[00:14:31] Paul: In which case we might be able to eliminate everything and move to the decision. But that kind of temperature checking, a straw polling helps us assess how close to a decision are we actually. How close to agreement are we and what are steps that we could potentially take to move us closer there.

[00:14:48] Paul: So I think that it's a really rich set of techniques. I know we've talked about this kind of thing on a past episode, but you know, as we've said, group decision making is hard. It keeps coming up a lot, which is why it's a perennial topic for us, and we keep bringing these things up again. 

Proposals and Facilitator Roles

[00:15:02] Karen: Another tactic, and this is more as we're narrowing down to the last few often, but another thing that I think is really important is sometimes what the group needs is for somebody to propose something. I was once facilitating a meeting where an organization was trying to choose their name and there were two synonyms.

[00:15:20] Karen: So they were either gonna put international or worldwide in their name. And some people liked international and some people liked worldwide. There was very little reason, like you could talk about this for a really long time and to get nowhere. And I think in that case it's very helpful if the facilitator can do, and this is a sociocratic thing that facilitators are asked to do, and I, they were using sociocracy, so I had some justification for it.

[00:15:46] Karen: But I just as a facilitator said, so I'm gonna make a proposal. And there was a criteria somebody had given some like, language history about why one of those words was more relevant to the group than the other from some linguistic history thing. It was the only thing I had. It was the only criteria there was.

[00:16:03] Karen: So I said lacking some other reason. I propose that we use this word because of this reason and we make that proposal and we go around and can everybody consent to it. If nobody's objecting, like, they may still think international's better, but they don't think worldwide's terrible and it gets us through the decision.

[00:16:21] Karen: And now the group has a name, whereas no amount of straw poll. I mean, you could do a majority vote but that makes people feel like winners and losers and that can bring some ickiness to it. So often if the facilitator is just willing to make a proposal, then that gets you off the fence when you're stuck between two equally good and pretty comparable choices.

[00:16:41] Paul: What that also points to is a technique that I'll sometimes use earlier in the process, which is, so we have these 15 proposals for things that we can do, right, sort of thing. And what I'd love to do is, and we do this visually somehow, what are all the ones that you could live with, right? Might not be your favorite, but just you're like, I really like A but I could live with A, B, C, F, and, T. Right.

[00:17:04] Paul: And if we can start to get a sense of that from the room. That also then starts to go, well, what are the things that nobody can live with? So we should just, you know, again, get them out, but really start to think about. Because then we can start to narrow towards what are the solutions that everybody that they have a minimum level of support.

[00:17:23] Paul: All of this is about figuring out how much support does this really need? And so I love your example there of international and worldwide. You're like, do I prefer worldwide? Yes. Can I live with international? Yes. Would I like this meeting to be over? Yes. Great. I will support your proposal, kind of thing.

[00:17:39] Paul: So it's like in any of these decision making things. You're also trying to make sure that you're not overtaxing the group in making a decision. Right. And to your point, there are times where the difference between our final, you know, we only get to pick one, right? The difference between them is really negligible.

[00:17:59] Paul: Then we've probably reached the point of diminishing returns for the group to actually be spending time on it. And asking them to stay in the room for however long until we come to a decision is not gonna be useful. And so, yeah, proposals are great.

[00:18:12] Paul: I actually was in a group recently where I just, I actually think the proposals and things like temperature checks and straw polling are really powerful tools. And I think even when you're not the facilitator being able to ask as I did in this meeting, is this a time when we're looking for proposals? 'Cause if so, I have one that I'd like to make.

[00:18:29] Paul: Not because I thought that we were ready to make the decision, but because the process of talking about a specific proposal would help us move it forward and narrow things down. 

[00:18:39] Karen: Yeah. And I do think people think I make a proposal when I feel strongly this is the thing we should do, which is a reason to make a proposal, but also make a proposal so that there is something real to be talked about.

[00:18:52] Karen: And I think that's useful. 

Handling Complex and Multifaceted Decisions

[00:18:54] Karen: And one more kind of category that I wanna throw out here is, a lot of times like, so we're gonna decide how much to invest in something and it could be anywhere from 50,000 to a hundred thousand. Well, there are 50 choices now. That makes no sense. Or you know, arguably you could go to half thousands. I mean, there's some- 

[00:19:13] Paul: Or dollars or cents. There's a lot of choices in there. 

[00:19:16] Karen: And there are a lot of times when we're in that kind of like, there's a whole range of things that we might do.

[00:19:23] Karen: It's super useful to say, okay, we're gonna consider 50,000. We're gonna consider 75,000. We're gonna consider a hundred thousand. Can we agree that we're not gonna like, make it more granular than that? And so you can get to where you're now at three choices instead of some infinite number of choices.

[00:19:43] Karen: And I think that's especially true when it's multifaceted. If we shift this number, it's gonna change that number. And so any of the numbers could flip any which way, or the factors could have many variables, but anyone that we change changes the others. So again, there's this sort of infinite number of combinations.

[00:20:00] Karen: I think it's super useful to say we're gonna look at three choices, and that's the thing that as a facilitator, I may be manufacturing those choices. I manufacture them to cover the range of opinions, the range of values, everybody's gonna have one that they go, oh yeah, that fits me pretty well.

[00:20:18] Karen: And even if we don't end up with exactly one of those, if we can say, okay, we can all agree we're not doing this one and we're not doing that one, we're gonna do something close to this one. And then we can talk about if we wanna shift the numbers, you know, more within that range. That can really help. So if you've got something really complex and multifaceted, you don't wanna go at it wide open like that.

[00:20:41] Karen: You wanna say, let's talk about these three possibilities and then when we get to one of those, if we still need to tweak it, maybe we do.

[00:20:48] Paul: Yeah, the shifting from an entirely continuous band to discreet choices within that band is super useful. And I think you're also pointing to the thing which is, even when we've said like we've narrowed it to three choices and we're eliminating, you know, one of them that we then still have the opportunity to tweak.

[00:21:04] Paul: Like, I do think that as much as we've talked about sort of trying to narrow choices. And saying, you might have had the impression when we started that if it's something that is not on the list, it's never gonna happen. We also need to recognize that as we get close to a solution, new options might appear that aren't really new, right?

[00:21:23] Paul: That are tweaks to this thing to say, you know, largely it had this, but we've decided to add this caveat. Or we're adding this clause, or we're striking this bit out. I just finished listening to the musical 1776 about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Right. And so if you look at that decision making and like what clauses survive to the final document, you know, there's one proposal under discussion, but they do make changes to it as you kind of narrow in.

[00:21:48] Paul: And so I think recognizing that you know, you're trying to narrow. And then as you get close to a decision, you may need to make some little bit of tweaks, which might feel like it's expanding out a little bit, but what you're actually doing is eliminating the untweaked choice. You're just replacing it with this sort of tweaked choice and being flexible about that. So it's like, as you're narrowing your're, trying to be firm, but flexible as you're helping a group to make a decision. 

Summary and Conclusion

[00:22:13] Karen: So what we're saying is following up on the last episode, which was about starting decision making with thinking about values and goals and criteria for a decision. Once you had that conversation, you then wanna get into narrowing your choices, beginning with defining the choices, which includes defining out some choices.

[00:22:35] Karen: And then there are a number of strategies that we talked about. We talked about in that initial defining, if we think there are things that nobody actually wants to name those. We think these three things nobody actually thinks should win, or is that right? And if everybody's like, yep, we're good, we throw out those three and we have narrowed our choices.

[00:22:54] Karen: Another strategy that we talked about is what I think of as buckets. Paul talked about it as a consent calendar. I've heard it as a consent agenda. Where you've got a number of things that fall into one bucket. We're just gonna not discuss them. We're just gonna approve them because they all make sense.

[00:23:09] Karen: Or we're gonna cut them out, consent to not do them. Because they all make sense without any discussion. That's a great way to clean out your agenda or clear out your choices, in a pretty simple way. We also talked about using spectrums or temperature checks or things like that to get a feel for where people are on options, because that may help us let go of the less popular.

[00:23:33] Karen: Or it may highlight, oh, there's a thing that one person's thinking about that nobody else is thinking about. We need to pay attention to that. But that can narrow us down. And then we talked about making proposals. So this idea that if having a proposal on the table can really help us get to a decision and we talked about what are the things we can live with.

[00:23:55] Karen: Because sometimes it's not what is the most people's favorite thing. Sometimes it's the thing that we can all be okay with. So we wanna do that. And that may narrow things, even if it's pretty popular. But there are a couple of people who just say, I'm not having it.

[00:24:09] Karen: That may narrow down and then there's the piece about making sure we don't get stuck in a narrow choice. That sometimes it's just time to say, Hey, how about we do this? And the meeting can be over. And just knowing when is the time to do that. So a whole range of things we can do, all aimed at, can we narrow down in a rational way that makes our meetings more efficient, that also keep people engaged and paying attention, and therefore making the very best decisions that we can in a way that doesn't exhaust us.

[00:24:40] Paul:  Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

[00:24:43] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.