Make a Team Decision with Mind Mapping
To make a successful business decision you need to clarify your processes and the collection tools that you will use to support the decision-making process. The installation of these tools and processes takes a bit of time, but only the first time. Then you will become much more efficient to make a collective decision, gaining time thanks to an easier common understanding.
Making a team decision is synonymous with cohesion, consensus, and success. For this reason, I will elaborate on how to make simple and effective decision-making through analyzing 2 key aspects:
- how to prepare for decision making;
- analyze and decide with mind mapping.
How to prepare for the decision-making process?
Primarily, in order to perform this activity with success, you need to understand the functioning of your organization, as well as the people who compose the team.
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Therefore there are 3 points that need to be clarified here:
- the standard of decision making;
- the method of decision making;
- visual indicators that support the decision-making process;
Standard of decision-making
To make a decision, we necessarily refer to something that guides our choice: beliefs, experiences, but also other criteria that are sometimes much more “logical”, such as turnover, profitability, the time something will take, etc. When we refer to the criteria mentioned before, we use a Standard.
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Personal / Internal Standard: I decide from my personality or my job-specific criteria. Valid also for the other contributors. If they are involved in the decision, it is for some reason, considered competent to decide. In this case, several people making a decision means crossing these “personal” standards. |
Common / External Standard: I decide from a standard that is developed or provided and which is common to all employees. The information used to decide is located in this common standard and allows differences in the positioning of a discussion. |
It is important to establish a common standard to be able to move forward in your decision-making team. Otherwise, it is possible that the personal standards are taking over and come to break the collaboration.
A common standard is a standard where:
- the vocabulary used will have the same meaning for everyone;
- the numbers will have the same values;
- a deadline will have a due date.
Decision-making method
Decision-making methods? Sure, you remember your history classes! Autocratic, democratic, monarchic methods, etc. In management, we don’t speak of methods but use a similar vocabulary to describe the decision-making process: authoritarian, participative, etc.
According to the situations and/or according to the types of decisions to be taken, several methods or other common modes can be used. Visual Tools will be useful only for some cases of decision-making in order to deduce easily.
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Autocratic method: the Chief analyzes and decides only. |
Oligarchic method: a few bosses analyze and decide only. |
Democratic method: analysis and decision with collaborators. |
Consultative method: analysis with collaborators who present their results to the (x) boss (es) who shall then decide. |
Knowing the method applied for the decision-making process is essential for its success. The autocratic method is not interested to know the collective decision-making. We start talking about collective decision-making in the “oligarchic method” but especially in the consultative and democratic methods that allow establishing an environment favorable to collective or participative decision-making.
To make the decision-making process work, we will need to define rules so that these decisions are validated by a majority of people in order to ensure participants adhere and reach a consensus.
For this, nothing more simple than the installation of a system of “internal democracy”:
- Relative majority: the idea which gets the highest number of votes is adopted.
- Absolute majority:the idea is retained if it collects 50.1%.
- The 2/3 majority: the idea is retained if it collects 2/3 of the votes plus one voice.
- Holistic decision:each person adheres to an 80% minimum to the idea (in general we retain 80% as threshold but you can increase or decrease the threshold). If you increase the threshold, you’ll have a unanimous decision, but which is often difficult to achieve in a group of more than 4 people.
80% = I support the idea, a small thing still bothers me, but I would do anything to block it. You can choose any of these systems or adapt them, or even create your own terms.
Example: Group of 7 people in a meeting. You just finished a brainstorming session and a few ideas were structured and categorized. It is necessary to identify ideas for sending them into the world of action. But when do you decide that an idea is accepted? Or said otherwise: when do you decide that an idea is sufficiently supported for an upgrade in production without the risk of questioning?
Here’s a great classic that is often retained by groups:
- 5 / 7 = OK;
- 3 / 4 voices = pending, review later, in reserve;
- 0 / 2 voices = not selected idea.
This type of scheme of a decision will consolidate the ideas on which the collective wishes to really act. The consensus will be natural and simple.
Choose your visual indicators for analysis and decision making
Last, but not least is the part where we can elaborate more about Visual Tools. These are intended to aid you to view in real-time the status of decisions and give a global panorama to the team on the impact that their decisions will have on the whole project.
It is important to provide this visibility because it will consolidate a moral contract between the people who participated in the decision-making process. It remains to choose your Visual indicators to visualize the decisions, and you can do this by using:
Markers/Icons progressive:
What is interesting about the markers/icons is that you can put several subjects and give more information simultaneously thanks to the power of the Visual channel and the Visual areas of the brain.
Use colors:
You can use colors in the same way as icons. The color gives more visual impact than an icon. But you can put only one color by subject.
Analyze and decide visually
Mind Mapping is an intuitive and logical decision support tool. If we accept the scientific work that concludes that our decisions are more influenced by our unconscious criteria than the conscious ones, then it is better to use a tool that will support the parts of our brain connected to our unconscious and which will help us decide intuitively and mostly relying on space, forms, and colors.
Of course, we must also continue to support our conscious brain, logical and analytical criteria. This is also very well done with Mind Mapping and thanks to the prioritization of information and the use of words. Visual and spatial indicators give a comprehensive and immediate information like the dashboard of a car or a GPS dashboard: texts, icons, and colors tags or markers. They can give qualitative (value of ideas) or quantitative (weight of ideas) information.
Choose/decide = balance + evaluate + prioritize
If we look at the issues mentioned by professionals since we entered the era of complexity and information overload, to “Choose” seems to be the hardest and the most complicated thing.
It is often considered to be complicated because managers have little knowledge about the cognitive processes of decisions.
But ultimately, the choice emerges “naturally” once following these 3 steps:
- Balancing: information influence us;
- Evaluate: we influence / interpret information;
- Prioritization: we combine balancing and evaluation to prioritize.
Balancing = weight of ideas
We are mainly sensitive to the quantitative dimension of information. We are influenced by the size, the importance of information, and the number of subjects in a category.
The weight of information can help us to put our judgment into perspective.
The number of branches with common Visual indicators gives the Visual weight of the information. To isolate the information with the same feature, you can use the advanced filters available in iMindQ.
The number of sub-branches in the main branch is also a Visual indicator that influences our judgment.
Evaluate = value of ideas
The value of a single information can help us put the power of many pieces of information into perspective.
We are mainly sensitive to the qualitative dimension of information.
These are values, beliefs, knowledge, experiences, and contexts that influence our judgment. So for example, a branch with a small number of ideas can be very important for us.
The value of single information can help us put the power of many pieces of information into perspective.
The value of an idea cannot depend on its statistical presence on the map.
Indeed, an idea may appear only once and yet be very important in the eyes of a person or group. So, this information can be visually enhanced by a Visual indicator, chosen by the group.
Hierarchy features of the logic of reflection are what helps to analyze and make choices. The spatial arrangement of information according to its place in the hierarchy – or at the level of branches either within a same branch – may give some more or less explicit value which will influence our judgment.
Prioritize and choose collectively
Prioritize: give more importance to information over another. We incorporate scales to establish our priorities. Pay attention, do not choose broad scales. 10 levels of priority will not help you see things clearly. By experience, 3/4 levels are sufficient and more effective to decide quickly.
Examples of scales:
In conclusion, if you are working with a team over a Mind Map, decision-making will become easy and sometimes even a playful activity. The essential part is to follow the steps and mainly guide the group by focusing them to comply with the rest of the steps.
Honest advice: Before making a team decision using Mind Mapping, try to collect initial ideas by brainstorming with Mind Maps.
The Synami team is the collective voice behind Synami’s project management solutions, providing guidance, tips, and industry expertise to help teams plan, manage, and deliver projects more effectively.
