Decision making is crucial in most businesses, but how we make decisions isn’t always clearly understood. Research from Colorado State University examined how decisions are made in teams and found that the way teams work together was crucial to successful outcomes, with those teams who spent more time both gathering and then examining data seeming to do better than those who followed their gut instinct.

This process of scrutinizing the data was underpinned by the general deliberation that it encouraged, with teams who took their time over decisions nearly always doing better than those who rushed into things.

“As soon as someone said, ‘You know, I think we should do X,’ it was like a switch was thrown,” the researchers explain. “It was like, ‘Well, I think we should do Y,’ and ‘Well, I really think we should do Z.’ And they were off to the races, into talking about solutions and they never went back to see if they had uncovered all the information.”

A measured approach

The teams that generally performed best were those that took a much more measured approach to their task. These teams would avoid discussing solutions, even if possible strategies were proposed early on.

“On the high performing teams they’d go, ‘Yeah, thanks for mentioning that potential solution—we’ll get to that. Let’s keep going through the information,'” the researchers explain. “They had the maturity to say, ‘We’ll get to the fun part in a little bit, but let’s make sure that we understand really what’s going on here.'”

What’s more, despite taking a more deliberative approach, the study found that these teams were also no slower in making decisions than those who took a more solutions-oriented approach.

“What we want to do with our research is take some of the uncertainty out of team decision-making meetings, as much as we can,” the researchers explain.

Dealing with uncertainty

This uncertainty often emerges in the face of attempts to grapple with complex problems. Such problems often produce a multitude of possible solutions, which creates an inherent instability as it’s by no means guaranteed that the team will successfully find the best solution to the problem.

The researchers hope that their work can help anyone who has to make decisions in a team environment take a more effective approach and improve team dynamics so that the best solutions are secured.

“You can see if someone is constantly trying to interrupt the team by saying, ‘I think we should do this. I think we should do that,'” they say. “You can stop that behavior and redirect the team back to information processing. That’s clear.”

If teams can do that, then the researchers are confident that their decision-making will be greatly improved.