Whenever groups need to decide on a single course of action, it’s usually the leader’s job to make that decision. They are likely to to try and solicit the input of the team beforehand, however, and possibly via a kind of straw poll. Research from the University of Washington explores the best way to do this.

The researchers found that a “multivoting” approach was 50% more likely to choose the ideal option than when they used a ranked-choice or plurality voting approach. Multivoting is when people have a number of votes to allocate across various options. They can choose to allocate their entire allotment to a single option or spread things around.

Making a choice

By contrast, plurality voting is something commonly seen in political elections and sees participants selecting a single option. Ranked-choice voting allows people to create a ranking of their choices from most to least preferred.

“We see multivoting as primarily useful for decision-making groups in workplaces,” the researchers explain. “Wherever groups feel like it’s going to be critical to get a decision right, use multivoting as an unofficial vote, look at the distribution and discuss after that. It works where people are motivated to vote consistent with what they really think rather than trying to strategically vote to counter another person.”

After conducting a number of experiments, the researchers found that just 31% of plurality teams chose the optimum answer, which is not really any better than chance. Ranked-choice voting wasn’t much better, with just 32% of teams making the correct choice.

“We were surprised that the ranked-choice groups did not outperform the plurality groups,” the researchers explain. “There is a lot of evidence, particularly in politics these days, that ranked-choice voting leads to outcomes that are more consistent with the preferences of the electorate than plurality voting does. That’s why we’ve seen so many political elections move toward ranked-choice voting.

“But ranked-choice voting is generally better at revealing the true preferences of people and not necessarily getting to the exact right answer. When people are making decisions at work, you’re more concerned about getting it right than about making sure it reveals what everybody thinks.”

The best outcome

By contrast, the multivoting teams did better, with 45% of them identifying the best answer. When the researchers analyzed why this might be, they found no clear distinction in the types of discussions that took place across the groups.

Instead, they believe that the benefits of multivoting largely took hold before any discussions even took place, as each team member was able to process the information they had more clearly and then considered it more critically.

“The real discovery, and the thing we didn’t expect, was that multivoting groups would be more accurate before they discussed,” the researchers conclude. “We just assumed they would all be kinds of equal before the discussion and then they’d improve at the end. If people have the option to say, ‘I kind of like Option A, but I also kind of like Option B,’ that might make them think more before they discuss, which would help them make the proper decision.”