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  • Participative Decision Making

    In The last byte, we looked at the various types of creativity. In today’s byte, begin our discussion on how to unleash the potential of participation in decision making. 

    Intuition and Creativity are extremely handy in decision making, however there is not a prerogative that these are properties of managers alone – people at any level could pitch in with the relevant inputs for a better decision. With companies employing a large work force, effective management of the people could help the company improve its economic performance tremendously. Participative Decision making is one such means by which companies could capitalize on the power of its people.

    Participative decision making is a kind of decision making in which individuals who are affected by decision influences the making of decisions. In such cases the company generally created an empowered self-managed team to make decisions.
     
    Let’s take an example to understand this – In a hospitality industry – guests residing in the hotels have various requests and they interact extensively with the guest service personnel. Empowering the guest service personnel to do whatever is necessary to make guests happy – without really consulting their supervisors could be one way in which this could be used!  (Definitely the cultural context in which such decisions are made cannot be ignored.)

  • Decision Making: Creativity Factors – Individuals & Organizational

    In the last byte, we looked at some of the mental blocks to unlocking creativity. In today’s byte, we continue the discussion further and explore the roles of individual and organization factors in creativity.

    Creativity doesn’t just help in finding problems but also helps fixing them. Research has classified the kinds of creativity into four types, based on where it is triggered from and the source of the problem.
    1. Responsive Creativity
    2. Expected Creativity
    3. Contributory Creativity
    4. Proactive Creativity
    Responsive creativity refers to the response (solution) to a problem presented by other as part of your job. Expected creativity refers to the discovery of problems as part of the expectation the organization places on the individual. Contributory creativity refers to the situation where a problem is presented to you since you want to be creative and Proactive creativity refers to the nature of discovering a problem because you want to be creative!
     
    It is important to note – creativity has emerged as a global concern as a response to addressing the uncertainty that one faces in the modern day business and leaders play a key role in modeling creative behavior in organizations.

  • Decision Making: Creativity Inhibitors

    In the last byte, we looked at what organization characteristics influence creativity dimension of decision making. In today’s byte, we look at some of the mental blocks that inhibit creativity from emerging to its true potential. 

    One would need to understand that creativity is not hard-wired, it could be developed. It however would emerge only if the mental blocks that inhibit creativity are removed. Following a list of such mental blocks that research has identified:
    1. Search for “the” “right” answer
    2. Attempting to be logical
    3. Be bound by rules
    4. Avoiding Ambiguity
    5. Looking for practicality in the solution
    6. Fright of being foolish
    7. Trying to be in the comfort of only one’s expertise, avoid zones not under expertise
    8. Fearing failure
    9. Believing that one is not creative
    10. Eliminating Play from work!
    Unlocking these mental barriers could release the creativity hitherto untapped both for individuals as well as organization.

  • Decision Making: Creativity Influences 2

    In the last byte, we looked at how individual aspects influence creativity. In today’s byte, we look at the organizational aspects that influence creativity.

    The organizational environment in which one works also has implications on the creativity of an individual working in the organization. The environment could either be supportive to creativity or impede it – i.e. Creative facilitating or Creative impeding.

    Creative facilitating environments could involve aspects like autonomy, teams with diverse skill sets, supervisory staff who is supporting and willing to take risks etc. The environment which is creativity impeding would have a very strict evaluation and monitoring of the activities that one works on, a competing environment where if one wins the other looses etc.
     
    Flexible organization structures, participative decision making environment, strong relationships with supervisors and coworkers, appreciative of efforts etc could all be pushing the creativity horizons.  An organization which is extremely political, criticizing, and risk avoiding is detrimental to creativity in the work place.

  • Decision Making: Creativity Influences

    In the last byte, we were discussing about creativity and its influence on decision making. In today’s byte, we look at what factors influence creativity.
     
    The factors influencing creativity could be classified into two groups:
    1. Individual factors affecting creativity
    2. Organizational factors affecting creativity
    Several variables that are extremely individual specific could influence creativity some of these are: cognitive processes like divergent thinking (thinking of several potential solutions for a given problem), association ability, use of imagery etc are all part of the individual creativity.
     
    Other factors like breadth of individual interests, high energy, concern for achievements, intuition, judgment, self-confidence, tolerance of ambiguity, risk-taking etc have been found through research to be influencer of creative processes.
     
    Importantly, the mood of individuals – preferably good mood – helps achieve creativity.

  • Decision Making: Creativity

    In the last byte, we looked at the role of intuition in decision making. In today’s byte, we look at the role of creativity in decision making. 

    Creativity could be defined as a process influenced by individuals and organizational factors that result in the production of novel and useful ideas, products, or both. (Src: Ref book) The constantly changing environments in which the organizations operate require the employees to think of creative ways to solve the challenges they face.
     
    The process of Creativity could be seen to possess the following 4 stages:
    1. Preparation – seek out new experiences and opportunities to learn
    2. Incubation – reflective thought
    3. Illumination – sensing the insight to solve the problem
    4. Verification – determination if the solution or idea is valid
    It is interesting to note that the creative dimension relies a lot on the relaxation of the brain! So sleep well 🙂

  • Decision Making: Intuition

    In the last byte, we began our discussion on how individual influences affect Decision Making. In today’s byte, we look at the role played by Intuition in Decision Making.

    Intuition is in essence a preference used to gather data. It could be defined as a fast, positive force in decision making that is utilized at a level below consciousness and involved learned patterns of information.

    Intuition allows an individual to step into another’s role with ease, and this ability to take roles is a fundamental to development of moral reasoning. Moral reasoning would help in an ethical decision making process. 

    If the question one asks at this juncture is whether intuition could be taught? The answer research has found says “yes” – the researcher Agor, also cautioned that at the top of the organization, both the brain hemispheres become important – this means one would need to have both an analytical and intuitive mind functioning at their peak.

  • Decision Making – influence of Brain Characteristics

    In the last byte, we looked at the Z-model of decision making. In today’s byte, we look at some characteristics of the brain that influence decision making.

    Numerous individual differences affect a manager’s decision making of these, the manager’s preference of logic or creativity influence most of the decisions that the individual makes. This difference of preference for logic or creativity has its origin from the individual’s brains.

    Human brain has two lateral halves – the right and the left. The right hemisphere is responsible for creative functions while the left hemisphere is responsible for logic, detail and planning.

    Clearly, each of these thinking comes with its own advantage and the best situation is to be “brain-lateral”, i.e. to use either logic or creativity or both based on the situation one gets in.  There are ways by which one could develop either side of the brain which one is not accustomed to using.

    For a manager, it is important to visualize the big picture – put a vision and plan strategically (predominantly right brain) and at the same time should be able to understand day-to-day operations and flow of work (predominantly left brain)
     
    It would be interesting to discuss the two dimensions of intuition and creativity and we shall continue that in the next few bytes.

  • Z Problem Solving Mode 2

    In the last byte, we had a look at the diagrammatic representation of the Z-model of decision making. In today’s byte, we look at in detail.

    According to the Z model of decision making, a good problem solving model should have the following 4 steps:

    1. Examine the facts and details
    2. Generate Alternatives
    3. Analyze the alternatives objectively
    4. Weight the impact
    In the first stage when we are examining the facts and details it is the sensing style that takes predominance and helps gather information about the problem. In the second stage, it is the intuiting style that could play a major role in developing the possibilities. In the third stage, it is the thinking that would drive the decision maker determine the effect of each alternative. The final stage uses the feeling dimension predominantly to determine how the people involved will be affected.

  • Z Problem Solving Mode

    In the last byte we looked at the intuition based decision making process. In today’s byte we shall begin our discussion on the Z Problem Solving Model.

    We could summarize the Z-problem solving model in the following diagram. We shall discuss about this in the next byte.




    Ref: The diagram has been adapted from the reference book on organizational behavior that we follow.