Group Decision Making Quotes & Sayings

Exodus is a very large organization. My board of directors is supportive of me as the president of Exodus and are very much involved in my decision-making and those types of things. They're a wonderful and balanced group of people and I'm grateful for their support. Within the membership we have 270 or so members within the network of Exodus whether that's a local member ministry, a counselor or one of our members of our church association. — Alan Chambers

There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure. — John Kenneth Galbraith

First, a school with a strong, shared sense of mission is more likely to initiate improvement efforts. Second, norms of collegiality are related to collaborative planning and effective decision making. Third, cultures with a strong dedication to improvement are more likely to implement complex new instructional strategies. Finally, schools improve best when small successes are recognized and celebrated through shared ceremonies commemorating both individual and group contributions (Louis, 1994; Fullan, 1998; Abplanalp, 2008). — Terrence E. Deal

Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgment won't wreck the group's collective judgment as long as those errors aren't systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people's judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information. — James Surowiecki

But perhaps most important of all, having too many people on a team makes team dynamics during meetings and other decision-making events almost impossible. That's because a good team has to engage in two types of communication in order to optimize decision making, but only one of these is practical in a large group. According to Harvard's Chris Argyris, those two types of communication are advocacy and inquiry. Basically, advocacy is the statement of ideas and opinions; inquiry is the asking of questions for clarity and understanding. When a group gets too large, people realize they are not going to get the floor back any time soon, so they resort almost exclusively to advocacy. It becomes like Congress (which is not designed to be a team) or the United Nations (ditto). — Patrick Lencioni

I like being in control of making all the major decisions pertaining to my projects. That's something that you don't get to do in a group. Everything has to be voted on - every minor decision. — Bobby Brown

You have fun at the cool kids table. I prefer my spot over here with the real people. — Dan Pearce

The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on. — Eugene Jarecki

Will you hold on to my penis while I drive?"

"If it's absolutely necessary, yes. — Stephanie McAfee

Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group. Given the force of the group's normative power to shape the opinions of the followers who conform without thinking things through, they are often taken at face value. The persistent minority forces the others to process the relevant information more mindfully. Research shows that the deciscions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent. — Philip G. Zimbardo

We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board). — Jonathan Haidt

If you've got somebody in harm's way, you want the president being
making advice, not
be given advice by the military, and not making decisions based upon the latest Gallup poll or focus group. — George W. Bush

We unfortunately live in a corporate world where group decision making is made to avoid failure rather than to achieve success. — Bill Cahan

Who you are is not a biological accident. What you are is not a circumstantial accident. God planned both for you.5 — Linda Dillow

Matt rested his head against the bus window, the vibration working like a strange massage. — Harlan Coben

If the work is worthwhile, then whether we can complete it or not, it's worth making the attempt. That's why courage is important. — Dalai Lama

communicating fully and openly, by not withholding or misleading. There is no doubt that our decision-making is better if we are able to draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group. But as valuable as the information is — Ed Catmull

You become more attractive when you love yourself. You attract the right things when you have a sense of who you are. — Amy Poehler

By operating without a leader the scout bees of a swarm neatly avoid one of the greatest threats to good decision making by groups: a domineering leader. Such an individual reduces a group's collective power to uncover a diverse set of possible solutions to a problem, to critically appraise these possibilities, and to winnow out all but the best one. — Thomas D. Seeley

Describing the process of making her decision to leave, Patricia said: "It is as if there is a shelf where all your doubts and misgivings are placed while you are in that group. Over the months or years you observe so many things that may conflict with your original beliefs and values, or you see things done by the group or leader that are just not right. Because of the indoctrination and not being allowed to ask questions, you just put it on the shelf. Eventually, the shelf gets heavier and heavier and finally just breaks, and you are ready to leave" (p. 55). — Madeleine Landau Tobias

Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival. — Willard Gaylin

I had the belief that many troubles you could observe on the European continent were due to politicians not understanding economic phenomena. Even if they had good intentions, they didn't have the skills to solve problems. — Leonid Hurwicz

Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community. — Edmund White

All you have to do is put me in front of the people and put the beat in front of me, and the rest is history. — Mystikal

Everybody's friend is nobody's. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy. — Harold Russell

I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things. — Peter Jackson

I see myself as a traveller. — Annie Lennox

The decisions we make lead us to complex behavioral sets, and what we decide to do can be consciously and unconsciously motivated. The human being, however, is a small-group decision-making animal, a small pack animal, with a will to life, who engages in sex and the food quest to propagate and maintain that life, and who needs acceptance and recognition from group members. — John Rush

It's okay to feel bad about how things went down, but it's not okay to drown in guilt and regret every day for having made decisions other people don't agree with. At some point, we all have to man up and decide to do what we have to do, despite the people around us who try to get in the way. — M-E Girard

If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their end - who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be of any trouble. — J.M. Coetzee

We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two ... We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic. — Lee Kuan Yew