As design consultants, we’re constantly helping clients navigate the complexities of digital transformation, which means enabling businesses to better operate and deliver value through digital tools. That might be through digitizing an analog process, modernizing a website to resolve usability issues, or redesigning services to better serve their users.
At Design Centered Co., we use several approaches to accomplish this, primarily through user experience research, interactive design methods, agile, and human-centered practices. But you might be surprised to hear that one of the most important tools we have in our toolbox isn’t a specific UX software or design methodology— it’s the decision-making process.
That’s right, good decision-making is at the heart of every inspirational design, easy-to-use interface, and frictionless service you’ve encountered. Making a decision sounds simple enough on the surface, but when you dig into it, there are a ton of factors that can complicate things, especially when other parties are involved in the decision, i.e., during collaborative decision-making.
TLDR;
Collaborative decision-making is a structured process where a group defines the decision to be made, gathers perspectives, assigns roles and accountability, generates options, and commits to a clear decision with owners and next steps. The most common failure modes are dominant voices, unclear ownership, bias, and decision fatigue. An approach based on Jake Knapp’s book Sprint improves outcomes by defining the decision and long-term goal, inviting the right people, assigning roles (facilitator/decider), and separating brainstorming from deciding.
Quick decision-making checklist
- Define the decision (and what’s not being decided).
- Set a long-term goal (5 months + 5 years).
- Invite the right people (builders + experts + “troublemaker”).
- Define roles (facilitator + decider).
- Brainstorm and decide on different days.
Why collaborative decision-making is hard
When decisions involve multiple stakeholders, you’re balancing perspectives, power dynamics, limited time, and competing priorities, often under pressure. Without a clear process, even talented teams can leave a meeting misaligned on what was decided, who owns next steps, and why the decision was made in the first place.
Four common challenges in group decisions
Here are some of the biggest struggles facing organizations practicing collaborative decision-making:
Dominant voices drowning out diversity of thought
Whether it’s the literal loudest voice in the room or the person holding the most power, it’s easy for quieter participants (or those with lower status) to cede to the person who talks the most. But this removes the opportunity for innovative decisions that take into account multiple perspectives.
Lack of clear roles and accountability
Colleagues are thrown into a meeting and told to make a decision. With no clear roles or responsibilities, decisions are scattered, and no one takes accountability, especially when it comes to action items planned to operationalize the decision.
Bias and pre-decided outcomes
Without a clear process to ensure all options are weighed fairly, participants can go into a meeting with a preconceived idea of what the final decision will be, causing them to ignore other suggestions, even if those suggestions are better.
Decision fatigue and degraded judgement
As humans, we have limited energy each day for making decisions. When we stay in decision-making mode for too long, we can get burnt out, lowering the effectiveness of our decision-making. We might either take longer to make decisions, or make a choice we wouldn’t make if we were feeling more focused.
Sprint lessons for better collaborative decisions
With all these difficulties, what is the solution? Luckily, smart people have put a lot of thought and iteration into how to make better decisions, including the author of Sprint, Jake Knapp.
Here are some of my favourite lessons from his book that you can apply at your next decision-making session (it doesn’t have to be a 5-day sprint), and how we apply similar principles at Design Centered Co. as well.
1. First, define
Don’t assume everyone knows or understands what problem is being decided. Define it explicitly.
Explain how granular the decision is (are we doing fine-tuning or a big redesign?), and also what’s not being decided on at present.
How we apply this at DCC: This is an important first step when we’re onboarding a client. To make sure we’re on the same page, we define the scope of the project and get agreement before moving forward.
2. Set a long-term goal
Make the “why” behind the project clear, and set 5-month and 5-year goals to put your current decision into perspective.
It’s okay to think blue-sky here, just try to be somewhat realistic about timelines.
How we apply this at DCC: this helps us when designing new features. We might have an MVP version of a feature that we plan to release in the short term, but keeping the long-term vision in mind ensures we’re designing in a sustainable way that will be easier to build upon toward the goal.
3. Invite the right people.
When you get the right mix of people into a room to make a decision, it can work magic. Jake Knapp recommends no more than 7 people present during sprints to ensure discussions remain manageable, and he suggests inviting the following:
- People who build the product or run the service, which might include an engineer, a designer, and/or a product manager
- Subject-matter experts, which might include finance, marketing, customer, or other specialization (e.g., medical) experts
- Bring the ‘troublemaker’: If you have a colleague who is always asking the hard questions, be proactive and include them in the process: it will help improve your ideas if they are put under scrutiny.
Want to include more people to get their perspectives? →
How we apply this at DCC: this is where stakeholder interviews come in handy. This lets us include more people’s input without bloating meeting invitation lists.
4. Define your roles
Once you’ve got folks invited, make sure you assign these roles:
Facilitator: this person’s role is to be the unbiased arbitrator, keep people on subject, and keep the session on time. If your team is struggling to remain unbiased, this person can be an outside facilitator (which is a service we provide at DCC).
Decider: this is the person (usually in a management position) who ultimately needs to give the “okay” for the decision to move forward. They don’t have to be present for all sessions, but they should be there to give the final stamp of approval. For any sessions they can’t attend, they should have a stand-in who can decide on their behalf.
A quick round-robin to assign roles can save a lot of confusion and increase ownership over ideas and decisions.
5. Brainstorm and Decide on different days
As we talked about earlier in the challenges, decision fatigue can creep up when you’ve been using your executive thinking too long. You can keep your cohort’s minds fresh by splitting up ideation and decision into separate sessions.
How we apply this at DCC: we’ve done this as a way of ensuring sessions don’t run too long. You can even do some brainstorming asynchronously, as we’ve done with Impactor App, and then come together for a synchronous decision-making session on a different day.
Decision-making is difficult, but there are plenty of techniques, like the ones above, that can make it easier. Try them out at your next decision-making meeting and see the difference for yourself.
If you’re facing unclear ownership, meeting sprawl, or stalled decisions, we can facilitate a structured decision session and help your team leave with a decision, owners, and next steps.
