Whether it’s with a ministry team at church or with our own families, we regularly find ourselves trying to discern God’s will with others. In this blog, I will outline ten principles for helping us find God’s way together.
Principle #1 – Encourage spiritual growth
It’s important that we recognize that what people bring into a decision-making forum will influence the quality of their contributions. Those in a growing relationship with God will be in a better position to hear from Him. Their increasingly Christ-like character will help them make decisions consistent with Christ’s character and his desires. As we build each other up in Christ, we will make wiser, more God-honouring decisions.
Principle #2 – Pray before, during and after decision-making meetings
We desperately need to hear from God. Prayer strengthens our communication link with Him. As we ask God for wisdom, He will guide us. Prayer also connects us to the One who will give us the strength and courage to live out His calling.
Principle #3 – Listen for God’s voice in multiple ways
We know that God speaks through His Word. He’ll sometimes put something on our hearts as we pray. Other times, we might sense God moving as we discuss possibilities. He may use circumstances to nudge us in certain directions. He can use a crazy idea to get us thinking in “out of the box” ways. As we pray, discuss, debate, and plan, let’s be open to God’s still small voice breaking through in unexpected ways.
Principle #4 – Build diversity before driving to consensus
Groups often push for consensus too quickly. Give people time and space to contribute their unique perspectives. Explore many options. A free-flowing brainstorming session, without critique, can help generate a large pool of possibilities. Then, prayerfully discern how God is beginning to shape some of the ideas into a cohesive sense of direction.
Principle #5 – Hear multiple perspectives
We know from Scripture that having additional advisers can help us succeed. They can give us greater clarity about the situation and possible solutions.Of course, this assumes that we actually hear from the advisers around us. In group decision-making, this means that we need to employ mechanisms that allow people to contribute meaningfully as equal participants in the discernment process.
Principle #6 – Guard against groupthink
One of the ways to overcome groupthink is to encourage people to express ideas outside the group norms (like in an open brainstorming time). Do not discount outlying ideas, but allow them to agitate people towards better solutions. Remember – groupthink often leads to groupsink.
Principle #7 – Harness conflict’s restless tension
Most people do not enjoy conflict. When navigating through the tension of conflicting ideas, we’ll often stretch ourselves to find a resolution. Capitalize on this desire by welcoming healthy conflict and using it to unleash creative exploration of new possibilities.
Principle #8 – Embrace complexity and chaos
Integrative thinking, according to Roger Martin in his book, Opposable Mind, is “the ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.” This kind of thinking requires us to dwell in the uncomfortable world of complexity, ambiguity and fragmentation long enough to see how the pieces could fit together. Giving people time to process together and on their own will often lead to better decisions. It’s important that we don’t let a false sense of urgency or an unwillingness to embrace chaos (for a while) lead us to make poor decisions.
As we dwell in the complexity and chaos of a thorough decision-making process, we will be better able to follow the principles that Chip and Dan Heath outline in their book, Decisive. Typically, in decision-making, we encounter a choice, analyze our options, make the choice, and then live with it. The problem, according to the Heath brothers, is that we often rush through the stages leading to poor or, at least, less than best decisions. We encounter a choice, but narrow framing makes us miss options. We analyze our options, but a self-confirmation bias, which filters out information that does not support what we already believe, leads us to gather self-serving information. So, at this point, we’ve explored limited options and those options tend to fit with our pre-conceived ideas. We then make a choice, but short-term emotion will often tempt us to make the wrong choice. We then live with the decision. However, we tend to do so with excessive confidence about how the future will unfold.
Chip and Dan Heath encourage decision-makers to slow down enough to enter the messiness of thorough decision-making. Instead of thinking narrowly about a choice, it’s important to widen your options. To do this, they recommend several strategies including running the vanishing options test where you eliminate all the current options from the discussion so that group members must come up with new ones. Another strategy for generating more options would be to multi-track multiple options simultaneously. This forces people to think in an integrative way.
As teams analyze a larger pool of options, the Heath’s encourage them to reality-test them. This might involve running a smaller pilot project or assessing the effectiveness of others outside your organization who’ve pursued the same or similar options.
Before we make a choice, the Heath’s say it’s important to attain distance so that we don’t succumb to short-term emotion. They recommend using the 10/10/10 technique where we imagine how we’ll feel about a decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. This helps us to consider both future and present emotions. It’s also important to honor our core priorities. What are we willing to give up to do what is most important?
To combat overconfidence about how the future will unfold, Chip and Dan insist that we should be prepared to be wrong. To help teams incorporate this mindset, they recommend bookending the future where we think about a spectrum of future outcomes that range from terrible to amazing. They also encourage teams and individuals to do pre-mortems and pre-parades where they think about how a decision might fail or succeed. Another strategy is to set tripwires, which are future reminders to evaluate one’s decisions.
I’ve taken more time with this eighth principle of embracing complexity and chaos long enough because it really does increase our capacity to make better decisions, especially as we pray and listen to God’s voice throughout the process. God can certainly speak new ideas into our minds. Yet, it seems like He often wants us to take the initiative to explore and as we do so, He begins to show us the best path forward.
Principle # 9 – Use good coaching questions
Whether you’re the group facilitator or not, you can ask questions that get you and others in the group thinking in new ways.
Principle #10 – Process complex decisions thoroughly
In my work with boards and other groups, I use a decision-making framework called, A Discernment Process for Making Complex Decisions. The full process has eight steps: identify issues, clarify personal and professional values, clarify influencing factors and barriers, identify guiding ethical and legal principles, analyze alternatives, find common ground, decide and act, and assess outcomes. I have found that it is an excellent way of exploring issues in a thorough and objective way that gives all group members an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way.
The ten principles I’ve looked at in this training session are foundational for Christian leaders as they seek to discern and implement God’s vision for them and their organizations. What are some other principles or approaches that you have found helping in making good group decisions?