Collaborative Decision Making Quotes

Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.

I believe in active citizenship, for men and women equally, as a simple matter of right and justice. I believe we will have better government in all of our countries when men and women discuss public issues together and make their decisions on the basis of their different areas of experience and their common concern for the welfare of their families and their world.

If we are to control our own future, it will be necessary, not only to obtain the cooperation of people, but to prepare comprehensive plans for that future.

There are a lot of global decisions that you can make as a co-publisher, and only publishers can make those kind of decisions. At the same time, there are some things you can do only as a penciler or creator. I want to keep my hands in both pots, so to speak.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

We must learn for the sake of one another to make better choices guided by more holistic measures of the common good we share.

Any decision made by my father was the result of a process that had involved many voices and which sometimes had taken weeks or months.

Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference.

To be successful, we need everyone to think independently and work through disagreement to decide what's best.

Business and investing are team sports.

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue.

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Eleanor Roosevelt doesn't ever do anything that is going to hurt her husband. She tries things out on him. She gets permission to do things. The amazing thing, I think, historically, is that he says, "Go do it. If you can make this happen, I'll follow you."

...Obama said, 'I welcome debate among my team, but I won't tolerate division'.

Whatever you do, whatever you come up with, whatever you decide on, you can go with it, and if the director or the execs, they like it, then you'll stick with it. That's a good thing, as opposed to having something that's already written.

I hire people who can do their jobs and who will advise me of things they don't agree with. The worst thing you can do is get in a room with 14 people who say, "OK!" Then you really are making decisions about engineering and finance and other areas.

In order to get past disagreements, you just can't have one person with power decide. In other words, so just because I'm a boss, it would be terrible if I then said, "Okay, we're gonna go do this." That's why, after that thoughtful disagreement, there has to be a process of an idea meritocracy. That means okay, now you have to vote, not that the decision resides with power. And then you vote and move beyond it.

We Finns represent a very transparent and open-minded way of reaching political decisions.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.

Decisions are more apt to be accepted when you've listened to suggestions first. I wanted them to see the reason behind what I asked of them, not to do things just because I said so.

My senior leadership team is half people who have been at GM for a long period of time like me, and others who have joined the company within the last five years from different industries, experiences, and countries. You have a better picture of the world. The diversity of thought is where you can make better business decisions.

I have always believed in evolving a consensus before taking any major decision.

The problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds.