We hope that you enjoyed Dr. C John Tarter’s last blog about enabling school structure. In this blog, he gives us a useful heuristic for decision-making in schools.

If you are making a decision, always include people who have expertise on the question at hand and who have a personal stake in its resolution. Do not include people who have no knowledge of the problem and don’t care about it. Sometimes, but not too often, ask for help from those who have some expertise in the problem you face. Occasionally include those affected by the resolutions that are developed.

There are other models guiding participation in decision making, but this is an easy, carry-around-in-your-head one. But, be on guard! There are some parts missing from this assembly, and thus they require some thoughtfulness on your part to put into operation.

Always include people who have expertise and a personal stake; your decisions will improve in quality and acceptance. What could be easier? Well, as H. L. Mencken pointed out a century ago: There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong. Consider the following:

1. Who are the experts in your school? Often the job title goes with expertise, so you would expect, for example, the science teacher to have competence in science questions. Other times, the expertise you are looking for is not readily apparent. In these cases, you have to add to the model. Here, you must have enough connection to the people in the school to know special areas of knowledge in the organization or to ask the right people to find out hidden sources of expertise. The better you know the school, the better this model works.

2. Is there too much agreement? The question of including people in the decision usually arises because the school does not have a readily applicable policy. Schools run on routine, that is, you don’t decide a new schedule, room assignments, or attendance policy every day. Instead, these decisions are baked into the school routine. It is the problems not addressed by the routine of the school that will prompt you to think about getting help.
   Let us say you have assembled a group to help you resolve a problem and they are both supportive and eager to find a resolution. You want honest opinions from this team; however, some members of the team might not think their ideas are worth presenting, especially if those members strongly support you. It seems paradoxical that the people who trust you would withhold honest assessment, but there it is. At times, people who have confidence in you assume your ideas are going to be better than theirs, thereby depriving you of useful information.
   Daniel Kahneman (2011) suggests appointing a devil’s advocate who will reliably and cogently argue against potential resolutions to the problem. This person needs to be appointed because you don’t want the naysayer to be a volunteer in a group where opposing the majority is seen as simple obstructionism. You need somebody to be an antidote to the feeling of unity that can accompany a group decision. In cases of major decision, you might even appoint someone to explain why the chosen resolution will fail.

3. Did the resolution appear too quickly? It seems like an odd problem. After all, the purpose of group decision making is to decide. The risk here is going from problem identification to resolution without the intermediate steps of gathering information, establishing what an acceptable decision must have and what you would like to have, and developing several resolutions before seizing on one. It is good to have a Plan B—and a Plan C and D. Slow down the process.

4. Are people prepared to participate in decision making? Making decisions is a learnable skill. If you invite people to share in the process, you might need to give them a little practice in framing problems, defining acceptable solutions, and creating solutions. Possessing expertise or relevance to a problem does not necessarily grant ease in the dynamics of the problem-solving process.

There are two “maybe” cases in deciding on someone’s participation, both suggesting caution. There are people who have expertise but no interest in helping you with your problem; the biology teacher may not want to help you buy house plants. Conversely, people with no expertise in construction will likely be interested in knowing that their parking lot will be closed for repaving.

The literature on decision making is substantial and multi-disciplinary. These remarks on involving people in decision making represent a quick summary intended to answer the question: Who should I involve in decision making? If you find this useful, you might well find the following works beneficial as well.

References

Hoy, W. K., & Tarter, C. J. (2008). Administrators solving the problems of practice: Decision-making concepts, cases, and consequences. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.