{"id":1526,"date":"2015-11-20T16:04:08","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T16:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/thebigidea\/?p=1526"},"modified":"2017-05-19T11:33:04","modified_gmt":"2017-05-19T10:33:04","slug":"planning-for-collective-decision-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/thebigidea\/planning-for-collective-decision-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Collective decision making – right or wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were lucky to be able to bring together a diverse, experienced and knowledgeable Critical Friends (CF) group to reflect with us on the project and the direction that this was taking, especially in relation to our collaborative and co-productive aspirations.<\/p>\n

This blog reflection begins with a CF meeting that we had between the two initial project events (the first workshop brought areas together to talk about collaboration and project possibilities, and the second essentially asked areas to pitch their ideas\/vision to us and each other). In this CF meeting we discussed how we were going to move forward and make a collective decision on which project\/s we were going to continue support on.<\/p>\n

As a staff group in Iriss, we aspired to be truly collaborative in our approach to decision making. In other words, we didn\u2019t want to be the sole voice making the decision on which of the projects to take forward. Therefore, as we had discussed in the previous CF meeting, we wanted to hold a collaborative vote at the end of workshop day two, with all the project groups voting on which projects would be taken forward. This voting would be done based on short poster\/oral presentations from each group that had been developed throughout the day.<\/p>\n

However\u2026 the question came up in the CF group:<\/p>\n

Will<\/strong> we know (and will others know) enough about the other partnerships to make a decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By employing this collaborative voting system we had hoped this this was the fairest and most transparent way of choosing ideas\/localities to take forward. This was raised as possibly not being the case. Firstly, the CF group thought the other groups at the workshop wouldn\u2019t have enough information to make their decision. Essentially they would have been voting on the short presentation made at the end of workshop two. They didn\u2019t think this was enough to know the plans in a robust enough way. Secondly, there was a worry that a shared understanding was necessary between Iriss and the chosen group, but not between each other. In essence, Iriss has to live with the projects that were chosen, the other groups would not. If collective decision-making was employed, we would be ceding control of the direction of the overall work to people that may not be actively involved any further than this workshop day. This presented us with a tension between our hope to be transparent and collaborative, while still trying to retain our original project focus.<\/p>\n

In the end, despite the CF reservations we decided to go ahead with the vote at the end of the workshop day. We tried to allay the CF fears in a number of ways.<\/p>\n