Making decisions in a group has its ADVANTAGES and disadvantages; the main advantage is that there will be more information and data available by which to make the decision; the main disadvantage is that it can take a significant amount of time.

Let us consider first a jury for a trial.  The decision that they must make is ‘black and white’ or binary; is the defendant guilty or not guilty?

A jury session usually starts with a vote amongst the jurors, guilty or not guilty.  There follows a discussion between people on either side why they have the opinion that they have.  By this means, each juror hears opinions about pieces of evidence that they may have forgotten or dismissed and the relative importance of different pieces of evidence.

After a set time, another vote is taken to see in which direction the overall opinion is ‘going’.

It depends on whether a majority or unanimous verdict is required; if majority, once the requisite number of people all vote the same way, the decision is made; if unanimous, there is a danger that the longer the discussions go on, those in the minority will vote with the rest just to ‘get it over with’.

There is another decision that a jury can make, they cannot agree to the set majority or unanimous parameters and inform the judge.

But not all decisions are ‘black and white’, most represent a range of options that must be chosen from.  The following are the major recognized ways in which groups of people can come to a decision:

• Consensus decision-making

• At the start of the decision making ‘workshop’, some participants will have their own opinion of which way the decision should go usually based on their own or their ‘departments’ best interest.  However, the aim of the consensus process is to REACH a decision in the best interest of the whole.
• The first thing a facilitator must do is to establish the agreed boundaries of the possible decision spectrum; for an extreme example, if the decision is to be made about new products in a consumer product manufacturing organization, you wouldn’t expect the boundaries of the spectrum to include ‘Make a spacecraft’.  However, the facilitator must not allow the group to dismiss reasonable innovative ideas.
• Much as in a jury, proponents or ‘champions’ of each possible solution put forward their reasons; others listen and ask direct questions to further understand the reasons from their own frame of reference.
• In this way, the group opinion gravitates in one direction.  Eventually, those in the minority, unless vehemently opposed to the majority, agree to ‘let’s see how it goes and review later’.
• Trying to reach consensus avoids "winners" and "losers". 
• Voting-based methods
  Voting of some form will always form part of any decision-making process.  In all discussion-based decision-making, votes are SOLICITED at regular intervals to get a ‘snapshot’ of the group’s opinions and to decide in which direction further discussion would be beneficial.

Let us see all the voting processes in detail that may be used:

• Range voting – Each participant gives each option a score based on an agreed scale and the option with the highest average is chosen.
  This method has been shown to produce the highest participant satisfaction with the result compared to other common voting methods.
• Majority – A majority REQUIRES support from more than 50% of the members of the group.  Thus, the bar for action is lower than with unanimity and a group of "losers" is implicit to this rule.
  Majority voting is not considered suitable for business group decision making unless a great deal of discussion has taken place beforehand.
• ‘First past the post’ –  With ‘first past the post’, each participant votes for one option; the option that receives the greatest number of votes is taken as the decision.

The problem with this voting method is that the winning option may only be supported by a minority of the participants; it is unlikely that those in the majority will actively support the decision.

• Delphi method 

This method is a structured communication technique for groups, originally developed for collaborative forecasting.  It INVOLVES ‘experts’ answering a series of questionnaires and after each questionnaire is completed, a facilitator presents anonymized results and the reasons for those results.  The idea is that each expert modifies their opinion based on the reasons and it is expected that the range of opinions becomes smaller and converges with the ‘best’ decision.

You can possibly see that Consensus decision making is a less structured version of Delphi; all workshop participants are experts in their own field, but their opinions are not anonymized.

• Dotmocracy 

Using this method, participants are asked to place ‘sticky dots’ or use maker pens to indicate for which option they vote for.  The may be given one vote or a range, identified by colors, such as ‘I want this one’ (green), ‘I would be OK with this one’ (orange) and ‘I do not want this one’ (red).

There are different ways of using the results:

• ‘First past the post’ – Like the description of this above, the decision to be adopted would not be the option that the majority voted for but also the option that the least number of participants that voted against it.
• Removing ‘outliers’ – Options at either end of the ‘decision spectrum’ can be removed from consideration and further discussion can take place on a reduced set of options with further dotmocracy votes at intervals to remove other outliers.
• The disadvantage of this way is that innovative options may be dismissed too early.