Creating a New Agora to Overcome Spreadthink and Groupthink

The Agora was a central location in ancient Greek cities where people assembled and  decisions were made.  It has been suggested that we return to the concept of coming together to make better democratic decisions in a “New Agora” (Schreibman & Christakis, 2007).  The authors combine a number of collaborative methods to overcome known problems in group thinking and even in larger settings such as in democracy as a whole.  They point to problems such as Spreadthink where individual opinions in a group are watered down to the point where the decisions that are made are not in line with what anyone in the group would actually want.  Similarly, Groupthink is the name for what can happen in group settings where group pressures cause the group to lose touch with realistic thinking and even sometimes moral judgment.  To overcome these kinds of problems the authors indicate that facilitators of groups need to institute methodologies in the decision-making process so that the group converges on a consensus that makes sense.  Thus they collect a number of proven techniques and use them in a systematic way.

The Structured Design Dialogue Process (SDDP or SDP) is one technique that is discussed which spells out a system for defining a problem space around a critical triggering question and then formulating a group solution through a carefully laid out sequence of steps as illustrated by the author of that technique (Christakis).  The steps are illustrated in the picture provided by the author:



The SDP Process

The system helps to guide a team through a decision-making exercise by providing steps that the team can follow.  They start with a “complex problem” and generate a trigger question as a group that the team must focus on.  Each team member then provides his own ideas to answer the question and the ideas are posted for all to see. In the next round each person gets to answer questions about their ideas from the other group member which forces the team to define terms and understand the perspective of the others in the group while clustering ideas into groups and then determining the relationships between the ideas.  This relationship is called a “tree of influence” where the team decides which items have influence over other items.  This then evolves into a “tree of meaning” where they now understand the problem(s) more completely and can come up with group decisions more clearly.

There are forces that prevent widespread adoption of good collaboration techniques.  First, there is an educational problem where many facilitators have been trained poorly or have not been trained at all in leadership.  This causes them to rely on behaviors that are not constructive in group thinking.  Another force that must be overcome is cultural where it is naturally counter-intuitive to allow all of the members in a group to participate in an equal amount in making contributions during structured thinking meetings.

References

Christakis, A. (n.d.). The SDP Process. Retrieved October 24, 2012, from Harness Collective Wisdom: http://www.harnessingcollectivewisdom.com/sdp_process.html

Schreibman, V., & Christakis, A. N. (2007). New Agora: New Geometry of Languaging and New Technology of Democracy: The Structured Design Dialogue Process. International Journal of Applied Systemic Studies , 15-31.